Category: Travel

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Three Days in Chicago

Day Three

Starting with today, the reason I’m here this time: It’s my dad’s 85th birthday. We’re having a barbecue and Ann and Dan’s — my sister, my brother-in-law — at their place on the northwest side. Beautiful day for it. Sunny, in the low 70s, with a non-prevailing wind and a few clouds pushed this way from that hurricane in the East.

Pop: Happy birthday. Again!

Day Two

My bro-in-law Dan Wasmer and I got on our bikes and rode from the Wasmer-Brekke homestead down to my brother Chris’s place south of Interstate 80 in the south suburbs. By car it’s a 43-mile trip, so not the impossible dream in terms of getting out and riding it. But here’s the thing: The city itself presents itself as a kind of barrier; that’s especially true when you try to ride west out of the northwest side: O’Hare is a giant obstacle that needs to be navigated around; no problem in a car, a pretty good challenge when you’re on your own on two wheels. Riding south, the challenge is a little different: Finding a route that’s reasonably direct and that avoids the unseen terrors of non-Caucasian, non-Spandex-wearing neighborhoods; also, finding a route that keeps you off the busiest streets. Because, though you see tons of cyclists on the lakefront bike paths — too many; too many who are still getting the hang of riding; too many riding among too many pedestrians and runners and random path-crossers; too many to ride at an expeditious pace and feel safe — you don’t see a lot of people on the streets and roads.

We headed south from the northern end of California Avenue until it’s interrupted at Lawrence; we jogged west on Lawrence and then southeast on Manor back to California; then to Grand Avenue, then east to Damen; then Damen down to Blue Island Avenue, and west on Blue Island (which turns into 26th Street) back to California and the Cook County Jail complex; down California to 71st, then, after a brief sojourn on some side streets not all that far from my mom’s old neighborhood, back east to Western Avenue. Western is busy but not impossible at that point; we had one car full of guys yell something at us — whatever it was, I greeted it with a friendly wave — and we rode all the way out of the city before we turned west again, on 123rd. That took us to Kedzie before we hit a detour; Kedzie was fine, and we took that to 175th, then south on Central Avenue, across Interstate 80 just west of the I-57 junction, then a few more miles south (to Vollmer Road, then Harlem Avenue) to Chris’s place. Our mileage: 43 miles, the same as driving (and going at a reasonably friendly pace, we made it in three hours, even with all the traffic signals we hit).

So now I know how to do that.

Day One

Took the 6 a.m. United flight from Oakland to Chicago. Encountered major confusion and building frustration (other travelers’, not mine) at the United check-in counter. My experiment on this flight: I took my handheld GPS unit to see if it would work. I got a window seat (to work, the GPS needs to simultaneously “see” at least tglobal positioning system satellites). I managed to get a window that I couldn’t really look out of, though, it was far enough aft of my seat that the only way to get a view was to lean my seat way back; I prefer not to do that because I know how unpleasant it is have the seat in front of me pushed back in my face. But I did manage to figure out a way to prop up the GPS in the window. When I turned on the device 10 minutes after takeoff, it had no problem acquiring signals from half a dozen satellites, and it worked throughout the flight. The result: I have a track I can view to see the path we took, which admittedly may not be interesting to anyone but me. The problems I found: Since my window was in an awkward position, I couldn’t really move the GPS much to check the map display while we were en route; and I also found the 2-inch display pretty hard to read. The thing to do would be to figure out how to connect the unit to a laptop so you could get a nice big display of the route as you’re moving. Next time, maybe.

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The Place

Potterstreet

As mentioned a few days ago in this space, I went with Thom, who’s going to be a sophomore at the University of Oregon this year, up to Eugene in search of a house to rent for him and a couple of friends. One part of the job was easy. Unlike Berkeley, where there are comparatively few rental houses on the market, Eugene seems to be full of places to let.

We got to town Tuesday evening with a list of four places to check out before dark. None was just right — either a little far from campus or a little sketchy looking (in one of these places, the tenants had changed the locks and the landlord couldn’t get in for an apparently unannounced showing). Wednesday morning, we checked Craigslist and the local paper, the Register-Guard, which had about 80 houses listed for rent and about half a dozen that were big enough and close enough to campus to look at.

One of those was the house above, on Potter Street, about a mile south of campus. It’s on the plain side but looks like it has been well taken care of; it’s got wood floors, a big, largely junk-free backyard and a full basement with a washer and dryer. That’s what we could tell from the outside. We called the agent from the street in front, found out there were no applications in for the house yet and that we could see the inside the next day if we were still interested. To apply, we needed to get paperwork not only for Thom and his roommates but on a cosigner for each.

“Paperwork” meant giving Social Security numbers, driver’s license info, two pieces of ID (including one with a picture), and agreeing to a credit check for each applicant and cosigner. The challenge was that of the three roommates, only Thom was in Eugene at the moment. One was in suburban Portland and the other was on a family road trip to Utah and Colorado from his home in Wyoming. But having a deadline — we wanted to be back in Berkeley on Thursday night — helped. Using email, cellphones, faxes, and the walk-in printing setup at Kinko’s, we managed to put together complete applications for everyone by the time we met the agent back at the Potter Street house at 11 a.m. Thursday.

The house looked like it would be a good place for the three guys. We drove to the agent’s office and dropped off the applications, checked out a couple other houses just in case Choice A didn’t come through, then hit I-5 and drove home. Friday morning, we got a call from the agent: Thom and his buddies got the place. I didn’t expect it to feel like an accomplishment, but it does.

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Eugene, Late

Up Interstate 5 again today for our unofficial first visit of the 2006-07 University of Oregon school year. Gas is three bucks and up everywhere you go, and if there are fewer people on the road than during the late cheap gas days, or if the ones who are out there are really driving smaller cars than they were before, I still need convincing (I’m the one to talk, driving a ’98 Dodge Grand Caravan — Grand, mind you — that at its most economical got about 26 miles to the gallon. One hundred and forty thousand miles into its career, it does well to get 23 miles per gallon, though the way we tend to drive on I-5 and like roads — 75 or 80 if people will let us by — doesn’t help matters).

Anyway. Thom and I are up here for a couple nights. Our mission: Find an off-campus place for him and two of his buddies to stay for the coming year. So tomorrow and Thursday, we’ll be looking at places and saying to each other, “Can’t believe they think they can get $1,500 a month for that dump.” Hopefully, we won’t be the payers of that $1,500. Wish us luck, wherever you are.

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Pedestrian Matters

7th Avenue and W. 34th Street

Early last week, we were in New York. I spent most of one hot afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, on the Upper West Side, and afterward decided to walk down to Penn Station — nearly three miles on the wandering out-of-towner’s course I took — to meet Kate, who was coming in on a commuter train from New Jersey.

Always striking about New York: the number of people on the street, at all hours; and of course, the effect is magnified at the end of the work day as you go from the placid precincts of Central Park West toward Midtown. A commuter crowd mobbed the area around 7th Avenue and West 34th Street, a block up from the station, all going home to the suburbs.

Standing at that corner (above), I was conscious of something I’d been seeing all along my walk: The New York pedestrian’s habit of stepping off the curb when waiting for the lights to change, crowding right up to the traffic lane in some cases getting ready to hustle across against the light if there was an opening in traffic — unlikely on 7th Avenue, not so unusual on less-busy side streets. For a visitor, the New York walking style seems aggressive, disorderly and even dangerous. But it is fast: The only places I got stopped along the way were major intersections. The key is keeping your eyes open and remembering that the drivers you’re looking at are aggressive, too, and that the laws of physics are against you in a collision, even if you think you have the right of way.

It’s a fundamentally different way of street thinking from the prevalent attitude in the Bay Area. In California, state law gives pedestrians virtually universal right of way (with the obvious exceptions: against red lights, for instance). The law aims to make it safer for pedestrians to cross the street, but its effect actually goes well beyond that: It has created a sense of righteous entitlement among pedestrians, who by their behavior apparently believe that all considerations — courtesy, common sense, drivers’ reaction times, night-time visibility, the aforementioned laws of physics — have been suspended by statute.

Yeah, a less car-centric world would be a much better place in many ways. And we ought to make the streets safe for everyone who uses them. But planting the idea in people’s heads that they can step off the curb into the path of a speeding car — and that the car will stop, damn it — promotes naivete and selfishness more than safety.

Some suggestive stats: According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration numbers, in eight of the 10 years between 1995 and 2004, the most recent statistical year available, New York state had a lower pedestrian fatality rate than California. On the other hand, New York appears to have a much higher percentage of pedestrians killed at intersections — consistently on the order of 40 to 50 percent of the state total compared to California’s 25 percent or so. For the past several reported years, “improper crossing of roadway or intersection” is the top listed factor in pedestrian fatalities in New York; in California, that factor is in a dead heat for No. 1 with “failure to yield right of way” (which I take to mean pedestrians’ failure to yield).

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Melissa the Loud

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New York flashback: Her real name is Melissa Kacalanos, but she goes by Melissa the Loud (because of her voice, she says online). She was playing this instrument — the hurdy-gurdy — at Columbus Square on Tuesday night, when the temperature was about 95, and was just taking a break to tune it when I walked up and asked to take her picture. Her website: www.melissatheloud.com.

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Vacation Video Experiment

I had my camera out when our flight was taking off from New York for Oakland the other day. I’m not sure if a camera is on the list of electronic devices you’re supposed to keep shut off during takeoff and shortly after, and I don’t want to draw attention to myself by asking the flight attendants. So on Wednesday, I switched the camera to video mode and recorded the first couple of minutes as the plane rolled down the runway at JFK and climbed to 2,000 feet. The next part of the experiment was putting the takeoff video online. That turns out to be easy. I downloaded the file to a computer, then uploaded it to YouTube (it’s a 60-megabyte file, and it took a while to send over our DSL line). Check it out below.

Trying to look past the novelty of the thing — yes, I’m somewhat slackjawed that this kind of video publishing is so straightforward for someone with little technical ability — this sort of tool really does open up new possibilities for self-publishers (artists, journalists, etc.) of all kinds. [Postscript: I went back to YouTube to look for other takeoff videos. What an original idea: A search turns up 827 hits — many of which are commercial airline takeoffs shot at airports all over the world.]

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Flying Back

There will be plenty of East Coast trip postscripts to come, but for now: We’re sitting in a terminal at Kennedy airport; outside, it’s about 100, and even people who have been working inside all day are complainng about the heat. Outside, one big difference between city dwellers and suburban folk shows itself. The urban types are out on the streets, walking to the subway, shopping, whatever they have to do. It’s not like the sidewalks were packed in my brother’s neighborhood, but people were out and about, even if lots of us looked a little wilted. Out in the suburbs: No one on the street, anywere; people out there — and "out there" is probably any suburb you can think of — live strictly a doorway to doorway existence during the worst weather. Glad the power grid is holding up for everyone so far.

This morning, getting ready to leave John and Dawn’s place, we were talking about the latest bicycle fatality in the Oakland Hills. A guy out for a ride was hit head on up there on Skyline Boulevard, within a half mile or so of where I crashed in June, by a motorcyclist; the cyclist died of his injuries, the motorcyclist apparently walked away from the wreck. Not to place blame without knowing what really happened, but one of the risks bicyclists take riding up in the hills, a risk that’s increased a lot in the last 20 years, is that we share the road with motorcycle riders and motorists who treat the twisting roads like a raceway challenge. I’ve often worried about getting hit up there.

Anyway. At one point, John said, "Hey, did you hear about that Wired editor who died during the marathon?" I hadn’t. I looked up "wired editor marathon" onlne, and found a story on Wired News. The editor who died during the marathon was a guy named Bill Goggins. I knew him from my stint at the magazine in 1998 and from my days freelancing for the magazine. Bill was 43, and the news accounts say that he collapsed at mile 24 of the San Francisco Marathon last weekend and couldn’t be revived. A friend who saw him at mile 21 said he was smiling and running strong, and a mutual friend had seen him twice in recent days and said he seemed fine. The thing about Bill, whom I never got to know well enough, was that he was brilliant and funny and charming and had a big heart that was right there for anyone to see. Forty-three. Hard to believe. See you, Bill, wherever you are.

Continue reading “Flying Back”

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Forza Italia: Bath-Towel Edition

 

Italia

John and Dawn (my brother and sister-in-law) live in Carroll Gardens, an old Italian neighborhood southwest of downtown Brooklyn. Italy’s victory in the World Head-Butt Cup last month sparked outpourings of joy ("I’m so happy!" John recalls one guy telling him. "I’m from Italy!" To which John comments: "No, you’re not — you were born in the Bronx"). Team Italy’s success also prompted the appearance of even more than the usual generous display of Italian flags in the neighborhood. The pizzeria across the street has one on the sidewalk. My favorite is one around the corner — green, white, and red bath towels hanging from a fire-escape railing.

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Heat, a Re-examination

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The last day of July, the first of August, it’s supposed to be hot. Today, it’s an unremarkable 90 or so here in Brooklyn. I’m sitting in my brother and sister-in-law’s unairconditioned kitchen about a mile south and east of the Brooklyn Bridge. Not suffering. But tomorrow we’ll be getting what folks to the west have been dealing with for the last couple of days (112 in Bismarck?!). The National Weather Service is warning it will get up to about 100 Tuesday and Wednesday, that it will be plenty humid, and that we’ll have high ozone levels as the air in the region stagnates. (Add rum and guns, then stir for a swell party!)

The last few days, Kate and I have been staying in a friend’s house  near the northern New Jersey shore. It’s got central air conditioning, and the system has been running ever since we arrived there last Thursday. It struck me this morning as I walked outside for the first time and shut the sliding glass door behind me that around here, the ability to cool the air in homes and cars and public places of all kinds is just as vital as the ability to heat it in the winter. In the suburbs, anyway, you don’t see homes open to the elements on a hot day any more than you’d see a place with its windows flung open when it’s zero outside. Yet, the weather’s the weather. It may be incrementally hotter on average than it was a generation or two or three ago, but everyone here endured long, stifling stretches of heat then without refrigerating every living space, just as most of the world’s people do today. (We went to France in August 2003 at the tail end of the country’s extended heat wave; I knew air conditioning was uncommon there, but I hoped against hope that somehow our little hotel would be an exception; instead, when we got to our room, we found that the windows hadn’t been opened for days and the place was like an oven — and what was worse was that for several days afterward, there wasn’t enough of a breeze to cool anything off.)

I’m not arguing for some kind of sweaty, hair-shirt virtue in living without air conditioning. Just makes me wonder sometimes what would happen if we all suddenly had to do without (which ties into my fear for the next couple of days; I’m concerned that the power demand here will cause a blackout and shut down the air-traffic-control system and keep us from flying back Wednesday to our effete little climate back in Berkeley). I do remember that before we had our first air conditioners, in 1966, the remedy for hot nights was staying up late watching movies with our mom and taking cool showers before we headed off to bed. Somehow, we slept.

(Picture: Hamilton Avenue and West 9th Street, Brooklyn. It wasn’t really 99 degrees.)

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Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

After a day spent near the Delaware River, then with Kate’s cousin’s family north of Philadelphia, we decided to take an impromptu sidetrip to Gettysburg (how impromptu? We didn’t bring a change of clothes). So tonight, we’re camped out in a motel just outside Harrisburg and about 30 miles (an exhausting day’s march or a half-hour air-conditioned drive) from Gettysburg. I haven’t been here since 1971; Kate’s visiting the battlefield for the first time. Oh, and our rental car has South Carolina license plates.

More tomorrow.