A Signature of Time and Eternity

NPS / Zachary Lindeman

In May of 1958, Senator Paul Douglas introduced his first bill to preserve the Indiana Dunes with the National Park Service. Shortly after, Douglas received a letter of support from renowned American writer Carl Sandburg. His words reveberated with the masses and were used as a rallying cry for the Save the Dunes Council:

Dear Senator Douglas:

You should know that I am one of the many who appreciate your toils and efforts in behalf of an Indiana Dunes National Monument. I have known those dunes for more than forty years and I give my blessing and speak earnest prayers for all who are striving for this project. Those dunes are to the midwest what the Grand Canyon is to Arizona and the Yosemite to California. They constitute a signature of time and eternity: once lost the loss would be irrevocable. Good going to you!

Faithfully yours,

Carl Sandburg

Ron Engel has worn many hats throughout his life, including high school biology teacher, park ranger, professor, and author. His deep passion for nature and social justice culminated in his 1983 book Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes, which explores the role of democratic faith in the preservation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. His work reflects a lifelong commitment to connecting ecological integrity with social justice.

Enjoy the following excerpt from Engel's book, highlighting the complexity of Sandburg's metaphor, "a signature of time and eternity":

Tom Gill

Moving Mountains

The Dunes are “our mountains, the only mountains that we of Chicago will ever have,” Jensen explained. The Chicago plain is flat, Dudley noted, but “waves have carried sand to make a miniature mountain range along the shore.” Standing on Mount Tom, Reuben Strong remembered, “I had something similar to what one gets on a mountain top even though the mountains would be many times higher.” Throughout the annals of the Dunes tradition, the Dunes are named mountains, called mountains, compared to mountains. They are painted and drawn to resemble mountains. Earl Reed’s and J. Howard Euston’s etchings of Mount Tom suggest a high, snow-capped mountain rising in the far distance. When Dudley hung thirty Dunes paintings at the Art Institute in 1918, he simply called them Western Scenes and invited visitors to “guess where.” The Rocky Mountains and Pacific coast were favored in the guessing.

But for the members of the Dunes movement, the Dunes were more than ordinary mountains. They were cosmic mountains. “The hills around seem like symbols of eternity,” wrote Edgar Lee Masters. To follow in the footsteps of A. F. Knotts, and climb Mount Tom, or one of the other high dunes, was to ascend into the upperworld. Louella Chapin describes a day’s pilgrimage to the Central Dunes in 1907; climbing to the top of a dune, she encounters a scene “so intense, and vivid that by its very purity it grasps you and lifts you up, out of yourself.” Like the cosmic mountains of the ancient Near Eastern religions, the high dunes, and especially Mount Tom, were the loci of ecstatic revelations of the perfect order of the world.

Yet, the Dunes were a different kind of mountain and a different kind of cosmic symbol. While many lovers of the Dunes, such as Stephen Mather and Harriet Monroe, shared the monumental esthetic of the American wilderness movement, frequently touring the West and exulting in spectacular mountain grandeur, they were keenly aware of the uniqueness of their own sacred hills. The great rock-hewn mountains of the West appeared as embodiments of permanence. The sacred Power they manifested was transcendent, Wholly Other. In contrast, the Dunes were moving mountains, creating a landscape of intimate beauty. “Thus we see the Dunes are not fixed, but moving, slowly, silently, irresistibly, mysteriously.”

Numerous individuals have struggled to put their finger on this unique dimension of the Dunes revelation. It remained for Carl Sandburg to find the right image. In 1958, at the time of the Dunes’ greatest peril, he put a new twist on Masters’s “symbols of eternity” and wrote Paul Douglas: “They constitute a signature of time and eternity: once lost the loss would be irrevocable.” It was the genius of Sandburg to see in the moving mountains of sand a coincidence of opposites, and to recognize that the opposites unified were the very ones religion ever seeks to reconcile—time and eternity. For thousands since, these simple words—“signature of time and eternity”—have epitomized the meaning of the Dunes.

Sandburg’s image is more complex than at first appears. Its power derives from the connotations of the metaphor “signature,” the double subject “time and eternity,” and the multiple meanings implied by the dialectic between them. There are at least four polarities suggested by the image—each a subspecies of time/eternity. These are mortality/immortality, movement/rest, imperfect/perfect, and growth/law.

NPS / Joseph Gruzalski

Mortality / Immortality

The notion of a signature is a peculiarly apt analogy for the Dunes. In the first place, it is an analogy drawn from human experience, confirming what many have felt about the moving dunes, that precisely because they are in some sense mortal, they are also approachable. Analogies from human life are frequently used to describe the Dunes. Sandburg himself, in his children’s stories of the 1930s, called the Dunes “sand hills which walked wanderingly now and then.” The Dunes are “moving pictures of land in the making” reported the Chicago Herald in 1914. “Dunes are not dumb-bells,” declared Bess Sheehan in her talk before the wives and legislators of the Indiana Assembly in 1923. “They are intensely human. They organize, mobilize, get together, decide to move, and overnight they are gone.”

Movement / Rest

In the second place, a signature suggests the meaning of time and eternity as movement and rest. Time is in the process of being written into the landscape while eternity is forever written there. “Infinite movement—infinite repose!” exclaimed Irwin St. John Tucker in his 1920 poem “On the Sand Dunes.” The Dunes are a “changeless yet ever changing plain” wrote E. Stillman Bailey in his book, The Sand Dunes of Indiana. He explained:

“Some day you may happen at the dunes when the silence will be the charm . . . The calm at the dunes is to be felt; it cannot be spoken. The sky, the water, and the land meet and proclaim the peace of heaven and earth and sea. The next day it may be the fury of the wind that will cast its spell on you . . . both storm and calm are but echoes of your own self; you acquiesce when all is still, and you thrill when all is moving.”

Imperfect / Perfect

The Dunes are also a signature of time and eternity because they symbolize the polarity of the imperfect and perfect. “Mt. Tom,” said Jesse Smith at the founding of the National Dunes Park Association on Waverly Beach, “is a sand dune that is one of the most finished pieces of landscape in America. Logically speaking, it is a specimen of the past, present, and future. . . . You will find land centuries old and beside it land which was made only yesterday or perhaps is in the making as you look at it.”

According to historian of religions G. van der Leeuw, the cosmic mountain is a “primal and permanent element of the world: out of the waters of chaos rose the primeval hill from which rose all life.” The Dunes—

Climbing up from out the sea,

And building, row on row . . .

disclose the movement of the cosmic mountain’s creation, not as a once-and-for-all event, first manifest in the primordial past and evoked now only by ritual imitation, but as a recurring present reality. It is though the Dunes were an Isle of the Blessed continually emerging out of the waves of the sea, a creation at once perfect and incomplete.

Growth / Law

The meaning of the polarity of time and eternity most important to the Dune tradition is that of growth and law. In this variation, the moving dunes embody the generative principle of cosmic evolution. Wrote James Russell Price in his poem “The Live Sand Dunes”: “Moving sand, like flowing water, ever purifying itself.”

Vince Hannell’s painting Pine in the Dunes is a strong symbolic statement of the revelation of the Dunes as moving mountains. The abstract character of the painting suggests a mythic landscape that is almost a fairyland. The sand dunes, drawn in three dimensions, show the sculpting effect of the winds. At the summit of the sand hills is an evergreen tree whose rhythmic, uplifted limbs identify it as a tree of life, a universal symbol of world regeneration. In the foreground and distance are other trees or shrubs painted as though surrounded by halos. The impression of the picture is that the Dunes are the center of life’s eternal capacity for growth rooted in the ever-changing , yet enduring currents of the physical universe. Hannell’s landscape symbolizes the apprehension that reality is self-transforming and that at every moment in the process of creative transformation there is found fullness of life.

Reuben Strong recognized the symbolism of the moving mountains as growth and law when in 1953, in a report to his fellow members of Friends of Our Native Landscape, he included a quotation from the Michigan Conservationist:

“One need not to be a scientist to see the beauty of the DUNES, to sense the drama that is taking place, to feel the surge of some creative force beyond his ken. The Dunes are more than sun and wind and sand; they are symbolic of the struggle which all living things endure in order to fulfill their destiny.”

It is not much of a step from the insight that the Dunes manifest some creative force beyond human ken to an attempt to delineate the structure of the divine creativity with greater specificity. This step leads to either philosophy or to science. It was a step Cowles and his colleagues took when they decided to map empirically the evolutionary progression of natural communities they believe to be better represented in the Dunes than in any other place in the world. But it is a step many others have taken also, whenever they have speculated upon the meaning of the evolutionary story of the Dunes on the basis of their original experience and observation. An assumption has underlain all of these efforts: that there is a universal principle or law of the world evolution to be discerned in the Dunes landscape.

The comments Edgar Lee Masters’s friend “Old Sam” made as the two stood waiting for a train to take them back to Chicago in 1917, summarizes the native philosophy of several generations of Dune Bugs:

“You see,” he says, “the wind blows the sand and piles it up, and makes domes and spires of it, and keeps changing it until it gets too far back from the lake for the wind to affect it. In its travels back it may bury some previous generation of trees. But what’s the difference? Creepers come along, growing up from the wind-driven seeds, and make a first assault and begin to anchor the sand by a great weaving of roots. Then you will see the tamaracks, by and by the pines, and then the oaks. The oaks hold it and make it land. You see, it’s all growth and law.”