Leaving Chicago

Sandland at twilight / All hushed in brooding gray— / A place to find your
heart again / And cast your cares away. / Duneland at sunrise, / Life’s
glory risen new— / The arms of freedom flinging wide / The gates your
dream saw thru [sic].42
—George E. Bowen

When Alice Gray left Chicago on a South Shore electric train in the fall of 1915, she was thirty-four years old and intent on seeking one thing—solitude. She aimed to find it in the remote hollows of the dunes region, which she had no doubt heard about but perhaps visited only in Michigan City, Indiana, where her sister, Leonora, lived with her family.

On a determined mission to disengage from the trappings of work and society, she brought little of her city possessions. The adventure was largely unrehearsed, so she could hardly know what to expect or how to plan for such an unusual new life. Furthermore, she had no idea how long she would be gone from Chicago; at this point, however, she did not plan to stay away for the rest of her life.

Alice was no stranger to the notion of radically shifting direction; she had already done so twice—once when she moved to Washington, D.C., to work at the observatory and again when she set sail for Germany to study mathematics. By the time she stepped off an interurban train at the Wilson stop in Indiana, she had lived on her own for more than a decade. Even so, making a home in the outdoors, temporary or not, required a far different set of survival skills than working as an editorial secretary or a book editor, the two probable jobs she walked away from on October 31, 1915.⁴³

In a letter written to an acquaintance nearly forty years later, Olga Schiemann commented on the level of survival skills Alice brought to her dunes life. “She had never learned to do anything for herself and when her mother died, she was completely helpless in the community. She had relatives that wanted to help her but she would have none of it. She simply got away from everyone.”⁴⁴

The idea that Alice “simply got away from everyone” could be in reference to her retreat to the dunes, but it might also explain why Alice accepted a job in Washington, D.C., and then spent several more years in Germany before returning to Chicago. Alice clearly wanted to prove she could take care of herself, eventually choosing to measure success by her own definition.

Writers and storytellers over time have proffered various theories to explain Alice’s departure from Chicago. Although she said, “No love affair has caused me to live this lonesome life,”⁴⁵ it is a common theme; in fact, strong evidence exists that a complicated affair may indeed have been a reason she left.

The relationship was revealed in excerpts from Alice’s diary, the pages of which she provided to the Chicago Herald and Examiner in 1918.⁴⁶ For a woman who valued her privacy so intensely, it seems curious that Alice would share publicly her thoughts about a man she called only “L,” a writer for whom she had both intense and confounding feelings.

Others say, as did Alice, that she left Chicago because women were secondclass citizens in the working world; she deeply resented being underpaid and undervalued. While speaking to a reporter, Alice insisted that “the life of a wage earner is a slavery.”⁴⁷

In a diary entry dated December 4, 1915, Alice wrote:

There was a letter for me from Dr. A., which, hastily read, spoiled my mood. Yet as I read it again there was no reason why it should. He assures me he has understood my case from the first—my abilities call for a better position. That statement revived the feeling which had made me almost loathe myself while I was doing the work: that I should be reduced, stooping to such means of earning money—what a prostitution of my powers!⁴⁸

Alice also expressed disillusionment with her work during an interview in 1916 with Honor Fanning, who claimed to be the first female reporter to “penetrate the sanctuary of this modern-world Diana.” “I was working in Chicago, making little in the way of money, doing little of importance in the world, it seemed. I had measured myself with the world—and the results were not encouraging. I came here to measure myself with nature.”⁴⁹

Another possible explanation for her exodus to the dunes derives from one of the first interviews Alice granted a Chicago reporter. “I must stay out here for a year....Friends told me last fall I could not live the life of a recluse two weeks without gaining a great deal of objectionable publicity....Thank goodness, though, I escaped until today.”⁵⁰

It seems feasible that Alice complained enough to her friends about her situation in Chicago that she was dared to set off on her own, leaving society behind as she attempted to commune with nature, like some Thoreauvian character. Perhaps she set her own timetable—one year—toprove her mettle among those who would doubt her success. It may not have seemed entirely risky, since her sister, Leonora, lived nearby in Michigan City, Indiana. (Family lore insists that while Alice lived in the dunes, she did visit her sister, although with what regularity is uncertain.)

The summer after her arrival, while speaking with a reporter about her search for solitude—by then, an utterly impossible dream for all the attention she had attracted—Alice grew hysterical. The interview occurred in the midst of her first long day of being besieged by newspapermen who were desperate enough to go thirteen miles south of Lake Michigan to Valparaiso, Indiana, in hopes of finding guides to her isolated shack.⁵¹ Alice, the reporter wrote, “said sobbingly that she could ‘readily understand why people were driven to suicide.’”⁵²

On the surface, such a remark from Alice seems rooted in her frustration with the onslaught of questioning from various reporters. However, her diary hints that when she first came to the dunes, the notion of suicide was one with which she meant to reckon. Alice wrote of the day she left the city: “The day I arrived— the day that was crowded with thoughts of ending it all.”⁵³

Almost immediately, however, she was captivated by her new home. She admired nature’s rich palette of colors, noted useful landmarks and pondered the vastness of her new environs:

Now, on this cloudy afternoon, as I sit and look over the milky green on the lake between the trees defined at the horizon with something darker than I should not know whether to call greenish or bluish or reddish. I feel sometimes as if I could faint with the rapture of it.
     Back of this hill there is a wonderful sweep of sand up to the heights—a great wash, really the great white way. From the top of that hill is a wide prospect—brown hills in the distance, over the tops of oak woods, and back to the lake between the dunes. The road I take to the farms and the railroads lies that way, sharp down into the oak forest in the valley. How exquisite the bare sand hills stand out coming back, especially in the subdued light at sunset.⁵⁴

She gave thought to the question of “what I shall do when I get back?” in her diary entry of Sunday, December 5, 1915. By the following Wednesday, however, she determined that she would never return to Chicago. “And now a forever sadder and a wiser woman—let me forget that acridly chemical atmosphere—even corrosive atmosphere that I knew—now that I am living in the world that belongs to me and to which I belong.”⁵⁵

Whatever combination of reasons set Alice in motion toward the dunes, it is certain she had weathered a long winter, alone. From October of 1915 to midsummer of 1916, she busied herself with learning to survive in her new home.