The Northern Thrust

While the higher elevations of the Appalachian Mountains commonly feature floral extensions of the great northern forests as far south as Georgia, what most people do not realize is that remnants of great bogs can be found even at lower elevations as far south as parts of Ohio and Indiana.  The inhospitable conditions of a  bog, along with occasional cool groundwater seepages, means that our hardier northern friends are often the only plants that can thrive.  While more southerly trees and flowers might make it even to the edge of the peat, they are forced to yield to the true survivors.  Such is the scene captured below, in a rather damp, nearly bog-like place between two lakes around Cement City, Michigan.

Taken from Hallson's Gardens which neighbors the wetland.   

The large conifers sticking out of the wetlands are tamaracks (Larix Laricina), northern trees which grow all the way to the Arctic Treeline and find their climactic southern limit not far from here in extreme northern Indiana and Ohio, with, of course, the exception of higher ground in the Appalachians.  Southern Michigan is where a few more northern sentinels start to pop up, including spruce, pines, birches, and northern willows.  Like so many native plants that could otherwise be seen as the delightful blessing that they are at the edge of their range, diversifying an otherwise familiar landscape, these trees are often dismissed as scrub and uninteresting, and are often consigned to a fate of being chopped down as their wet ground is drained away to make room for a far less interesting condo development or mini-mall.  

Granted, your author is a bit passionate about having something boreal practically in his backyard.  To me, it is what makes the western Great Lakes region so interesting: we can have a tallgrass prairie a stone's throw from a boreal bog, again only a walk away from towering forest of maples, beech, oaks, hickories, and more.  Let's just say that nature makes our housing developments look mundane, what with nothing but mile after mile of carefully chopped lawn grass and manicured trees serving as green background rather than a reminder of how we can still dominate a planet that we can keep largely natural.  

Crown Point, Indiana

Northwestern Indiana is a unique part of the state as much economically and demographically as it is naturally.  As if human culture were trying to stick to natural drainage patterns and ecotones, heavily industrialized Lake and Porter counties contrast with the rest of the agrarian state.  Even the other large cities such as Fort Wayne and Indianapolis do not feature manufacturing and refining as their main events.  Gary, on the other hand, has industry for its lifeblood.

Those blurry bits on the horizon are huge refineries and processing mills that surround the undeveloped shoreline of the Dunes national and state parks.

Head south enough, even within the two south shore counties, and one can find "Indiana proper" slowly emerging, along with a domestic and civic architecture one would expect to find from the true Midwest.   I covered what one could typically find in a Midwestern city center back on a post which featured a few downtown shots of Independence, Missouri .  Picture the downtown from "Back to the Future" (despite it being supposedly set somewhere further west) and you get your classic Midwestern townscape, complete with a central government building, a movie theater, and a bunch of shops set around the main square.  As noted in the earlier post, the civic planning is based on a strong democratic basis of a culture that focuses on interdependent family and small town ties, along with less of a focus on commercialism and more of one on public gatherings.  Still, this is the "cultural ecotone" of northwest Indiana, and the landscape here is just a little bit different.  Case in point: Crown Point.  The pictures, I think, can speak for themselves.

The courthouse.  John Dillinger escaped from here!

Lake Michigan's Southern Shore: North Meets West Meets East

Dramatic stands of Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus) and Jack Pine (Pinus Banksiana) grow among Big Bluestem (Andropogon Gerardii), Eastern Prickly Pear (Opuntia Humifusa), as well as a variety of trees common to the eastern forests, notably oaks, hickories, ashes, willows, and more.  In a low, watery basin sits a spahgnum bog topped with boreal species, mere yards away from an open prairie, in turn yards away from an ash swamp, which sits behind cool depressions in sand dunes which give rise to great pines.  This meeting place is the world of the Indiana dunes, a natural point of junction that has also served as a great crossroads for people traveling between various parts of the continent.

Sand, wind, and glaciers are responsible for bringing together a diverse community of plant life that serves to defy definition for the area.  My first sign that I was in an altogether different place was the presence of so many White Pine that just popped up out of nowhere.

Both shots taken at Indiana Dunes State Park near the end of State Park rd.

Now normally when one comes across such stands so far south it is because park agencies would have planted them to add exotic interest to the environment, an attempt to create something of a "north woods mystique" to state and local campgrounds.  Pines might have existed here naturally at one point, but most that are seen south of the Great Lakes are nostalgic reminders of a timer before the great lumber pillage of the nineteenth century.  Here, however, they remain as relics of the huge stands that once helped to build Chicago.  They rise from the sands in scenes expected hundreds of miles to the north in northern Michigan and Ontario.  Travel only a few miles south, over ancient moraines left at the edge of long vanished ice sheets, and the sand is left behind to be overtaken by rich prairie soils and more temperate forests.  This is, after all, Indiana, a place one would hardly expect the north to thrive in.

Yet thrive it does.

But the north here is not alone.  The dunes are first stabilized by dune grasses...

...and more southerly trees like Eastern Cottonwoods (Populus Deltoides) and Eastern Redcedar (Juniperus Virginiana).

Eventually they are joined by trees found in more mature forests as richer soils are built up in the ever changing world of our eastern plant succession forests.  In some lower places, water stands for a significant portion of the year, and we have moist forests of ash trees, Swamp Cottonwoods (Populus Heterophylla), and other water tolerant trees.

Eventually the lake gets far enough away that its power over the shifting sands declines along with the sand itself.  Departure from the drainage basin of Lake Michigan marks an ecological departure into the Midwest, where a new struggle of plant succession takes place, waged not between sand and plant but fire and plant.  A mosaic of prairie, savanna, and forest stretches in all directions but north from atop the Valparaiso Moraine.  Looking north instead shows us what we have just seen, a meeting of north, east, and west.  These days humans mimic this corridor along our highways 20, 94, and various railroads.  Come by tomorrow for a look at the human presence in Indiana's "southern shores".

Northwest Indiana: A Little Different

Time and again I have disagreed with the majority opinion regarding how we ought to define the Midwest.  Much of Ohio and Michigan just do not qualify to be truly part of the Midwest, with a good chunk of Wisconsin and bits of Minnesota not quite making the cut either.  Geographically, climatically, botanically, politically, culturally, and in so many other ways, these places are a distinct region better named for the Lakes which they embrace, and for the northern lands which they form the southern edge of.  Just beside them, however, are places that take on a different character almost immediately.  One such place would be Indiana.

Indiana has what one would definitely come to expect from the Midwest, even as it shares a few features in common with the Lakes region and the American South.  In the northwestern corner are a variety of human and natural features which mark a very rapid transition into something Midwestern.

Just south of Hobart, Indiana.

While Ohio and Michigan have their fair share of farms and quite open rural country, Indiana is positively dominated by it.  Even before the second born of our continent changed her face into what we have these days, Indiana was the first place heading west where one would find open prairies, some large enough so that a treeline on the horizon was barely noticeable.  The result was that settlers took quite readily to open spaces with excellent soils, and the place became a state as quickly as 1816.  They and their descendants formed an agrarian minded populace that has since become associated with the "heartland", and everything from their accents to domestic architecture reflect this quite well.

That said, the state was (and is) something of a highway as much as a destination.  People came to Indiana on their way to something else as often as they broke ground, enough so that the place has been self-proclaimed as the "crossroads of America".  In the northwestern corner of the state, this is perhaps all the more true.  While most western migration routes followed the main rivers and more southerly wagon trails, a connection to the Great Lakes was important enough that Indiana demanded a little bit more of it from Michigan, a territory which would have claimed land as far south as Gary.  The connection to Lake Michigan is indeed very tenuous compared to the rest of transit networks in the state, a situation reflected in the relative  lack of a drainage basin emptying into big blue.  Mere miles is all the grand lake can fetch in some places, while the Mighty Mississippi steals the rest.  Mere miles, however, is enough to produce a part of the state just a little different enough to make it a very special place.  This is dune country, and this is more of what we will explore tomorrow.

Lake Michigan From the Bottom

Really from the bottom, in Indiana, and at a low angle just over this lovely little sand dune.

The beach at Indiana Dunes State Park, an enclave of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

The scale is a bit misleading, as the dunes are anything but flat.  The rest of the area is pretty pancake though, at least until you hit the Valparaiso Moraine.  Come by tomorrow for some more detail!  The next few posts will feature the softer side of heavily industrialized northwestern Indiana.

Dreaming of Blissful Surroundings

A bit tired to post about much today, but I thought I would keep the momentum going by showing something nice.

An oak savanna in Island Lake State Recreation Area, near Brighton, Michigan.  Oak savannas once covered significant portions of southern Michigan, southern Wisconsin, Indiana, northwest Ohio, and southwestern Ontario.  They are in many ways the meeting of worlds between the eastern mixed forests and the interior grasslands.  In Michigan and Ontario they tend to be inter-mixed with forests, whereas in much of the rest of their area they form more open landscapes.  Early settlers who saw them commented on how beautiful and park-like they looked, even as they were plowing them over into farms and settlements.  These days very few of them remain, but they are often targeted as special conservation areas and have even started to get attention as possible landscape choices for larger properties.  

Defining the Not-Midwest: Geography

Look at the United States.

As you can see, the Midwest is aptly named because it is halfway out there to the western part of the continent.  It sits roughly in the middle of things, even sitting in a time zone (the eastern limit of which is marked by the pale blue line) that is aptly called the central time zone.  The rivers (purple) which flow through it nearly all drain to the Gulf of Mexico, in one spectacular point of land known as the Mississippi delta.  The landscape looks slightly less green than stretches further east do, and in the western edge of the region, things brown out quite a bit as the trees get far and few between.

Now, look at our friends Michigan, northern Ohio, northwest Pennsylvania, western New York, and yes, even southern Ontario.  These areas fall into the eastern timezone, albeit at the middle and western end.  The rivers (pale blue spray on the Lakes and St. Lawrence river) of these areas drain to the Atlantic Ocean through the wonderful inland seas that are the Great Lakes. Things look much greener (though parts of Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario do look a bit more farmed over, to be honest).  And for crying out loud, Detroit is at the same longitude as western South Carolina.  Even the western parts of the state are still due north of the Florida panhandle.  To envision Cleveland being much more western than Erie is simply mind-boggling in the regards of sheer proximity.  Old divisions between north and south at least acknowledged the existence of "border states" both culturally and physically.  Hence, again, the term "Nearwest" is best applied to these areas.

Justification for such a term here is certainly given both in terms of actual location and cultural/commercial links between east and Midwest.  Those rivers do more than just drain water; they have been determining the market for cities such as Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and even distant Gary and Milwaukee for over two centuries now (Chicago is a different animal, more of a bridge between, well, everything).  They have sent their goods either to Canada or down the St. Lawrence seaway (and formerly the Erie Canal) to foreign markets.  In contrast, goods from the Midwest have made their way to the port of New Orleans and destinations beyond.  The barges of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers also carry different cargo from their Lake freighter counterparts; grains and produce float down towards the Gulf, while everything from autos to iron ore load up the Lakers destined for the Atlantic.  If the map is not evidence enough of the distinct region that the Nearwest forms, the markets that exist because of the conditions of the map are there to support the theory that we have a separate region on our hands.  Anyway, enough of the bare bones of physical geography, let's take a look at environmental geography.

Much of the Midwest is characterized by its dominance of farmland, grid-patterned cities and orderly plots of land, and in general its heavy development.  Much of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, and parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and of course the neighboring plains states used to be quite open.  While a settler standing in the middle of Indiana or Illinois would probably still be able to see trees around, there was a lot more sky and grass than had been encountered down in Kentucky and points eastward.  Things would also seem very flat.  This is not to say hills do not exist in these states, but for the most part, the terrain is a rather level affair.  Much of the original landscape is now gone, replaced by nearly endless agricultural development that took advantage of the rich, deep soils of these areas.  Still, the notable absence of extensive forests is because the farms were simply developing land that was rather open to begin with.

A section of restored tallgrass prairie along I-55, and a scene typical of central Illinois.  There are trees here, but there is also natural open space.

Now, this is not to say that Michigan, northern Ohio, and southern Ontario have no farms.  Indeed, there is a lot of corn grown here.  Here and there, though, instead of patches of woodland, are remnants of some truly amazing forests.  While there are definitely tall trees in Illinois and Indiana, the difference between these regions lies in the elements of the forests.  For one, unless they have been planted, pines and spruce are going to be far and few between in the former tallgrass regions.  There are exceptions to this rule, even as there are patches of prairie in Michigan and Ontario, but by and large a notable contrast will be seen by even the most casual of observers.  Illinois and Indiana have lots of oaks, hickories, elms, and shrubs.  Michigan, Ohio, and points east have maples, beeches, pines, and towering trees of all sorts.

Joy road, near the western limits of Canton, Michigan, a rare instance of a natural landscape in Wayne county.  Here we have a typical maple-beech forest.

As you can see, the dominant landscapes of the two different regions are substantially different.  Again, there are exceptions to the rule in these places, but by and large, the Nearwest has a different flavor from the true Midwest, and this is without bringing the Great Lakes themselves into the debate.  Still need convincing?  Well, come by for the last post in this series of defining the Not-Midwest as we explore the wonderful world of politics, where we find the concept of "Midwest" was probably born.