Old Geography

In the summers between college years, I used to bike to a grocery on South Shore Drive in Holland Michigan. This was about two miles. It seemed like a long way because I was extremely sedentary (fat) then. It gave me time to write a (very bad) poem in my head about people from college. I don't remember the poem, but I remember the people involved.

If I were going to make the ride in Holland again, I would probably take a side-trip down 32nd Street, to see the repairs on the road. A nigh-biblical (ok: maybe only nigh-minor-prophet) flood completely washed out 32nd Street and mostly washed out 147th.

Then, in the summer after I got married, I was living in the South Shore neighborhood in Chicago. (That the neighborhood shares a name with the street in Holland is pure coincidence. It's not even the same lake that each is on the south shore of.) From the apartment in Chicago, I rode my bicycle to a chain guitar store in Burbank, Illinois. I had no particular need, I wanted to go somewhere cool. That ride was about eleven miles.

In Chicago, when I was going to the guitar store, I got a little lost because of another disaster straight out of the bible. (Measured demographically, disasters in Chicago are probably at least an order of magnitude bigger than anything that ever happened to Jerusalem.) I'm referring to the freeway that runs through the neighborhood. It may be a freeway to the cars on it, but to bicycles and houses, the skyway is a giant wall, like something put down by the Assyrians or the Romans to symbolically punish the natives for their feeble resistance.

Racially– and Chicago is an amazingly race-conscious place– I would be a Roman in this situation, getting lost under the seige defences built by my own government. I didn't realize this at the time, I just thought I was on my way to a music store.