There’s always something invigorating about beginnings: a blank slate, a new chance, infinite possibilities, endless permutations.
Anyone that knows me will tell you that I enjoy two things more than any other: writing and trying new things, especially seeing new places.
You don’t need to ask someone, though: I’ll just tell you (or, show you, if every writing instructor’s advice at every level is to be heeded).
I’m constantly thinking about where I can go and what I can see when I get there. I recently roadtripped out to Yellowstone National Park — it was something I had thought about for a long, long time.
On a whim, I once watched the Ken Burns documentary series on the national parks, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” and became hooked. I sped through the installments, then began reading whatever I could find about parks I hoped to one day visit, in Washington and Wisconsin, Michigan and Maine, Arizona and Alaska.
Even, too, right here in Illinois: The Black Hawk Statue (The Eternal Indian) overlooking the Rock River in Oregon, Starved Rock, Rock Cut, the Cahokia Mounds, the Nachusa Grasslands, Chain O’ Lakes, Matthiessen.
This is where I should mention that while Yellowstone was the preeminent destination on the trip, the excitement was in the interim. Where would we stop? What would we see? How long does it take to drive from western Wyoming to the South Dakota-Minnesota border?
I listened to sports talk radio in Nebraska, in Colorado, in Wyoming and Missouri. I discovered that everywhere else, everyone else, the center of the universe is relative. In Nebraska, Cornhuskers football reigns supreme — I knew this already, but to hear it talked about, in depth, as opposed to passing mentions in national outlets, drove home a sense of an almost inconceivable variety of experience.
I stopped in towns like Big Springs, Neb.; Casper, Wyo.; and Davenport, Iowa. I slept in Cody, Wyo., Sioux Falls, S.D.; Iowa City, Iowa; Kansas City and Saint Louis. Gas station chains changed in each state we visited. Casey’s General Store dotted the Midwestern landscape, but further out, in Wyoming, a green dinosaur could be found, that of Sinclair — even fuel, I suppose, takes branding.
These places made up the substance of the journey, as hackneyed as that may sound. The way people talked, the way people acted, the stores they held dear and the layouts of their cities, all meant very much to me.
And yet, as much diversity as I found on this trot through the heart of America, exploring these places, each its own center of the universe to someone, I realized that my own center had just as much to say, if not more.
The city of Chicago boasts nearly 3 million residents, but that’s not what’s most notable about it. While it’s the third-most populous city in America, on the global scale it is perhaps not so grand. To a Mexico City or a Tokyo, our numbers are not so impressive.
What has always impressed me, however, is the city’s kaleidoscopic makeup. Tell me to explain the city, and I’ll point to a stained glass window: jagged lines, straight lines, defined, clear and disparate, comprising a whole.
Chicago consists of 77 neighborhoods, each distinct. Whether it’s Rogers Park or Jefferson Park, Back of the Yards or Uptown, Lakeview or Bronzeville, each is a sphere unto itself.
Tell someone you’re from the North Side or the South Side and you might as well be as imprecise in your self-identification as saying you are a resident of the Western or Eastern hemisphere.
Tell someone you live near a certain Brown or Green or Red Line stop, or at this pair of cross streets — well, then you’re getting somewhere. Western, Roosevelt, Belmont, streets with numbers and streets with names … they all serve to orient, geographically, mentally and otherwise. They’re emotional, sentimental, informative coordinates
Sometimes, though, I get the feeling that it’s a city, a place, beyond comprehensive comprehension. It is simultaneously one and dozens, together and dissolving, steady and volatile, opulent and indebted, noble and corrupt, a photo and its negative. It is everything and its antithesis.
And that’s why I hope to see it all, to try to understand a little more about each one. I also hope to write a little about adventures outside of the city’s reach, throughout Illinois, the Midwest and the nation.
Above all, I hope to use this as a place to test things out, to write a little bit about whatever comes to mind, whatever I might see. Unfortunately, the burden of writing is the implication that whatever the writer shares is worth reading, that the compulsion to share is borne of a worthiness of that which is being relayed.
I don’t know if that will hold true here — if it is, great. If not, at least I will be writing.
I have yet to see Chicago’s 77, every site in the state I’d like to see, every national park or every city. Simple math suggests I likely never will.
But, like the road to Yellowstone, the result is secondary. This isn’t a checklist so much as a growing body of thoughts, at times seemingly unconnected, possibly even contradictory. Like Chicago, it might not make sense one sentence, and total sense the next.
We’ll see where this goes. As I sit here thinking out a general sketch of a plan, I envision writing about any number of things.
What those will be? I suppose I’ll find out as I go.
77 and beyond 