Strange New World

THE HIKE BEGINS at the parking lot on Floral Lane, near the Boy Scout camp, in the marshy northeast corner of Warren Dunes State Park. Snow lightly covers the ground from a few days ago, but it’s supposed to warm up again tomorrow. The sky is a light, silvery gray, and the sleeping, leafless oaks, beeches, and hornbeams look like black lightning reticulating up from the ground, as if in photo negative. Behind them mass dark pines, all along the marsh and right up the dunes, closing in on the gravel road to the trail.

The trail is a familiar one. Just inside the woods it hits a junction. To the north it winds a loop around the marsh and behind the parking lot, in wet months much of it flooded. West takes you to the dunes, first the oldest, stable, wooded backdune ridges, then the drifting layers of sand, grass, isolated cottonwood stands, and shrub thickets that make up what botanist Henry Cowles called a “restless maze.” As he writes in his groundbreaking 1899 article, “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan”:

Warren Dunes State Park lies on the southeast coast of Lake Michigan about ninety minutes from Chicago. More than a million visitors come each year to its smooth beaches and often-crowded campground. The camping’s not ideal, since the grounds are in a leeward hollow that traps campfire smoke, and it’s not the crash of waves but the gentle roar of Interstate 94 that will waft you off to sleep, but it’s only forty minutes from South Bend, where my partner and I live and teach. The land had been preserved by a Congregationalist dry goods shopkeeper in Three Oaks named Edward K. Warren, who got rich in the late 1800s by substituting braided turkey feathers for whalebones in corsets. Warren died in 1919, and both Warren Dunes and nearby Warren Woods, home to the last original climax beech-maple forest in Michigan, were made state parks in 1930.

Warren Dunes is particularly interesting for its topographical and ecological variety, as it is what’s called a “compound lake-plain complex.” In such a complex, “multiple generations of blowouts, parabolic dunes and coastal dune ridges lead to a compound complex in which fragments of older coastal ridges are preserved between overlapping and nested parabolic dunes.” The oldest, easternmost dune ridges are around twelve thousand years old, likely created when the Great Lakes were all joined in one vast body of water at the foot of the Laurentide Ice Sheet called Lake Algonquin. The western, lakeward dune ridges are much younger, ranging in age from two thousand to four thousand years old, contemporaries of Ovid and Bronze Age Egypt. Closer to the lake, active parabolic dunes mere centuries old shift, blow out, and rise again.

I didn’t know any of this when we first moved here. To my eyes, Michigan and Indiana were all strip malls and highways and pro-life signs, cornfields and soy fields and industrial rust—a landscape of anthropogenic blight. We went to the lake, of course, but all I saw was sand and water and people.

We’d moved from New York, which of course is even more human, human will in steel and concrete raised high, an empire city built to accumulate and exploit, ablaze with the names of its paragons: Morgan, Rockefeller, Chrysler, Trump. Yet the city’s churning cosmopolitan dynamism, human as it may be, remains inextricable from its geological and ecological embeddedness in the particular confluence of flows that make it such a valuable port for intercontinental commerce: Manhattan’s bedrock schist, Brooklyn’s tidal flats, New Jersey’s marshes, and the indomitable Hudson’s perennial pulse. And indeed, although the Catskills cannot be seen from the city even on a clear day, they loom beyond the horizon connecting the Taconic Mountains and the Berkshires with the Poconos and the Blue Ridge Mountains farther south, all part of the long Appalachian wall that divides the eastern seaboard from the interior.

In spite of the inevitable self-concern that comes of being the cultural and financial capital of global hegemony for the past eighty-odd years, New York is acutely and electrically alive in multiple dimensions, deep and wide, old and new. Coming up out of the subway over the East River on the N train to watch the Brooklyn Bridge arc into the sky through passing stanchions—standing on a Greenpoint rooftop at night overlooking the United Nations headquarters in Turtle Bay—turning a corner and stepping out of the traffic to crane your neck at the nearest architectural aspiration reaching to break the sky’s blue bowl—to live in New York is to live in a phenomenological world of buzzing, vibrant, multidimensional spacetime.

Moving west to northern Indiana, the world collapsed to a Cartesian plane. Whatever human, ecological, or geological history that might have predated industrial agriculture here had been cleared and plowed and paved into oblivion. Whereas New York was (for all its drawbacks) dynamic and stimulating, the Midwest seemed phenomenologically flat. The derisive appellation by which coastal elites refer to 80 percent of the United States—“flyover states”—seemed to apply nowhere as well as it did to this blank surface. Or so I thought.

The first hint there was more than met the eye came from a hike—not the winter hike in Warren Dunes, but an earlier one, at Cowles Bog. I’d assumed there were no good hikes in the area, of course, since the topography was so monotonous. But I’d invited the speculative fiction novelist Jeff VanderMeer to come to Notre Dame for a reading and I wanted to find him something interesting to do during his visit. Knowing he was an avid birdwatcher, I asked around for good birding and was pointed to Cowles Bog Trail. Now I take students there, not only because the trail is a pleasant and interesting five-mile hike as well as a prime location to spot migrating birds, but also because it’s the perfect place to talk about the human-nature interface, dune succession, and the history of ecology itself. Henry Cowles, for whom the bog is named, was one of the first scientists who brought the study of ecology to the United States from Europe, specifically through the study of dunes.

The idea behind the concept of ecology is an old one, but the term itself is surprisingly new, coined by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in his 1866 General Morphology of Organisms, where he defined it as “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the ‘conditions of existence.’” Approximately thirty years later, Henry Cowles, then working on his PhD at Chicago, was so excited about a study by Danish botanist Eugenius Warming detailing dune succession on the coast of Denmark, published as Plantesamfund, or Plant Ecology, he learned Danish in order to read the book himself. Cowles’s advisor, the botanist John Coulter, “encouraged him to assemble a field course in plant geography,” then directed his dissertation on dune succession, which became his field-defining 1899 article on dune ecology. Coulter and Cowles between them might be said to be largely responsible for the founding of ecological science in the United States.

I wish I’d known any of that when I hiked Cowles Bog with VanderMeer, but at that point I didn’t even know what “dune succession” meant and just hoped VanderMeer wouldn’t be bored. He’d written a series of books set in a fictionalized version of St. Marks Recreation Area on the Florida panhandle designated “Area X,” in which the landscape is somehow taken over by an alien entity—somehow becomes an alien. Inspired in part by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the novels offer a peculiar and fascinating form of estranged nature writing, in which close attention to the natural world is filtered through the genre conventions of science fiction and horror to create a hybrid new vision of reality in which ecology becomes entangled in both human consciousness and cosmic mystery, at once intimate and incomprehensible. This hybrid form is powerfully illustrated by the opening paragraph of the series’ first novel, Annihilation:

Like the dunes, Area X offers rich ecological variety within a narrow geographical band. Also like the dunes, Area X is anything but pristine. It’s a mixed place, grown feral and strange, yet marked and shaped by human development, including not only the mysterious plunging tower and derelict lighthouse but also a military base on its border and abandoned habitations within.

Cowles Bog and the Indiana Dunes are bounded and marked and intermingled with human structures, indeed some of the most intensive industrial development in the country. Immediately to the west of Cowles Bog, for instance, lies the Bailly Generating Station and the Port of Indiana. Bailly burned coal until 2018 and still serves as a natural gas peaker plant. The Port of Indiana hosts the NLMK Indiana steel mill, a US Steel finishing mill, a variety of steel processing companies, and Cleveland-Cliffs’ second-largest US steel mill. Further west lies the city of Gary, home to US Steel’s Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in the United States, with four operating blast furnaces. Going east, nestled between Cowles Bog and the rest of Indiana Dunes National Park, you’ll find Dune Acres, which began as a resort community but is now an exclusive vacation town with private security. Further east gleam the casinos and outlet malls of Michigan City and New Buffalo, as well as the NIPSCO Michigan City Generating Station, a coal- and natural gas-fired power plant, with its distinctive hyperboloid cooling tower. Hardly “wilderness,” yet the Indiana Dunes, like Area X, beckon the attentive visitor with the promise of something special and maybe even sacred.

It’s a promise that can be hard to see. Both VanderMeer’s Area X and the Indiana Dunes demand more thoughtful engagement than does the spectacular sublimity of “pristine wilderness” or even the Prometheanism of New York. They challenge us, as William Cronon writes in “The Trouble with Wilderness,” “to stop thinking of such things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the non-human, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world.” They invite us to attend closely to the constantly evolving hybrid complexities of human ecology, which given the global impact of human civilization is simply ecology. And they challenge us to see beyond what’s right in front of us, to look past the landscape as it exists and peer into realms of ecological, geological, and cosmological time accessible only through the imagination. Standing on the beach of Lake Michigan, where the Cowles Bog Trail comes down to the water, you have to work to imagine the land around Chicago buried in ice half a mile thick, as it was some twenty thousand years ago, when humans likely crossed the Beringian land bridge to a new world.

LEAVING BEHIND the snowy parking lot, I went south at the junction, following the trail between the wooded ridge and the campgrounds. I passed one, then two dog walkers wearing hunter’s orange, and my polite howdys were inflected by a rising anxiety as I remembered that the dunes were open to hunting in the winter and I was dressed not to be seen but to keep warm: black snowpants, black jacket, and gray cap. I wasn’t really worried about getting shot, however, until I was bear-crawling up the snow-covered eastern face of Mount Randall.

Mount Randall is demanding on a good day. Ascending from the base, you only have to go up 120 feet, but it’s 120 feet of unstable, fine-grained sand on a fairly steep incline. There’s a trick when it’s dry, which is to follow the depressions left by previous hikers, almost like steps, but even doing that many hikers wind up scrambling the last thirty feet on their hands. I was facing an unblemished dune that hadn’t been climbed in weeks and was covered in three inches of snow. Halfway up I was sweating ferociously, breathing hard, scrambling on all fours, and grappling with the realization that from afar I might be mistaken for a bear.

Would I even hear the round as it tore through my ribs? The crack would follow long behind, by which point I’d be down and bleeding. I comforted myself with the assumption that bear hunting was strictly regulated in Michigan, which meant I was probably safe. Still, I made the effort to climb the last twenty feet upright.

When I finally made it to the top, I was hit in the face—not by a bullet, but by an icy, sandy blast of wind. The trail summited between Mount Randall proper to the south and a smaller, unnamed hill to the north, and opened into a series of blowouts and dunes descending in waves to the lake. In summer, the wind off the water refreshes the weary climber as they admire the sun-painted vista below; in winter, the wind is a cold steel plow. I set my face against the grit and charted a course along the southern edge of the depression, trying to stay out of the main current, slipping and skidding down the slope, hauling myself up a sandy rise, slipping sideways again, inching toward the distant lake.

I wish I could say hiking Cowles Bog with VanderMeer so long ago had been a revelation, but in fact the change took years. It began in earnest in 2020, during the COVID lockdown, when I started exploring different parks along the lake looking for unpopulated beaches. Piece by piece—because pieces are all that’s left—I slowly began assembling a deeper and more comprehensive sense of the place I lived, a region of tremendous ecological richness, historical depth, and dramatic geological transformation.

One of the most transformative experiences was a bus ride. I read a story in our local paper about a city park ranger named Gary Harrington who gave glaciology tours, and the idea intrigued me—frankly, it seemed almost absurd—so the next time he ran the tour, I bought tickets.

The city where I live, South Bend, Indiana, is a hollowed-out industrial town that never quite recovered from the Studebaker plant closure in 1963 and deindustrialization in the ’70s and ’80s. Recent efforts to drag the city into the twenty-first century haven’t been entirely successful: the crime rate has dropped and we have nicer coffee shops, but the average income is still 84 percent of the national and much of downtown is still vacant. The major employers are the University of Notre Dame, the public school system, and the health care industry. When I moved here it reminded me a lot of where I grew up, Salem, Oregon, which had been similarly gutted in the ’80s by modernization and offshoring in the timber industry. What Salem had that South Bend didn’t, however, was topography: hills to the west of town, mountains on both sides, and far to the north on a clear day Mount Hood. South Bend was flat, flat, flat—or so it seemed. As I learned from Gary Harrington, the area has quite a lot of topographical variation. Yet because so much of it is covered in concrete and houses and farms, you have to know where to look.

Rum Village Park, for instance, where the tour began, is perched on a small hill on the south side of town that’s actually part of a glacial moraine running all the way to Mishawaka. Moraines are piles of dirt and rock that glaciers push in front of them as they advance and then get left behind as the glaciers retreat. The area around South Bend—named after the southernmost bend of the St. Joseph River—had been shaped by the advance and retreat of two lobes of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and as we drove familiar streets in the tour bus, Gary’s story of ancient planetary forces scouring and warping the land turned the familiar strange, making me see the path of my daily commute with new wonder. The Midwestern flatness I’d taken for granted began to take on depth, both physical and temporal.

Numerous previous glaciations and retreats had swept the continent and dug out the basins we call the Great Lakes, but the best place to start is probably the Last Glacial Maximum, around twenty-six thousand years ago, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered North America as far south as Manhattan and the Ohio River. More than a mile thick at its heart, the Laurentide sheet made a thousand-foot wall across the continent and stored so much water that the oceans were more than four hundred feet lower than they are today. At some point, and for reasons scientists don’t really understand, the glaciers began to melt and retreat, a process that accelerated as it went. The melting ice left ridges of rocky moraine behind, as well as glacial erratics—the odd granite boulder—and vast proglacial lakes.

Around nineteen thousand years ago, the ice had retreated as far as the modern Great Lakes. As it melted, it unleashed a catastrophic flood that radically transformed the entire region. This was the Kankakee Torrent, a sudden cataclysmic pulse of meltwater that tore through the Marseilles Moraine southwest of present-day Chicago, carved out the sandstone canyons at Starved Rock and the Illinois River Valley, and caused a hundred-foot drop in the level of the lake it drained from. Geologists estimate the torrent may have sent more than twenty quadrillion gallons of water rushing down the Kankakee, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers into the Gulf, raising global sea levels as much as 3 mm. It’s difficult to imagine the horrific intensity of such a flood, which would have been comparable to the greatest tsunamis in history.

Was there anyone to witness the Kankakee Torrent? Probably not. The earliest securely dated evidence of human settlement below the glacial line comes about three thousand years later. These hardy pioneers with their stone tools most likely took a route along the Canadian coast or braved the widening gap through what is now Alberta between the shrinking Laurentide in the east and the Cordilleran Ice Sheet enshrouding the Rocky Mountains to the west. Over the next few thousand years these settlers developed increasingly sophisticated hunting tools, culminating in the fluted “Clovis point” spear tip, that probably helped drive dozens of species to extinction, including most forms of Pleistocene bison, the giant muskox, the stag-moose, the western camel, every kind of native horse, saber-toothed tigers, the Pleistocene North American jaguar, the American lion, the dire wolf and Beringian wolf, the short-faced skunk, the Florida spectacled bear, the mastodon, and possibly the giant polar bear.

At around the same time, as the ice retreated across the hydrological divide separating the Mississippi watershed from Arctic and Atlantic drainages, the first recognizable precursors of today’s Great Lakes began to appear, as well as a massive lake to their west which has since drained away but was once the largest freshwater body on the planet. More than 324,000 square miles in area at its greatest extent, Lake Agassiz spread across North Dakota, Minnesota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. At first this massive lake drained into the Mississippi, but around 12,800 years ago something happened that not only changed Lake Agassiz, but transformed the climate of the entire planet, though what precisely occurred remains a matter of debate. One of the more dramatic hypotheses is that a comet struck the atmosphere and exploded, raining down debris and destabilizing the edges of the Laurentide Ice Sheet.

Whether it was shattered by comet debris or melted by global warming, what seems to have happened is that the ice separating Lake Agassiz from the precursor Great Lakes system collapsed and released a massive flood of fresh cold water into the emerging Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River, and North Atlantic, where it stalled the oceanic conveyor belt that helps regulate the planet’s overall temperature, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC). As a result, the Earth rapidly shifted into a cooling period paleoclimatologists call the Younger Dryas, in which ice sheet retreat stalled and even reversed in some places. The impact on human populations was significant, as rapid and extreme climate change drove famine, migration, the Neolithic Revolution, and the adoption of agriculture in the Levant.

The Younger Dryas ended as suddenly as it began. The ice sheets again resumed their retreat, submerging much of the Great Lakes complex in a single proglacial lake called Lake Algonquin, which drained out from the Chicago River in the south and Port Huron in the north, but which receded over time as the meltwater flowed away, eventually dropping more than three hundred feet when melting ice opened a new outlet at North Bay, leaving the lake basins isolated. It was around then that the St. Joseph River, which had previously drained west into the Kankakee, turned to follow a slightly more direct descent through a chain of glacial kettle ponds north to what we now call Lake Michigan.

As the climate warmed and stabilized, the ancestors of the Potawatomi, Miami, and Winnebago began to settle the verdant lands exposed and watered by the retreating ice. The population of North America boomed and grew more sedentary, settling in seasonal hunting grounds, developing agriculture, and emerging into distinct regional cultures. The nascent Great Lakes refilled and reconnected thanks to the Canadian Shield lifting from beneath its melting burden, as well as surges of water from Lake Agassiz. The peoples living around the Great Lakes began to work with copper. Another geological shift around six thousand years ago caused the water level in the Great Lakes to rise about thirty feet, which as it later receded left a shallow lake behind the south shore dunes that over time became Cowles Bog.

At this point, roughly contemporary with predynastic Egypt and the rise of Minoan Culture, the massive geological and climatological flux that characterized the preceding twenty thousand years calmed and North America became the primeval Eden the first European settlers imagined it to be, though populated by increasingly various and increasingly sophisticated peoples, from the Canadian Arctic to Sonora. Some of them cultivated maize, some of them piled up vast mounds of earth into temples, some of them built the cities of Cahokia and Chaco Canyon, but too little is known about the numerous peoples who lived across North America before the first contact with Europeans.

Part of the reason so little is known about them is that most of these people died in a rapid succession of virgin soil epidemics. Between five hundred and three hundred years ago, smallpox, measles, typhoid, influenza, and other diseases inadvertently brought from Europe killed between 90 and 95 percent of the Native population. So many people died so quickly that it affected global carbon dioxide levels, as forests reclaimed previously cultivated land, sucking up enough carbon dioxide to leave a visible decline in proxy records, and possibly helping to cause the Little Ice Age that extended from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The vast forests around the Great Lakes that French explorers like La Salle and Marquette braved in the 1600s were not so much un-populated as de-populated, and the Native peoples they encountered were the remnants of a population shattered by wave after wave of death.

Europeans unleashed havoc not only through disease but also through whiskey, horses, and guns. In the early 1600s, a confluence of factors—including the sale of weapons to the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) by Europeans, conflicts and alliances between Dutch and British colonial governments and the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, and territorial conflicts between various Iroquoian and Algonquian tribes—set off a decades-long war between the Iroquoian alliance and various tribes of the interior from the Hudson River to Lake Michigan. The Iroquois drove Hurons and Neutrals from around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario west into Michigan, and then drove Petuns, Ottawas, and Potawatomis west from Michigan to Green Bay and beyond, where they pushed out local Winnebagos and came into conflict with Sioux. Iroquois raids into present-day Ohio and Indiana drove Miami and Shawnee tribes west, where they came up against the Illiniwek.

As Richard White recounts in The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, the concentration of refugees around the western and northern coasts of Lake Michigan created a dynamic and anomalous situation into which French missionaries and traders brought global commercial networks and European imperial politics. After the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, however, the Shawnee returned to Ohio Country and the lower Allegheny River, and the Miami returned to Indiana and northwest Ohio. The Potawatomi went back to Michigan and the Saint Joseph River Valley, where they stayed until they were forcibly removed to Kansas and Oklahoma by the United States following the 1830 Indian Removal Act.

Yet the long decades between the end of the Iroquois wars and the Indian Removal Act were hardly a time of peace. Potawatomi, Miami, Mascouten, Meskwaki, and other tribes of the Great Lakes not only fought each other, but were continually entangled in conflicts between the French and British, from 1700 to 1763, then between the British and Americans, from 1776 to 1814, and as time went on found themselves increasingly fighting encroachment from British and then American settlers. The great oak and beech forests of Indiana and Michigan resounded with gunfire and the cries of death from Pontiac’s War (1763–1766), the American War of Independence (1775–1783), the Battle of the Wabash (1791), the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), the War of 1812, and Tecumseh’s War (1811–1813), among countless skirmishes and raids, as a revolutionary government founded on the highest ideals of enlightened self-determination began a campaign to dominate the continent. Indians were removed or killed or pent up on reservations, great forests were felled, buffalo wiped out, the Kankakee marsh drained, corn planted, roads laid down, factories and steel mills built, dunes excavated, and wetlands cleared until from New York to Chicago the country was one long stretch of industry, agriculture, and commerce—strip malls, gas stations, and parking lots, all doomed in their turn by some cataclysm yet to come, maybe a new pandemic, maybe nuclear war, maybe the unstoppable planetary transformation we euphemistically call climate change.

A vision of apocalypse: As I came down the icy dunes toward the lake, I veered off into the northmost beach lot, which in summer would be full of cars from at least three states, families with dogs and kites and beach balls, teenagers with coolers and portable speakers, everyone down to shorts and bikinis in the blazing heat, but which was now a white desert blasted by the wind, empty as a tomb. Beyond the vacant lot and locked-up bathhouse lay the beach, edged with forbidding frozen sawtooth waves. I found myself suddenly and terrifically alone—the ghosts of summer beachgoers screamed with pain and grief as the icy wind tore them to pieces—modern civilization scattered to windblown detritus—and I was the last survivor on Earth, facing an unknowably alien planet.

HOW DO WE MAKE the familiar strange enough to see it new? “If we examine the general laws of perception,” writes Russian novelist and literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, “we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic.” Habituation empties concrete experience of its immediacy, according to Shklovsky, “and so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.” The solution, for Shklovsky, is the aesthetic practice of “‘estranging’ objects and complicating form” so that perception once again becomes difficult and “laborious,” so that we approach sensation through sensation instead of through recognition. Through art, we can once again “make a stone feel stony.”

This is a striking and valuable insight, yet it relies on a false dichotomy between sensation and cognition. If we examine our perception a little more closely, we begin to realize that sensory experience as such only exists through pre-existing cognitive frameworks. As Kant famously put it in his Critique of Pure Reason, while “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Shklovsky asks how we make the stone stony, and this is a good question. But an even more important question may be, what makes a stone a stone at all?

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “At the Fishhouses” may help us explore this question. The poem takes place on a cold night on the New England shore, describing two encounters between the narrator, for all intents and purposes Bishop herself, and two denizens of that liminal space where land and water merge. We first meet an old man, sitting mending his net, as the narrator describes in hallucinatory detail an eerie scene: everything translucent silver, covered in sparkling fish scales and iridescent flies, the old man himself nearly invisible. Common items gleam with spiritual force: the two stained handles of a broken capstan suggest the crucifixion; the old man’s black scaling knife the reaper’s blade. The ocean heaves against the land and through the poet’s disorienting use of language begins to seem more real, more solid somehow than the ghostly scene along the shore. Up and down trade places, surface and depth grow confused.

From the water comes a messenger, a seal to whom the poet sings hymns, “like me,” the poet writes, “a believer in total immersion.” And although in the end the pinniped remains unmoved, ambivalent at best, the poet’s desire for communion carries through the final lines of the poem, expanding and intensifying as she imagines putting her hand in water so cold it would burn, then tasting it, imagining it would “first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue.” The poem ends with an Emersonian turn toward the transcendental:

“At the Fishhouses” gives form to the metaphysical experience of nature. Its almost psychedelic descriptions of workaday New England cod-fishing paraphernalia make that world seem strange and new, and imbue the narrator’s lingering meditation on one of the most banal possible poetic subjects, waves crashing on the beach, with disorienting and breathtaking spiritual force. The seal’s native Atlantic is both more real than the haunted charnel house the old man inhabits and of completely different stuff, composed of an elemental substance so powerful it kills, a substance which the poet compares to knowledge—though what she means by the word remains ambiguous, almost Platonic, and at the same time strangely transient, fleeting, “flowing, and flown.” Bishop’s poem makes the New England shore new again in just the way Shklovsky describes, making the water wet, the cold cold, the stones stony, but it also does something else. It transforms an embodied experience of physical and visual sensation into a spiritual experience of metaphysical reality—an experience in which we become conscious of the deep symbolic and spiritual dimensions of our phenomenological being-in-the-world.

I had memorized the poem once and could recite it on demand, though as I walked north up the barren, isolate Michigan shore at Warren Dunes, along the ragged line of frozen waves and frothy ice stretching a thousand yards or more into the sluggish blue water, all I could recall were a few passages snatched from oblivion. I passed a 4” x 4” half buried in the snow and sand, reminiscent of Bishop’s capstan. The sand itself was frozen solid, carved into patterned ripples by the wind, sometimes hewn into imbricated slabs. The water was a blue line in the distance, as otherworldly as Bishop’s Atlantic but even more unreachable. The ice made a barrier as real as the Laurentide Ice Sheet or an abandoned moraine, a barrier as real as the divide Bishop imagined existing between ourselves and the kind of knowledge she describes in her poem, a barrier as real as the divide between past and present—and as susceptible to sudden collapse as the ice that once held back Lake Agassiz.

We often forget that from the modern, scientific point of view, the past does not exist. All that exists is what’s here now, physically, and any extrapolation beyond physical phenomena is theoretical at best. The history of the planet is a constructed narrative based on conflicting and often sketchy evidence. Consciousness and more complex forms of memory are side effects of electrochemical processes in the brain. From this point of view, we live in a material world, in a moment-to-moment flow of impression and sensation, intuition and reaction, a flow as temporally shallow as the scroll of social media or the endless loop of the proverbial goldfish. History does not exist. The Laurentide Ice Sheet does not exist. Henry Cowles does not exist. The Neutral Confederacy, pushed west then wiped out by the Iroquois, does not exist and neither does the Pleistocene bison. My hike through Warren Dunes does not exist and everything I’ve written in this essay is in some sense a confabulation. From the modern scientific point of view all that exists is physical reality, which means that all we can say about the past and the future is speculation informed by evidence in the present.

Maybe you’re okay with this. To me it seems unreal, and what’s more, paradoxical. A modern, scientific, evidence-based viewpoint demands radical skepticism toward the concrete truth of experience, yet there is no evidence for anything we can apprehend beyond the concrete truth of our experience, which is inescapably complex, multidimensional, and metaphysical. The problem gets worse when we consider that most of what science comprehends as physical reality is inaccessible to our senses without elaborate technological mediation. Even most of our technology, from our smartphones to our microwave ovens, functions in a more or less magical way, real but not real, voodoo boxes where spirits send us emojis and warm our food. We know they work but have no idea how.

The problem deepens and ramifies as we deepen our phenomenology. Philosopher Edmund Husserl adopted a mental exercise he called “bracketing,” or the epoché, which works to bring a kind of scientific approach to philosophy: attend only to the evidence of your senses, without judgment or explanation. This is harder than it sounds, because we are not proverbial goldfish. Humans are not merely sensate animals, but symbol-using ones. While we can, temporarily and with some effort, apprehend an apple not as an apple but as an object we’re perceiving, we cannot help but remember the crisp crunch as we bit into its twin, the sweet tart juicy taste, the smell of apples past, apple cider, apple pie—nor can we free ourselves from what we “know” about apples and the countless social associations that give them meaning, from apples and oranges to their caloric content to Johnny Appleseed to the their role in the biblical fall from grace, or at least as Europeans have interpreted it, since the Hebrew פְּרִי simply means “fruit,” and the apple is native neither to ancient Israel nor ancient Iraq, where the story of Eden is set. The archetypal apple of knowledge was more likely than not a fig.

The stoniest of stones can never be just a stone. Human beings exist within and through networks of symbolic meaning that, contrary to the assumptions in Husserl’s technique of bracketing or scientistic physicalism, are not added to our sensate engagement with reality but make it possible: language, culture, history, and memory not only imbue our phenomenological field with depth and context, they generate the field itself. Experience coheres only through the categories, concepts, and narratives that make it coherent. True phenomenological bracketing—or radical scientific physicalism—would leave us worldless, without any clear way to navigate the flux of sensory impressions we call experience—or evidence. The upshot of all this is to say that physical reality as such only makes up a small portion of our world, for human existence is radically, fundamentally, inescapably metaphysical, a fact Bishop’s poem helps us see anew. The swelling ocean is never just the ocean. A seal is never just a seal. Likewise, a maple tree is never just a maple and a dune is never just a dune.

What this entails, however, is that the narratives and meanings we associate with the natural world are never simply given nor inherent, waiting to be revealed. The narratives and meanings through which we make sense of reality are cultural, taught, passed down from one generation to the next, revised to accommodate new evidence, molded to serve political needs, and warped by social currents and mass emotions, all the while evolving through their own poorly understood dynamics and trajectories. We don’t really understand how social change happens, or why, and it’s almost impossible to distinguish with any clarity the line between the shore and the water, the picture and the frame.

The deep history of a place like the one we call Indiana, the land of the Indians, scoured by glaciers, washed by floods, trampled by mastodons hunted to extinction by Siberian colonizers who after thousands of years were themselves nearly wiped out by Europeans who became modern-day Americans, is no more real for most Americans than the surreal virtual multiverse on their screens where they spend more than five hours a day, and probably a great deal less so. A rational, evidence-based understanding of history, climate, geology, and biology is no more real, no more self-evident, no more inherently persuasive than the vast mythopoetic apparatus of the Catholic church, emblematized in the 134-foot-tall mural fronting the main library at the University of Notre Dame, where I teach, named Word of Life but widely referred to as “Touchdown Jesus,” or the vast cultural apparatus of college football, emblematized in the 77,622-seat Notre Dame Stadium, “The House That Rockne Built,” which Touchdown Jesus faces.

There is a profound gap between the deep experience of nature that science, history, and art can offer when we connect them to our lived experience in place and the shallow, anthropocentric experience of the human-built world typical of modern life. If we believe that the deep experience of place informed by science, history, and art is worth passing on, then we have to recognize that we cannot do so merely by asserting its authority. We must ask what kind of work it takes to bring that depth to the surface.

When I first moved to Indiana, all I saw were Trump signs and abandoned buildings, cornfields and potholes, crowded beaches, isolated stands of trees, industrial farms, and places named with Native words, the meanings of which almost nobody who lived there bothered to know. After ten years hiking in the dunes, listening to park rangers and scientists, reading about glaciers and Henry Cowles and the Potawatomi, I know a little something about the place I live, if only a little. Knowledge itself, however, even combined with experience, is inadequate, and too often leads to precisely the kind of automatization Shklovksy warns against.

What makes the difference is a complex practice we might call the social imagination of place, as described by Keith Basso in his ethnography of Western Apache place names, Wisdom Sits in Places. It’s a practice “in which individuals invest themselves in the landscape while incorporating its meanings into their own most fundamental experience,” a narrative practice not of individual encounters with physical nature but rather communal interpretation of metaphysical reality through its embodiment in geographical space. Such a practice abjures naive physicalism, rejects the simplistic correlation of data and facts, and insists on seeing human meaning in non-human things, even and especially when those things are ancient, cosmic, or alien.

I hike back over the snow-covered dunes from the frozen lake, thinking of glacial moraines and the thousand-foot wall of ice that made them. I remember the mastodon hunters who once stalked these forests, the Algonquian refugees following the Sauk Trail west, the priest Marquette dying of dysentery as his canoe floated past the mouth of the St. Joseph River, and the clear-cutting settlers and featherbone entrepreneurs who made this land what it is today. I come back to the junction where I began, picturing myself coming out this summer and the next and the next, with family and friends, building more memories of a place I’d never thought I’d live, each passing winter getting warmer and warmer until deep snow is no more than a memory. I return to the lot, start my car, and head for home, a stranger in a strange new world.