Riding buses

I ride a lot of public transportation in a given week. Whether it be the 172 bus in Hyde Park to get from my apartment to work or the 15 to go over through washington park to the green line, it's always an experience. I think what always has fascinated me most is the sheer expansiveness and rather amazing distances you can cover. The other day I was eating a pizza for lunch at 95th and Jeffrey down in Burnside on the far Southeast Side of Chicago (I would also like to note that the south side is not some horrifically scary place where a uchicago student exists in constant fear of being shot. It is however a community of people who are just going about their day and are not particularly concerned with the skittish behavior of someone who obviously is not willing to fit in.). I then ended up eating dinner (actually I ate a bunch of free granola bars I got at a frisbee game) in Wicker Park while wandering through and reading in Myopic Books. That night I ended up even farther along the blue line as my day ended while I was sitting outside Terminal 1 of O'hare freaking out about whether or not I would be able to find my friend because my phone battery had just died. The real moral of the story is that I traveled from my apartment (which actually happens to be in Kenwood) to the farthest southeast corner of Chicago and then all the way to that strange most northerly and westerly vaguely attached portion of Chicago better known as Ohare all in one day but more importantly all without ever touching a car, driving or at all being in charge of the motion of my transit.

For someone who grew up in a suburban/rural Virginia the concept of not driving to places I want to go to is strange and hard to comprehend. Throughout my childhood town and civilization was separated from me by the necessity of driving. I lived down a highway and the though of me walking to town still terrifies my grandmother. Even when I had my own car there was a certain agency given to myself in traveling that is so exceptionally different from the CTA.

You don't really make friends while your driving in cars. You just sit separately in traffic listening to NPR alone waiting to get wherever you're going. However, on the bus I make a lot of friends. On the bus I've had many an excellent conversation about basketball, the boy scouts, or the fact that some people don't seem to "fuck with Garfield" and are pretty entertained that I am intending on getting off their. Public transit has been and I think will continue to be a very unique social and local way of experiencing travel.

Section Hiking Chicago

I miss hiking. At home I could go any weekend I chose and disappear onto the Appalachian trail or one of the endless side trails in Shenandoah National Park with names like Little Devil's Staircase, Matthews Arm, and Old Rag. I for some reason find great enjoyment in just being outside and walking for many hours at a time. Sometimes I did it for the beautiful views that the Blue Ridge Mountains had to offer but most of the time I did just to hike, just to be out in nature walking around and talking with friends.
I thought that the midwest had robbed me of this joy. The midwest for all intensive purposes might be the most boring terrain I've encountered ever. It is flat. It is filled not with trees but with an infinite amount of corn and soybeans. It is 16 hours of driving west of 12 hours of driving east to get to anything that might conceivably be deemed a mountain. 4 or 5 hours away in Wisconsin there may be something that resembles outdoor activity. But here in Chicago I had all but given up on interacting with nature. I at one point thought my love of the outdoors would make me an active member of the Outdoor Adventure Club at the University but in the end I came to find that there were none of my traditional outdoor adventures to be had.
My love of walking however has persisted. I had originally gotten the idea to walk from Hyde Park to Pilsen after thanksgiving dinner when my friend Charley and I were just sitting in my room feeling gluttonous. I thought that if I walking to Pilsen would be the only way to actually deal with the excessive amount of turkey, potatoes, and tofu stir fry (oh uchicago) that I had eaten. But on that occasion the food come got the best of us. So this past weekend I convinced my friend Sean to begin this grand trek with me. I envisioned Pilsen as our destination but he being more pragmatic suggested we go through Chinatown and stop there and see how we felt. So we began our long trek up through Bronzeville and towards Chinatown upon which it began to pour rain. Undeterred by the weather we carried on until we were completely soaked and took refuge in a grocery store to ride out the storm. We continued on and eventually made it to Lao Sze Chuan for dinner. At this point we knew it would be dark by the time we walked to any other public transportation option so we boarded the redline homewards.

However, I was still determined to make it to Pilsen on foot. Sean However suggested we walk to there from Chinatown since we had already made the trek to Chinatown once. Then it all started to connect for me. It was like Chicago was the Appalachian Trail, too long to do in a single day, so unless you camped along the way you'd have to do it in sections. Conveniently Chicago, unlike the Appalachian trail, has a complex system of public transit that makes ferrying oneself to a starting point and homewards from endpoints rather easy. Upon this realization we've now planned to complete a grand loop of Chicago (I'm modeling myself after this map I saw of a guy who did a few hundred mile long loop around Alaska, though I admit my journey will be a bit easier and more food filled). Next we'll go from Chinatown to UIC via Pilsen. Eventually we'll make it all the way up to the northwest side and then across over to Devon followed by a a southern return to hyde park closer to the Lake.
Since I can't finish the rest of the Appalachian trail in Virginia this summer then I might as well complete my Chicago trail.

back out west

As I ran through the economy parking lot of the Salt Lake City Airport in black leather shoes, shirt and tie two of the many worlds I live in crashed together. I dashed from the airport bus that had ferried me to the parking lot into a large white Semi pulling a six-horse trailer that had the words 'Pimpin Ain't Easy' monogrammed onto the back in cursive blue letters. My cousin Rob threw open the door and I jumped in to drive with them 3 hours to Burley Idaho where they were roping in the slack the next morning. When we arrived the gates, which had been locked at some point earlier in the evening, had already been ripped off their hinges by a fellow cowboy named Max. This is the kind of pragmatic unquestioned decision that comes from years out on the ranch where no one really has time to debate small issues, in this case vague legalities, because at three in the morning with a rodeo awaiting bright and early they didn't have time to care about anything other than what kind of tools might be in the back of the pickup that would get them into the Rodeo grounds.

When I sat in the stands a mere 5 hours later eating a taco for breakfast I was once again comfortable in my strange little niche of videotaping my cousins for them as they roped that I had carved out in cowboy life over the years. I sat there alone trying not to open my mouth to much and be betrayed as an "eastern city boy" as I had often been called. Now after moving to Chicago and being more characterized as a southerner than an easterner by any means I find this whole situation hilarious.

Three rodeos later I finally found myself sitting in my aunt's house looking at the family photo albums from my great grandparents and their mountaineering trips to Europe during the 1920s and 30s. Sitting there facing a window that looks down the valley from that isolated cabin outside of Kamas, Utah I searched for myself in the faces of my great grandparents hoping to find some advice on what to do with my existence from these people I never knew. The history of these people whose pictures I was now carefully scanning through in a few disintegrating photo albums had always fascinated me. My mother had made them out to be mythic creatures from a Boston that time and the great depression had erased. They lived in a time where real exploration was still up for grabs; their trips to the bighorn mountains wandered through legitimately uncharted territory; they were on the first ascent of various European peaks to ever be led by a woman; even as they did this they remained important members of the Boston intellectual community. Looking at their photos, at their lives, I wanted to live a life that they would be proud of.

Soon enough I was once again leaving Salt Lake City (not without an obligatory trip to Ogie's diner where old friends of my aunt were such good customers that the owner of the diner came up to shake my hand). From Salt Lake I drove and I drove and lost a set of bicycle tires somewhere between Rawlins and Cheyenne Wyoming and I drove until I got to Iowa across the endless expanse of Nebraska, and when I got to Iowa I just drank some espresso and kept driving until the sun had risen to meet my eyes somewhere past Des Moines. I woke up in the truck as it barreled past the endless cornfields of western Illinois just in time to drive myself through sunday morning in Chicago.

I had lost the west long before I entered Cook County. I had given it up as I drove east through that thunderstorm on the plains of Nebraska. Leaving the west behind is always heart breaking for me because the sky gets really small and the mountains and fresh air are left behind you and only get farther and farther away as the interstate passes beneath the wheels of that Toyota pickup truck.