There’s a new form of sadness going around Chicago these days, a grief for our lakefront.
You know which lake. In Chicago, it doesn’t need a name. We call it the lake.
It’s the lake — officially named Michigan — that for centuries has stirred the dreams of sailors, explorers, traders, fisherpeople, swimmers, poets. It’s a lake that has shaped Chicago since it rose from the prairie, a body of water so vital that it inspired the early city planners to declare its shoreline a common space that would remain “forever open, clear and free.”
Along that shoreline, people from every corner of the city come together to walk, run, bike, bask, play games, drink beer, fall in love, watch the sun rise.
And, in case you haven’t visited recently enough to notice, it’s vanishing.
In Sunday’s Tribune, reporter Morgan Greene recounts how the shoreline is being battered toward extinction by winter storms and a warming planet.
“Since 2013,” she writes, “the lake has risen nearly 6 feet, going from a record low to near-record high levels last summer. On Saturday, waves nearing 20 feet pummeled an already drowning shoreline.”
She writes of how in recent years giant storms have punched holes in a major shoreline project that was nearly complete, of how some stretches of beach have been swallowed up, how parts of the Lakefront Trail have been forced to close. Some buildings have flooded.
For many of us, watching these changes is like watching a friend fade away, the kind of friend you relied upon and assumed would always be there. We’re left unsettled and sad.
On a recent lakefront walk on the South Side, I found myself on a stretch of beach that had once been an expansive sandy walkway. Now it was barely wider than a slab of bacon, and no matter where I stepped, water lapped at my shoes.
On a visit to Rogers Park after last Saturday’s storm-lashing, I stopped to gawk at the piles of rubble that had once been a popular beach. Rocks will soon be the official replacement for the sand.
North Side, South Side. The damage doesn’t discriminate. And odds are, there’s more to come.
Lake Michigan’s water levels have always fluctuated. Some years they’re up, some years they’re down. That’s not new.
“It’s a cycle,” says a friend who lives in a lakefront high-rise and is more sanguine about the lakefront’s current state. “People in my building who have been there many years talk about when the lake was at record lows, so they take the current high level in stride.”
It’s true, too, that the lakefront as we know it — the paths, the parks, the beaches — weren’t always terra firma.
As my colleague Blair Kamin, the Tribune’s architecture critic, once wrote:
“Nearly all the parks along Lake Michigan were hewn from landfill dumped into the lake, beginning with debris from the Great Fire of 1871 and continuing through the creation of the northernmost extension of Lincoln Park in 1957 at Hollywood Avenue.
“In a grand illusion, the fill was planted with trees, grass and shrubs, then armored with rocks against the fury of the lake.”
As Blair now points out, however, “Guess the armor didn’t account for climate change.”
I’ve wondered if there’s a word for what many of us have been feeling about Chicago’s vanishing shoreline. Surely the Japanese or the Danish, who are so smart in naming subtle states of mind, especially as they relate to nature, must have one pithy word for the alloy of sadness and uneasiness brought on by troubling changes in the natural world.
Maybe there was even a word specific to the loss of a beloved lakefront. Lake-ache?
I Googled around and didn’t find anything that fit. But I did find the term “climate grief,” which was defined as “depression, anxiety and mourning over climate change.”
In a recent report, the American Psychological Association said that “gradual, long-term changes in climate can also surface a number of different emotions, including fear, anger, feelings of powerlessness, or exhaustion.”
It’s tempting to feel powerless when we think about what’s happening to our lakefront. But we have to keep letting the people who have power — the politicians, the scientists, the engineers — know how much the lakefront matters to all of us. Expressing our lake-ache is one way we sound the alarm.
Twitter @MarySchmich
