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Chicago Cemetery, with Coyote

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Part of a ritual we’ve taken up recently on visits with my dad in Chicago. We “go for a ride,” as he used to say when we were kids, across the North Side. We stop at the Dairy Queen on Irving Park Road just west of Central Avenue. Then we might drop by Mount Olive Cemetery, where much of his (very Lutheran, very Norwegian) family is interred.

Yesterday we went for a ride even though it was the beginning of the homeward rush hour, dodged most of the traffic, and swung by the DQ. I managed to dump part of my chocolate shake down my front before we proceeded. “You feel like going to the cemetery?” my dad asked when I’d cleaned myself up and started up the car to leave.

Through the gate off Narragansett Avenue, keeping left until you can’t go left anymore, then turning toward a section I’ve come to recognize. My grandparents are off to the right, just beyond a couple small conical piney shrubs. My dad’s grandparents and most of their children are off to the left. Other relatives are scattered around and about, and yesterday my dad stopped us near a gravesite we’ve passed recently without mention–an aunt, an uncle, a couple of cousins and their wives (the men died young; one of the women lived to be 103).

Up ahead, an animal moved across the road: a coyote, inside the cemetery and well inside the Chicago city limits. I’d heard they were here, but I’d never seen them. This one–a female, I think–settled into the grass just beyond the Brekke grave. We watched for about five minutes. When the mosquitoes started to swarm, we decided to walk over to the grave. The coyote got up and moved off among the headstones and monuments.

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Road Blog: Chicago Sidewalk Bikes

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I note a change in the local street culture while strolling in my sister’s Chicago neighborhood (West Rogers Park, which for auslanders means “far North Side”): lots more people riding bikes on the sidewalk around here. Impressions are undependable as data points, but I’d say that I might encounter an adult riding down the sidewalk maybe once a day on prior visits here (if that). On this visit, I’ve encountered multiple cyclists, sometimes flurries of them, every time I’ve been out walking. These don’t appear to be really serious, gung ho cyclists–we saw a group of them whipping down Western Avenue, in the street with full lights, etc., at dusk last night. No, these look like folks, like the guy above, who are out on short errands and have figured out that rolling is faster than walking and perhaps less complicated than driving. Sort of a good news (great to see more people on two wheels), bad news (bikes and sidewalks don’t mix well, and it’s illegal for anyone over 12 years old to ride on the sidewalk in Chicago) story. The illegal riding is complicated by the lack of etiquette and riding smarts on the park of most sidewalk cyclists: They rarely make a sound when they’re coming up behind you (Kate nearly got clipped by a teenager just on Sheridan Road just up from Loyola Park.

In any case, the issue is not a new one here. When my folks lived at Sheridan and Ardmore, there was an ongoing issue (and still ongoing) with cyclists emerging from the north end of the lake shore bike path and deciding to continue their journey on the sidewalk rather than on a parallel bike route a short block to the west. (Bike lanes of course pose their own set of challenges, including drivers who whip their doors open into the two-wheeled traffic zone.) The city has installed threatening signs and painted the message on the sidewalks there–by city ordinance, you’ll get fined and have your bike temporarily disabled (what do they do? take one of your wheels?). Last time I walked there, sidewalk cycling was still common.

The city government’s Chicago Bicycle Program has a decent instructional video on the issue: Bike on the Street, Not on the Sidewalk, which actually features some staged but still audacious examples of folks dealing with automobile traffic on the streets.

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Road Blog: August in Chicago

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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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Guest Observation: Minorities, Majorities

From Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address:

“If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must cease. There is no other alternative, for continuing the Government is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them, for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. …
“A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.”
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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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Guest Observation: The Salmon

Kate was tidying up around the house yesterday and found a folded sheet of paper under our bed amidst the great clumps of dog hair that had accumulated there (mute testimony to the incompleteness of my periodic vacuum-powered housecleaning). On the paper was the following poem about the salmon, and about other things too. Kate said the paper must have been mine, and it must have, given my sometimes-preoccupation with the fish in question. But I can’t remember how I came by this piece at all, and I don’t really remember having read the poem. David Whyte is a Scottish poet, I believe, whom I know for a book he wrote back in the ’90s called “The Heart Aroused.” It was a call for humanizing the workplace, for recognizing the role of creativity to excite individual passions, a recognition he argues leads to more satisfied employees and more successful employers.
Song for the Salmon
by David Whyte

For too many days now I have not written of the sea,
nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
we find between the islands

For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn

I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.

I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
opening its white hands on the seashore,
nor the salted wind, whole and healthy
filling the chest with living air.

I have not heard those waves
fallen out of heaven onto earth,
nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
of a thousand miles of ocean
giving up its strength on the sand.

But now I have spoken of that great sea,
the ocean of longing shifts through me,
the blessed inner star of navigation
moves in the dark sky above
and I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide.

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Mechanics Monument

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I stopped downtown on the way in to work yesterday. To give blood on Bush Street. When they’d gotten my pint, I walked down the street and got a cup of coffee (no longer recommended by the blood donation people since caffeine is a diuretic and they want to make sure you build up your fluids after you’re tapped). Right there where Bush meets Battery and Battery hits Market is this monument, the Mechanics Monument. It was created in honor of Peter Donahue, the cofounder of the city’s Union Iron Works, which I believe was the first heavy industry on the West Coast. Here’s a description of the monument from Gray Brechin in his fine and irascible history, “Imperial San Francisco“:

“Douglas Tilden‘s heroic group of five nude men straining to punch a steel plate commemorated both the family that had built the West’s first foundry and the mechanics who built the Donahue fortune. [Mayor] Phelan … reminded the crowd that from the Donahues’ primitive foundry, once located just a block away in Tar Flat, had grown the might Union Iron Words whose ships had earned San Francisco worldwide fame and wealth.”

President McKinley was in the city to unveil the monument in 1901, but begged off because his wife took ill.

(And: another view of the monument a few years after its dedication.)

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Oakland Estuary

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The Friday Night Ferry, July 22 edition. I walked over to the Ferry Building from work and on the boat met Kate, who was just back from several days in West Marin, learning about salmon and creeks and watersheds (I worked all week to suppress my envy). Then the ride back to Oakland, with the sky and water as changing and captivating and full of seductively beautiful light as ever and always. The dusk closed down on the week, the weekend flew by, and just a few hours ago, the dawn again of another ferry week.