The Great Fresh Lake

I didn’t really understand what a Great Lake was until I moved to Chicago. I’d seen Lake Michigan before, when visiting relatives in Detroit. I registered that it was large enough that you can’t see across, but I never thought about the actual size of the lake.

When I was still new in town, a friend back in New York asked if I jogged around the lake. I did jog, and I often did it near the lake. But around the lake? Only then did I stop to consider how many miles that would be. I knew it was more than ten miles to Evanston, the next town north of Chicago. I certainly can’t jog that far. Milwaukee is an hour north of that. In the other direction, a series of beach towns line Michigan’s shore—once you pass the Indiana dunes. A few months later a neighbor told us about driving around the lake on a family vacation. The 1,100 mile drive takes at least four days, and covers four states.

One thing that surprised me about the lake when I first spent time around it is the sand. The beaches in Indiana and Michigan have high dunes, similar to the Atlantic coast beaches I knew growing up. How does sand get to the middle of the country? Was it always here, or was it carried from one of the oceans, drifting from great lake to great lake?

The first few times I went swimming in the lake I expected salt. The water hits the shore like water in a bay. Small waves become big waves when storms blow through. It looks like the ocean. I yanked my dog back from the water when I caught him drinking my first winter in Chicago—the only time of year dogs can be on the beach.

I find the lack of salt fitting. Chicago is cleaner, easier to navigate because of a grid system, and feels more orderly. I wouldn’t call Chicago bland, but New York is saltier in many senses: people are harder and more hurried, the streets are dirtier, and the subway map looks like a tangled mess.

Salt or no salt, the lake gives Chicago a sheen and a character. I saw Terry Tempest Williams read recently, and she told her audience that she feels a kinship with Chicago. Like her hometown of Salt Lake City, this city has an inland sea. And, accordingly, it has its own sea mythology. Wrecked ships lurk on the bottom. Surfers call it the Third Coast. In the summer, beaches fill with blankets and coolers and people looking out at the water, away from the tall buildings and chaos behind them. The lake offers city dwellers an escape, even if only for a few hours.