The Great Fresh Lake

I didn’t really understand what a Great Lake was until I moved to Chicago. I’d seen Lake Michigan before, when visiting relatives in Detroit. I registered that it was large enough that you can’t see across, but I never thought about the actual size of the lake.

When I was still new in town, a friend back in New York asked if I jogged around the lake. I did jog, and I often did it near the lake. But around the lake? Only then did I stop to consider how many miles that would be. I knew it was more than ten miles to Evanston, the next town north of Chicago. I certainly can’t jog that far. Milwaukee is an hour north of that. In the other direction, a series of beach towns line Michigan’s shore—once you pass the Indiana dunes. A few months later a neighbor told us about driving around the lake on a family vacation. The 1,100 mile drive takes at least four days, and covers four states.

One thing that surprised me about the lake when I first spent time around it is the sand. The beaches in Indiana and Michigan have high dunes, similar to the Atlantic coast beaches I knew growing up. How does sand get to the middle of the country? Was it always here, or was it carried from one of the oceans, drifting from great lake to great lake?

The first few times I went swimming in the lake I expected salt. The water hits the shore like water in a bay. Small waves become big waves when storms blow through. It looks like the ocean. I yanked my dog back from the water when I caught him drinking my first winter in Chicago—the only time of year dogs can be on the beach.

I find the lack of salt fitting. Chicago is cleaner, easier to navigate because of a grid system, and feels more orderly. I wouldn’t call Chicago bland, but New York is saltier in many senses: people are harder and more hurried, the streets are dirtier, and the subway map looks like a tangled mess.

Salt or no salt, the lake gives Chicago a sheen and a character. I saw Terry Tempest Williams read recently, and she told her audience that she feels a kinship with Chicago. Like her hometown of Salt Lake City, this city has an inland sea. And, accordingly, it has its own sea mythology. Wrecked ships lurk on the bottom. Surfers call it the Third Coast. In the summer, beaches fill with blankets and coolers and people looking out at the water, away from the tall buildings and chaos behind them. The lake offers city dwellers an escape, even if only for a few hours.

I'll Explain Everything to the Geese

Last winter I listened to the album High Violet by the National almost every day. It fit the cold weather, the quiet that winter engenders. And I spent most of the winter thinking that, in the song "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks," the geeks were geese—despite the song title. I thought the singer was saying, “I’ll explain everything to the geese.” It follows “swans are a swimmin.” It makes sense. I’d walk around the North Pond, look at the geese and wonder where to start, what to explain first. A wise teen explained everything to me: It’s the geeks not the geese.

Still, I think of that song lyric when I watch the Canada geese. They’re a hardy bird, wintering in Chicago. They could probably explain a lot to me. Lately they don’t dominate the ponds in Lincoln Park. The migrating birds are descending.

At the South Pond when I went on the bitterly cold first day of Spring, there weren’t any of the songbirds that have arrived at the North Pond. But the water was more populated. Different species of ducks swam in the water. A noisy group of Canada geese had taken over the island. I wondered if their honking had something to do with courtship. Or, had courtship finished and was it the sound of mothers worried about their eggs? Perhaps it had nothing to do with mating, and it was everyday alarm over a predator.

The black-crowned night herons also stood along the island’s shoreline. They’d come down from the tree. With their necks hunched and their beaks pointed down, they looked grumpy and forlorn. When I search for photos on the web, I can see their necks aren’t always hunched. They’re capable of looking regal; they have long necks. On this day, I’d imagine the cold kept them from stretching out, kept their heads hanging low.

Roof of the education pavilion

There’s still no action in the pond grass. Some bits of ice clung to the shoreline, creating a lacy, bubbly border between the water and the land. Were the fish still hovering at the bottom, or had they become more active in recent weeks? If their bodies react to air temperature, they must still be in winter mode. Do the fish wake when the insects wake, or do they move independently?

The human overseers of the pond were visible, though not actually present. Small wood birdfeeders had been nailed to several trees, so even if the insects are still hibernating the migrating birds can find food.

The unfortunately named People’s Gas Education Pavilion, without a cover of snow, looked more inviting. I never noticed the wood, or whatever pressed recycled material the pavilion is made from, has an eggshell finish that catches the sunlight so instead of looking white, it’s more pink and blue. The panes of Plexiglass that form the roof refract sunlight, making a pattern of rainbow colors inside. In the white and gray wash of earlier weeks, it looked like a crude interloper on the shore. In the sun it’s pretty. The structure, open on both ends, provides a frame for the city skyline in the distance. In the warm months, someone will stand in there and explain everything to some students or potential donors to the zoo. The geese will hold on to their secrets.

Waiting for the Birds

Chicago was hushed on Tuesday by six or seven inches of snow. On Wednesday we all, humans and animals, crawled out. At the South Pond, the movement of rabbits was easily visible in the new snow. Tracks ran along the edge of the pond, as did scat, and what looked like burrows under the brush.

Is somebody in there?

I brought Mucho with me to walk in the snow. I can’t tell if it’s my imagination, or if he’s more excited by smells here. I like to think it’s new and mysterious smells: rabbits, raccoons, perhaps the coyote or fox that have been spotted nearby. But it could be the regular scents, his everyday sniffing magnified in my mind by this setting. What would he do if I let his leash go? At the North Pond a few weeks ago he smelled something and pulled me into the tall grass. He led me to some bloody goose feathers. I wonder if it was the smell of the goose or the smell of the predator (coyote, I’d guess) that drew him.

What remains of the ice covering the pond has turned a darker gray, except along the shallow edges where it’s pale and mixed with waves of light brown and yellow. It has an otherworldly feel. Broken bits of ice float on the surface, some dissolving in swirling patterns and some in jagged chunks. Small mounds of snow under the pedestrian bridge and near the boathouse look like the surface of the moon. These mounds aren’t curved, like drifts. It’s hard to imagine the wind that would create these shapes.

For some reason, most of the other people at the pond are women. On this day, two of them traversed the boardwalk on cross-country skis. They moved almost silently, except for the rustle of their nylon parkas. I pegged them as birdwatchers, but when they passed me near the tree with the black-crowned night herons, they continued their conversation about pilates and didn’t even pause.

I’ve become as fascinated by the birdwatchers as I have the birds. I watched a documentary this week about birdwatchers in Central Park, among them the novelist Jonathan Franzen. The film shows the birds and bird watchers that show up each spring, which led me to look up migrating birds in my own town. Each spring and fall, Chicago gets hundreds of different species of birds stopping by on their annual migration. This is a great place to watch birds, because it’s on the Mississippi River flyway. The city has a program in place to eliminate decorative lighting on high-rises during the migratory season, to cut down on the number of bird-building collisions. How could I never have known this?

At South Pond on Wednesday, there were two newcomers: a water bird with a black-and-white head. They weren’t swimming together; each had its own end of the pond. I watched one of them dive under water for more than 10 seconds at a time. This doesn’t sound like long, but compared to the diving I’ve seen ducks do, it looks like an Olympic feat. I tried to identify the bird with the help of Google. I’m guessing it was a hooded merganser or a bufflehead. Next week, I plan to walk with the North Pond birdwatchers and to start learning to identify the visitors who will be coming to town.

Blog post 6 -- Paved Paradise

It was a little disappointing, after the sunshine during my last visit to the pond, to again come upon so much gray. Everything in sight this week was gray or brown. The snow covering the pond was no longer white, but a pale ash. Slushy mounds of melting snow took on the color of steel. Bark on the large trees was a dark, menacing gray, almost black. On the smaller trees, the bark looked softer, smoother, like a small animal’s pelt.

Gray stalks wait for the sun

A group of school kids on the boardwalk created a shock of color and noise. Kids in bright parkas laughed as they hurled chunks of snow and sticks on to the frozen surface of the pond. Some left the boardwalk to stomp through the marsh grass to find sticks to throw, until the adults in their party called them back. As I watched them I thought about the ways different people approach nature. In the city, what does nature mean? Does it have to be a place like the South Pond, created by engineers and architects? Or are the trees lining a parking lot nature?

Last year my son was in the hospital, on a hall with other adolescent boys. One day in their group therapy, the discussion turned to a disagreement between two boys sharing a room. One of them wanted to keep the blinds open; one wanted the blinds shut. The boy who wanted the blinds open said he liked to look out at the trees. He liked the nature. He referred to it as "that shit," and said it was comforting.

At the time, this struck me as funny. But it’s stayed with me. The hospital’s windows were covered with an ugly metal mesh. It was hard to see out, and there wasn’t much to see. This hospital was close to Lake Michigan, but not close enough that you could see the park or water. The few visible trees, on the street or next to the tiny parking lot, were bare in late February. To my eyes, it was ugly. To this boy, it was nature.

As I watched the kids on the boardwalk, and especially the ones in the marshy grass, I wondered if it was their age or a lack of experience with this organized wilderness that prompted them to leave the boardwalk. All over there are signs asking visitors to stay on the paths, partly it’s about civility, partly to preserve the budding life in and along the water. It’s necessary to separate the pond and the pond visitors, of course. But does this boardwalk--constructed of recycled materials--that acts as a barrier between people and this patch of wilderness create too much separation?

In his essay, “The American Indian Wilderness,” Louis Owens questions the meaning of our modern idea of wilderness. “The global environmental crisis that sends species into extinction daily and threatens to destroy all life surely has its roots in the Western pattern of thought that sees humanity and ‘wilderness’ as mutually exclusive,” writes Owens.  Unless Americans accept the responsibility their relationship with the earth entails, “a few square miles of something called wilderness will become the sign of failure everywhere.” What does this responsibility look like? Could an appreciation for a few bare trees outweigh a multimillion dollar pond renovation? Or is it that one leads to the other and ultimately to more responsibility?

Fox or coyote tracks across the ice