In late summer, or really through all of summer, I wanted to go to the coast. Late summer was just when things finally aligned and I really could. I had been thinking about the line on the horizon and the salty water and the sand waves, the primal place of humanity where we crawled out of the oceans, on to the beach.
The opportunity was there because it was a labor day weekend. I’d just finished my first or second week of school so school wasn’t hard enough to give me any obligations to complete over the weekend. But because school had started, I wasn’t at home anymore and didn’t have the parental aura on top of me, threatening to judge me if I drove across multiple states by myself to see the water. My roommate had gone home for labor day weekend which made the decision even easier, since even the displaced parental aura was gone.
The real coast was too far away, of course. Too far away to drive in a single weekend. So I found the next closest thing: Michigan City, Indiana. I don’t remember exactly how I found out about this city. I probably googled “beaches in midwest” half-ironically but secretly hoping there would be something awesome. It wasn’t that far and the weather was warm on that Saturday. So I woke up on Saturday morning and drove.
I drove in my convertible with the top down, wind flowing over me as I cut through the early morning sun. I stopped to eat at Subway since I was too nervous to find a better vegan option restaurant on my phone while driving and I wanted to get there soon anyways. When they made my sandwich they asked which sauce I wanted and I said mustard even though I don’t like mustard but I didn’t want to say no sauce since I had already declined so many other things on the sandwich to make it vegan in the first place that declining more would make me appear overly ascetic and freakish about “health” to the Subway employee who was definitely paying attention to that.
Around noon I got close to Michigan City and I saw a sign for a state park with dunes so I turned into it instead of continuing forward to Michigan City. I pulled up to the park ticketing booth thing. Usually my parents did this part but it wasn’t hard. I had to pay $10 more since I was from out of state. I figured I would get a weird look, driving by myself in a convertible to a relatively small state park from so far away but there was nothing.
The parking lot closest to the beach was full so I had to go back to the earlier parking lot which was almost completely empty. I walked to the beach carrying sunglasses, my copy of The Sound and The Fury, and my phone and keys and wallet. I was already in swimming trunks because I really knew I wanted to go in the water and I didn’t want to change when I was there. I wore them through the rest of the day even though they were wet after this.
I walked through the parking lots to the beach. I hadn’t been exactly sure what to expect from this park but it did look like a beach. There were families and teens and umbrellas and beach towels. I did feel like I was the only person there alone, like Delphine in Rohmer’s “The Green Ray” and maybe I actually was. But I was also imbued with a sense of spacial mastery because I was here entirely because of my own desires and my own agency, maybe for the most I’ve ever let either loose. When I went into the water it was different from the ocean which was sad. There were no salt and no waves. You could walk out really far before the water actually got deep, as the lake just gradually sloped off. I took my phone with my as I walked out really far. I kept it above the water of course. I was just worried people would steal it. I could figure out life without my keys and without my wallet or my copy of The Sound and The Fury but life without my phone just wouldn’t work.
I left the water. I climbed up one of the sand dunes and looked over Lake Michigan, the line on the horizon as it too stretched out of sight like the ocean would. I took a picture of myself with the water in the background to post on my priv. I climbed another dune and then went back into the water this time no phone so I could submerge. Then I was done with the beach.
I went around to the other areas of the state park. There was a sign that said a Revolutionary War battle had happened here apparently? December 5 1780. I found that hard to believe. Hard to believe that there was ever tricorn hats and blood on the beaches of Indiana. The park was mostly there for the beach and the rest of it was camping areas. I walked through some short trails that went through woods and connected the camp sites to each other and the beach and the parking lots. There were so many mushrooms, probably from the lake humidity. Bigger mushrooms than I’ve ever seen in my life. I took a lot of pictures, in the shade of the woods, away from the people on the beach.
Then I went back to my car and looked up bookstores in the area. I ended up picking a fancy one in an artificially still-old fashioned town. There were a lot of annoying thin one-way streets, and a small street festival that was blocking the way Google Maps told me to go somehow. I didn’t buy anything anything since the bookstore itself was also artifically still old-fashioned. Everything was overpriced hardbacks of the classics, nothing written after modernism, and I don’t even like hardbacks, they’re uncomfortable to read. I drove back towards the coast towards Michigan City for real this time. On the way I saw a mediterranean place so I ate there. I also saw a rusted over swingset and playground in a giant open field so I went there and took pictures.
I finally got to Michigan City towards the end of the day. I parked my car in a mall parking lot. There was another bookstore in the mall parking, a discount wholesale store. The discount selections were bad but they had a cheap and clean new paperback copy of Great Expectations (in the classic sections) and hisperic had told me to read that so I bought it. I still haven’t read it. My mom was helping me move books and the receipt that said Michigan City Indiana came out of it and I just said I bought it used and it’s cool to see all of the places were the receipts from used books come from.
Then I walked from the mall parking lot towards towards the beach. I went past some railroad tracks and the back side of a crab restaurant through a hot and sunny empty street that it felt like no one besides me had ever walked on. Then I crossed a bridge into the nice waterfront area. There a bunch of parks with green grass, a water fountain near one of the harbors. I tried to get water from the drinking fountains in one of the parks but it was turned off. An Indian man with his wife and two or three year old son offered me a bottle of water and I declined numerous times because I felt strange that I was even here so far from home needing water and he kept offering and I accepted and I was grateful that he kept offering.
Then I went on to the beach and waited for the sun to set. The beach was still sandy like the dunes but it was later in the day and there were way less towels and umbrellas. But there were a lot of people on the harbors or slightly sandy slightly rocky edges waiting for the sun to set too. I lay down on an inclined piece of cement and watched and tweeted but about twenty minutes before it set officially I was thinking about how do you know when to stop looking and wondering why I was sitting here waiting for an unimpressive cloudless and not at all dramatically colored sunset to become official so I left and started walking back to my car. I had a long way to go to get home. I saw the sunset as I walked back to my car and it actually was impressive but it was fine.
I drove home with the convertible top down again. As I drove along the side of Lake Michigan, I felt the temperature drop and then a few minutes later my phone gave me a severe weather warning through the Google Maps voice. I was listening to Rilo Kiley’s album The Execution of All Things. I could see the lightning striking over Lake Michigan and feel the colder wind. But I just kept driving and then I was away from the lake and the weather was gone. In the flatlands around the lake, the sky was clear and I could not stop looking up away from the road and up at the stars.
