Over Thanksgiving last month I pulled out a story that had moved to the back of my repertoire. I don't know how that happened as it is one of my favorites. I've told a ton of stories about my livin' out west and how it inspires me in the middle west. Well my first adventure in the Midwest came long before my western days and has more ties to Florida than anywhere else. I remember it being spring however it could have been fall and a few years after the turn of the century. I was at home in the south suburbs of Chicago after my Thursday night class at the local community college. Months earlier I was living in Florida, where it was spring break every night and I was feeling pretty lame about to turn in at 9pm. Out of the blue I received call that took my night on a most memorable tangent. My Hoosier friend Jeremy, a buddy from my Florida days had driven up with another guy to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. I met them at I-65 and I-80 where we hung out at a Denny's for a few hours and decided to "make a night of it". After driving back to the burbs to get my sleeping bag we drove back to the dunes and parked on a 2 lane highway just outside of Gary. Parking near the visitor's center would have been a dead give away as to our presence and getting caught would have meant a night in the clink for sure. We grabbed our gear and flashlights and headed in to the forest. Jeremy was wearing a headlamp and I had never seen one before. Every time his head would move it looked like a spotlight piercing thorough the darkness. As we hiked we spooked deer and other nocturnal creatures. To this day I've never seen a deer leap as high or move as fast. The elevation began to increase, the terrain transformed from dirt to sand. The forest canopy disappeared as we came to the crest of the dune. The wind off of the lake howled as the waves crashed down below at the beach. By now the time was around 3am so we prepared for the cold in the coming hours before sunrise. The three of us retreated into our bags that would slowly slide down the dune at different rates throughout the night. We appeared out of our bags to the majestic site of the sun creeping above a cooling tower for a local power plant to the east and a golden hue on the Inland Steel smoke stack to the west.
OK imagine the scars of industry aren't there....now its majestic. With our bed rolls up we headed back to Route 12 to see if our vehicles had been towed in the night. They were not and just like that our adventure was over. Jeremy and his friend headed south to catch a class at noon at IU in Bloomington. I headed home with no classes on Friday to reflect on what three guys starved for adventure could accomplish.
