This page is a trick. It's not about Chicago at all; if you want to know about Chicago, read Carl Sandburg's poem.

These writings are about transit; Chicago as switching-point, as nexus, as transportation hub of America.

image: sunrise above chicago, from the plane, june 2005

i saw the sun rise from between these layers of clouds ... like below us there was this rippling ocean of white ... above these seaweed strands of cirrus clouds and that brillant atmospheric blue ... in between, a few moody clouds lingering lonely not quite sinking nor floating but chilling all coral and gold, and there, the sun, timid yet taking its surefire time ...

field notes: layover in chicago, november 2005

it is a windy-flurry morning in Chicago, the stinging cold / little-girl staring up at tall towers in wonder, that Christmas*Holiday*Feeling in the air -- bought a latte at starbucks, ok, with this unexpected burst of holiday-nostalgia for corporate america (well, corporate canada really) -- don't laugh. this comes from a sincere desire to live as many lives as possible. i want to sleep on dusty floors and walk through ruins but i also want to be the woman with the clickety-click heels on the tower floor, part of that whirling-world / for about 5 days a year, anyway, because i know how that woman feels when she gets home, throws her purse on the floor, after not-seeing-the-winter-sun all day, collapsing on her bed--

field notes: conversations with people passing through chicago to new orleans, on the City of New Orleans train, post-katrina

Somebody offers me a clear bottle from across the aisle of the train. The 11am peppermint schnapps is "for medicinal purposes", Redbeard tells me. What's your sickness? Alcoholism, he guesses. He is tall, thin, thirties maybe... He makes cell phone calls, some crazy scheme about driving a truck from Elkhart Indiana to Salina Kansas and then a truck to Phoenix, states appear and are mused over in the morning minutes... The lives we concoct for ourselves. Sounds like my life, I think. He talks to somebody else on the phone-- "I'm looking for France to fall and Revelations to begin" "because we just can't get along" "the blacks and whites in this country can't even get along" "God gave man dominance over this planet" -- What do you think about the End Times, I ask? We might be there, yeah, God's going to judge us, but he's not going to judge us on how much we put in the collection plate so the preacher can buy a new car. He's going to judge us on, like, if we put milk out for a stray cat or something... The closest Redbeard ever felt to God was the hours he spent floating down a river with his brother. Nothing but the wilderness. Duck hunting. God was everywhere. He quit premed school to become a carpenter, which he loves; he built himself a house on ten acres in Michigan and goes home now and then to go hunting... let the dogs run. Coon hunting. Redbeard asks me how much cola goes for in New Orleans. I say, I haven't been there in five years. OK.

Dawn is a woman who is going to New Orleans to start a new life. Redbeard tells her to get off the train in Memphis, but no, she's going all the way... She hopes she meets decent normal people, not the scum she always finds herself with. Good luck, I tell her. Brian is also going to New Orleans "for an adventure". He doesn't want to do construction work, but he will; he's from a tiny town in Minnesota near the Canadian border and is used to working in tents, hard work... He was going to college for journalism, back in 1983. But then he got a job laying a pipeline through Canada-- 21 dollars an hour, plus time and a half-- and it was too much money to pass up... and then he ended up getting a girl pregnant. Now, twenty years later, his daughter is in college. His daughter thinks he's crazy for taking off and going to New Orleans, but he's doing it anyway.

field notes: the ways in which the waiting room in Chicago's Union Station is Purgatory, january 2006

"I think they were upset because they thought 'damn' was a cuss word," the conductor was explaining gently to stringy-orange-hair-woman.
"Last time I checked 'damn' was in the book," she retorted. (The book?) "The Bible, they say damn in the Bible."

(america, america i love you but i'm not in perfect grace; i have to be in the mood to love you)

Conductor tells the woman that next time, she should keep her voice down. Then he leaves and she gets back on her cell phone, YOU KNOW MY BATTERY'S ALMOST DEAD she shouts to the person on the receiving end (except, the tricksy thing about these magical communication devices is that somehow, we're all on the receiving end, and I pray, please, battery, almost die) (all the way from Denver to Chicago)

This woman is very proud of the last time she was in Chicago. The cops were flirting with her and took her all around town. One of them had recognized her from a photo shoot she did on the Internet. You might not believe it now, after seeing the way she looks when she's been on the train for three days, but she does some modeling. Although-- you know that country song, "I'd rather die in my old blue jeans"? That's her, she says, she's a blue-jean kinda girl.

*

I had a piece of paper folded in my bag. It was titled "Notes on Transformation." They weren't my notes; they were the notes that poet Bhanu Kapil had taken on her own class (Migrant Metaphors). The paper said:

"Then there are the people, writing, who reverse the hope of the home. They burn it and walk down the beach with a teacup without a backward glance."

*

Once upon a time I would like to gather all the people I love in a village and live happily-ever-after. I know & love so many people from all the roads, you know, but everyone has their lives, whatever makes a life, paychecks and dependable kisses, I don't know. Favorite cafes where you can buy a croissant to count on. Or a wheat bagel. Whatever. I will miss the croissants at Cafe Roma but it was no place to stay.

Let's talk about Leonardo da Vinci.

Da Vinci was arrested by the dreaded Office of the Night (aren't you glad we don't have an Office of the Night yet?) on homosexuality charges.

"How many people there are who could be described as mere channels for food, producing nothing but full privies," DaVinci wrote.

If DaVinci was an elitist, can I be one too? O Leonardo, creative dreamer, bohemian artist, left-leaning antiwar vegetarian... If DaVinci rode the California Zephyr in a parallel life-- if DaVinci slept and sweated in the same train car as all these people-- he could see how the waiting room in Union Station becomes purgatory. People don't change over the centuries, do they? They will always be small smelly & suffering & I will always grudge them for this & never become enlightened. Or maybe grace will happen. Who can tell. I always get this way on trains, whenever I am pressed in together with humanity. There will be six crude men and one little darkeyed dimpled girl who makes me smile and it is a fair proportion, enough to get by anyways.

back to the heartland / back to the map