If you want to see a guy with polio flail, put him on a mountain of sand.

My daughter and I were about half way up Mount Baldy, a 126-foot dune that was (until recent changes in the park) one of the more popular routes up to the shore of Lake Michigan.  But I was getting no where.

Below us what little grass there was had given out and now we were into the truly bald and, at this time of year, baked part of the slope. My feet sank into the sand and slid along each tiny grain, rolling downward faster than my legs could rise ahead. Sand was filling my shoes, only making them heavier.

“You’re going to have to crawl on your hands and knees, Dad.”

I bristled. All around me were people running up the slope. Even the fat kids. Certainly my daughter wasn’t crawling, and I knew I was holding her back from the summit and whatever was up there. But getting a handicapped guy to crawl in public is not an easy thing.

When I was a kid, very young but way past the crawling age, I used to get down on my hands and knees when my legs got tired. My parents berated me because they knew I had to build up my leg strength, but also because it embarrassed them to have such a big kid crawling around. I grew ashamed of it myself.

Now, on the forever-slippery slopes of Mount Baldy, I faced a crisis. There was something up there I wanted to see, and I didn’t think I could really claim to have visited the park if I didn’t make it up its most famous trail. Looking around, I knew that nobody here knew me but my daughter, and she was kindly encouraging me to take the plunge. Also, she did not have a camera.

So I dropped my hands into the hot sand, dug my fingers down into the cooler, moister grains beneath, and pulled myself up the dune. My arms are strong, my grip tenacious. In no time I was to the top.

Holistic people who write inspirational calendars would say that my effort was its own reward, but probably most of them have not struggled to the top of Mount Baldy and seen Lake Michigan spread out before them, as blue as the Pacific. That view was the reward.

I immediately forgot the shame behind me. I was stunned into silence and then inspired into a grin.

“My god,” I said. “What must the pioneers have thought when they faced this?”

Many of them must have believed they’d come to the end of the world. The lake spreads wide, rolls a tide, and disappears on either side into a seeming infinity.

My daughter and I galloped to the water’s edge, took off our shoes, hiked our jeans and walked along the shore. The crowd that had seemed thick on the slopes was spread thinly here, and like them we didn’t venture very far into the water.

Even today, with the knowledge that big Chicago rests on the invisible farther shore – that people there sail far out into the lake, with the city at their backs – there is little sense of going forward at Indiana Dunes. You feel like you’ve come as far as you care to go.