Category: Travel

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Road Blog: August in Chicago

Online in Evanston, August 2011.

Kate and I did what I termed “an epic walk” when we started out–from near Touhy and Western on Chicago’s far North Side to downtown Evanston, then back by way of the lakefront. When we got back and I checked our route on Gmaps Pedometer, we had strolled for 7.9 miles. Flat miles, yes. The degree of difficulty was furnished by a temperature in the low 90s and humidity high enough that my Bay Area-influenced constitution felt like we were in a steambath.

There were people on the beach, but I didn’t happen across a single scene, or wasn’t alert to one, that said “hot day in Chicago” to me. But I did capture the above: a quintet at Peet’s in Evanston, concentrating on their screens in air-conditioned comfort. (I’m thinking “air-conditioned comfort” would substitute for “happiness” were the Declaration of Independence to be redrafted today.) This was the smart place to be, not shuffling along Chicago’s August streets.

And outside right now: A cold front is moving down from the northwest that’s already brought squalls and severe thunderstorms to the lake cities north of here. After that, it’s supposed to cool down for the rest of the week.

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Salt Lake City Approach

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On approach to the airport in Salt Lake City: A storm was moving over the area, and we had flown a long northerly leg over the eastern edge of Great Salt Lake to what appeared to be the edge of the storm before looping back down south–the direction we’re headed here–to the airfield. If you take a look at the FlightAware track of the flight, it looks like we had flown a loop well west of the airport, too. It rained buckets afer we landed

Here’s the trip slideshow

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Air-Road Blog: Chicago

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We flew to Chicago yesterday. It was clear and warm as we left Oakland. We landed in Salt Lake City just as a big monsoon-driven cell passed over the area. And in Chicago, we emerged into a steam bath. It was about nearly 1 in the morning and about 80 degrees. My first impression was 80 sopping-wet degrees, but I think you get used to it. I say “I think” because like millions of others in Chicagoland, I’m living Monday morning in air-conditioned comfort as the temperature outside climbs toward the 90s (and there’s a complicating factor today: the National Weather Service has issued an air-quality alert for high pollution levels today).

In other weather talk: A neighbor mentioned she’d heard that Chicago had had more than 6 inches of rain in a day recently, but thought that might have been a typo. Well, no, it wasn’t. As the Chicago Weather Center site reports in detail, July 2011 was one of the driest Chicago Julys on record–until 10 days ago. Then storms began rolling in, including one that dropped 6.86 inches on July 23 (the most on one date in the city going back to 1870), and the month turned into the city’s rainiest July on record). Here’s the rundown from WGN’s Tom Skilling and company:

From one of driest to all-time wettest July in just six days

Wettest July also third-warmest

Chicago’s 24-hour rainfall record …

(And the picture? That’s Lunt Avenue, in front of my sister’s place in West Rogers Park. God’s Battle Axe? Well, it gets your attention. The church describes itself as “a fast growing charismatic prayer ministry … destroying the works of darkness thereby impacting the world.” The ministry’s leader “is referred to by some of his close friends as ‘a Praying Machine: The Anointed Apostle of Prayers.’ “)

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Eastshore in Blue

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Yesterday: Just after 11 a.m., on the Eastshore Freeway (a.k.a., Interstates 80 and 580), at the Powell Street entrance. A beautiful day with no accidents in the vicinity. Just a lot of cars. The reason for all the cars well after the height of the commute hour: a day game between the Giants and the Dodgers, just across the Bay Bridge). When I drive in to work, I usually drive late and am spoiled; with an electronic toll pass, I don’t even slow down much for the toll plaza anymore, and I make it to the office reliably in about 30 minutes, door to door. Yesterday it was a little more than an hour, a lot of it spent just like this–in traffic that was going nowhere fast.

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Coast Solstice

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I spent the day out reporting in Sonoma County–salmon stuff, which I’ll write more about tomorrow. The drive back down the freeway, U.S. 101, was brutal, so I took a detour out to the coast and stopped at Goat Rock, just south of where the Russian River empties into the Pacific. The last time I stopped there was 1985, though I’ve passed it many times since. I parked, walked around the beach recording sound. Then on the drive back to Highway 1 pulled over and hiked up a trail to a summit overlooking the coast (the name, it turns out, is Peaked Hill; height given variously at 367 or 377 feet above sea level). Above (looking south, toward Bodega Bay) and below (looking northwest across Arched Rock, left, and Goat Rock) are the views from the top. It was very warm inland today and absolutely perfect on the coast. By the time I was back in the Berkeley, just before 9 o’clock, the sun had just set and a seabreeze was breaking our hot spell.

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Restrooms & Cemeteries

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First morning of our recent road trip: We stopped in Roslyn, Washington, on the east side of Snoqualmie Pass and a few miles off Interstate 90. Reason: The town was re-created as “Cicely, Alaska” for the series “Northern Exposure” back in the early and mid-’90s. The main street in town, Pennsylvania Avenue, is much the same as it’s depicted on the show. Just in back of me when I shot this was The Brick, the tavern/restaurant featured on the show. The building across the way–the exposure here hides the details–was the location of the radio station on which the character Chris held forth. The sign pictured here? Never saw it in the show, and I can’t account for the pairing of restrooms and cemeteries.

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From the Road: More Undead History

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A few more pictures from the hundreds I almost compulsively shot over the past week. After I go back to work this afternoon, the pictures will turn into a long-term photo editing project that I'll never quite get to. The shot above is from the Haymarket martyrs' memorial in Forest Home Cemetery (originally Waldheim, and when you see all the Germans buried there, you know why) in Forest Park, on Chicago's western boundary.

If you grow up around Chicago, at some point you encounter Haymarket in a history lesson. It seems long ago and far away, and of course in one sense it is: The events surrounding Haymarket began unfolding in 1886. But as I observed last week at the Little Bighorn battlefield, our history is too new to be settled, or at least much of it is, and forces are still contending to define or even own some chapters. Haymarket is one of those episodes that's still the object of curiosity for many and for a few at least a living symbol of the struggle for workers' rights.

We headed out there on an outing with my dad on Sunday. We had visited about four and a half years ago, and I still remembered how to get to the cemetery and find the memorial without asking. Our rounds went like this: first the Dairy Queen on Irving Park Road, near Central Avenue; then Mount Olive Cemetery, where my dad's parents and many other family members are buried; then the house my dad grew up in, on Nashville Avenue, and the neighborhood school he attended, Joseph Lovett Elementary. At that point, he said he wanted to go out to Harlem Avenue. OK — I could do that. With no destination in mind, I suggested stopping by Forest Home.

haymarket060511f.jpg I'm still surprised to find that the monument, and the nearby grave of Emma Goldman, still draw visitors who leave flowers and other tributes (I found the same at Mother Jones's grave in Mount Olive, Illinois; and just last week, when we visited the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, I saw that folks are leaving flowers and other small remembrances for Wild Bill Hickok and Martha Jane Burke (Calamity Jane) and Seth Bullock–all notable characters on a recent HBO series. People do feel attached to these figures from the past–though for now it's best not to digress into the quality of the attachment).

Of course, not all the latter-day feeling that modern visitors develop for the Haymarket memorial is necessarily very smart. On the back of the memorial, some clever lads–why do I think the perpetrators were male?–have gone to work with markers of some kind and added the legends in the photo above ("We are the birds of the coming storm" is a quote from August Spies, an anarchist who was among those hanged after the 1886 Haymarket bombing).

Why the impulse to do something so lame? Of course, that's been the question ever since teen-agers started chiseling smart-ass hieroglyphics into Egyptian tombs way back in the day. I suppose you could make the argument that it's better to be actively engaged with the history the monument represents–you know, jumping in and joining in the dialectic–than treating the space as sacred, sterile, and dead. Had the guys with the markers showed up while I was there, I think we'd haveour own lively dialectical exploration. (Click images for larger versions.)

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Road Blog: Berkeley

And on the seventh day, I flew home from Chicago. I began and ended the journey at the North Berkeley BART station, and at the extreme ends of the train schedule (last Tuesday, I caught a 4:30 a.m. train to take an early shuttle to the Oakland airport; tonight I arrived back on the very last train of the night and got home about 1 a.m.). Here are some basics:

Tuesday, May 31: Flew from Oakland to Seattle-Tacoma airport; drove with Sakura and Eamon from the airport to Butte, Montana. (Notable stops: Roslyn, Washington; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Superior, Montana).

Wednesday, June 1: Drove from Butte to Spearfish, South Dakota. (Notable stop: Little Bighorn Battlefield).

Thursday, June 2: Drove from Spearfish, South Dakota., to Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Notable stops: Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, Crazy Horse monument, Mount Rushmore, Yankton, South Dakota (cool bridge there).

Friday, June 3: We split as previously planned. I flew to Chicago from Omaha. Eamon and Sakura drove to Independence, Missouri, by way of Lamoni, Iowa (and if you’re sharp you can tell me the connection between those two towns).

Saturday, June 4: I enjoyed my leisure in Chicago. Eamon and Sakura drove into town from Independence.

Sunday, June 5: Chicago for everyone.

Monday, June 6: Eamon and Sakura drove from Chicago to Youngstown, Ohio. They expect to be in New York today (Tuesday, the 7th). I flew from Chicago to San Francisco.

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Road Blog: Deer vs. Cars–the Numbers

When you tell people you hit a deer while driving, you find out everyone has their own story. One of my brothers hit a deer he never saw while driving a truck in western New York State (he was checking a mirror when the animal ventured onto the roadway; his passenger explained what the loud bang had been). My other brother was driving behind a pickup that hit a large buck; the animal smashed into the truck’s windshield and the antlers penetrated the glass. My sister’s best friend hit a deer. A coworker of my daughter-in-law hit one on a Bay Area freeway, and the deer came clear through the windshield.

A 1995 study for The Wildlife Society crunched some numbers from earlier studies and came up with an annual estimate of as many as 1.5 million deer-vehicle collisions nationwide. Since then, researchers have even come up with a shorthand term for this phenomenon: DVC. The study was titled “Review of human injuries, illnesses, and economic losses caused by wildlife in the United States,” and the deer-vehicle issue was just part of the overall picture. The study considered everything from Lyme disease to bird-aircraft strikes to wildlife damage to farming and ranching and tried to tote up the cost.

For deer-vehicle collisions, the estimated cost was huge: About 200 deaths, 29.000 injuries, and more than $1 billion in vehicle damage. The study also notes: “Being hit by a vehicle is fatal to deer about 92 percent of the time. These deaths can represent economic loss that we could not estimate.” (A current estimate of overall wildlife-vehicle collisions–crashes involving “large mammals”–puts the annual number at 1 million to 2 million and direct economic losses at $6 billion to $12 billion a year.)

That 1995 report and similar studies prompted researchers at several universities to try to undertake a more systematic way of assessing the million or more crashes happening on the highways every year. One result is the Deer-Vehicle Collision Information and Research Center (you can find it at deercrash.org), which has put some harder numbers to some aspects of the issue. For instance, the DVCIR Center breaks down the number of (human) fatalities in animal-vehicle collisions from 1994 through 2007. The highest death toll was in 2007, with 223 people killed nationwide (second place was 2006, with 222 deaths). The total killed nationwide in that 14-year period: 2,398. Texas led the country in motorist fatalities in animal-vehicle collisions in 12 of those 14 years.

The collision research has also led to testing of a Roadkill Observation Collection System (ROCS), a networked handheld device with GPS that would allow road crews and others to document locations and circumstances of carcasses found on roads and ditches and upload their reports to a centralized database.

And that brings me back to the ditch along that twilight section of Nebraska Route 12 we were traveling last night when we struck a deer. Nebraska recorded 41,028 deer-vehcile collisions from 1998 through 2008 (Dixon County, where we were last night, recorded 215 of those incidents). The Deer-Vehicle Collision Information and Research Center puts the number of Nebraska fatalities at 20 from 1998 through 2007 (and 29 from ’94-’07).

Last: Here’s an unsentimental (and unendorsed) view of all this from Reason magazine, that bastion of libertarianism: North America’s Most Dangerous Mammal.

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Road Blog: Spearfish to Council Bluffs

Every road trip seems to entail one day that gets out of hand, a day you spend a lot more time on the road than you think is wise. Today–yesterday now–was such a day. We bit off a lot, saw a lot, encountered wonderful sights, had a few friendly chats with folks along the way, and wound up with a long grind of a drive east to put us where we wanted to be tonight.

To start at the end: We got where we were going, and I’m sitting in a comfortable motel room in Council Bluffs, Iowa, better than 600 miles from where we started the day. But something happened along the way.

Jump back about 120 miles from here, to Nebraska Route 12, just west of the little town of Ponca. It was dusk. I had been pushing consistently above the 60 mph speed limit in Eamon and Sakura’s new car, a Prius. Part of my brain was doing destination math, whittling down the distance to where I’m sitting now. Part of my brain was watching the road and monitoring everything on the displays in front of me.

The highway took a righthand bend, and my habit is to look through the turn, and I’ve got to think that’s what I was doing, looking right, when the deer appeared on the left side of the road. Sakura saw it first; she said she had seen a dead deer earlier and was watching out for any that might stray onto the road. She exclaimed something, and so did Eamon, sitting in the passenger seat. I saw a brown shape crossing in front of us. “Too late” is as close as I can translate the impulse that went through my head.

Then the impact: It seemed we made impact with the deer with the right front side of the car. It slammed into the front right side of the car, too, near the sideview mirror, as it was thrown up and to the right. The thought occurred that it hadn’t flown into the windshield. That was good. Then it was gone.

I slowed and pulled onto the shoulder about 150 yards down the road. In the car, we were all shocked but otherwise OK. Eamon and I walked back to see if we could find the deer. A man in a pickup truck stopped and rolled down his window. “We hit a deer,” I said. “You all OK?” he asked. I thanked him for stopping, then he rolled on.

Eamon and I walked back, looking for the deer in the ditch. There was just enough light to see it–her, I’m reasonably certain. She had come to rest on her left side, her head to the east. She wasn’t stirring–I’m reasonably certain, too, she was killed instantly. Marvelously intact and irretrievably broken, her left eye open and bottomless. Eamon looked down at her and said, “I’m sorry.” He was stricken and started walking back to the car.

I bent down over her in the dusk. Words came out. “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I took your life so brutally. I’m sorry to have taken your life for no purpose. I’m sorry I sent you back to the earth here in this ditch. If there’s a spirit, I hope it has flown and is free.”

Then I walked back to the car. It has some damage to the front end. I hope it’s all cosmetic, as expensive as that’s going to be. I know Eamon was feeling pretty bad about having his new ride banged up on its first voyage. I’m sorry about that, too–really sorry. And of course for the deer and for us I wish I could make the moment different from what it was. And it occurs to me that the moment could easily have been very different, and much worse: If I had swerved and rolled the car, say, or put the car into an uncontrolled skid.

I’ll always remember that righthand curve outside Ponca.