deb's place: Our Great Lakes Adventure: Days 12-14

We completed our visit to the Great Lakes region with a three-day stay in Chicago. This was Zach's and my first visit to the "windy city," where we were to learn that it got its name not from the winds coming off Lake Michigan, but from its politicians.

Leading up to this part of the trip, I worried about Chicago traffic. I don’t like car travel. And I hate freeways--especially around a big city.

Chris, our 27-year-old son who tackles class-5 rapids in a tiny kayak, drove right past Chicago a few months previous, avoiding it entirely. He said the traffic was awful. So I was not looking forward to this part of the trip.

But the 1½-hour drive from Hubertus to Chicago was delightfully uneventful. We arrived late morning, dropped our car and bags off at the Best Western Hotel at Grant Park, and set out on foot to locate the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where we were

scheduled for a 12:30 tour.

After finding the school and getting our bearings, we had an hour to kill before the tour, so we looked around for a place to grab lunch. We were hoping to find one of those famous Chicago diners or a stand where we could grab a Chicago-style hotdog. All we could find were national food chains, so we settled on Subway, which suited Zach just fine.

Our tour of SAIC was everything I’d hoped it would be. Our guide was a tall, very skinny young man--an art student--whose focus, we came to learn, is life drawing. Zach came to life when he heard this, nudging me every few minutes to utter how surprised he was to find an art school where students are actually encouraged to pursue art in its classical forms. We were also intrigued to learn that SAIC students can go to the nearby Field Museum of Natural History

to draw from its collection of life-size exhibits.

Except for the fact that I--with my big camera pack--got stuck in a revolving door at one point, the tour went very smoothly. By the time we were finished, Zach had decided that he loved Chicago.

Leaving the Art Institute, which is scattered through several buildings in the downtown area, we headed for the Sears (now Willis) Tower, hoping to get up to the top deck before returning to our hotel. After walking the six or seven blocks, we found long lines of people winding around the block. The sun was bearing down and we were tired, so we headed back to the hotel.

Air Pockets

—an aside—

Before this trip, I had purchased online a “Go Chicago” card for each of us. This pass would get us into the sites we most hoped to visit—the Chicago Institute of Art, the Willis Tower, the Shedd Aquarium, the Architecture Boat Tour, and the Field Museum. Admission to any one of these attractions is expensive—$35 per person is typical. Since all of these plus numerous other attractions are included in the pass, we figured we'd be getting a pretty good deal if we could take in at least two or three sites a day.

This was a mistake. Because the passes were quite expensive, I felt compelled to get our money’s worth. Like a diner at an all-you-can-eat food bar, I began to focus on how many attractions we could fit in with the time we had. I lost sight of something crucial to our having a good time together: the need for balance, rest, flexibility.

The following three days were difficult for all of us. Craig became ill with a severe infection that kept him in bed for the final day and a half. I made some self-centered choices, leaving Craig to feel expendible and me conflicted. And Zach missed out on the kind of times we have most enjoyed in our times together--those moments when we are rested and enjoying each other just as much as the place we've come to visit.

This past week, Craig and I planted three new trees in our front yard. One of the rules, when filling the soil back in around a newly-planted sapling, is that you tamp the dirt firmly. You want to eliminate any air pockets around the roots.

We humans, however, are different. We need air pockets.

Lacunae.

Negative space.

Wiggle room.

We need spaces in our days--our lives--that aren't packed tight with plans and activity.

One of Craig's happier moments on this trip occurred a few days earlier, when we were driving to the tip of Door County peninsula. For a short period of time, I couldn't figure out where we were on the map. Fearing that Craig might be upset, I nervously announced that I had no idea where we were. I was very surprised when he let out a great sigh of relief. He found it delightful that I was--albeit for just those few minutes--bewildered. I hadn't realized that my thorough planning and preparations for this journey might have become a problem to Craig--and that it might actually be a good thing, sometimes, to be lost.

Our favorite family-trip experiences are often those we haven't planned: the bench where we can sit and sip on cool drinks and watch some kids playing in a fountain; the little cafe where we discover we can get iced mochas when we need a rest stop; even finding a Subway when a quaint local eatery is nowhere in sight.

--end aside--

During our three days in Chicago, we did manage to visit most of the sites we’d hoped to see—though Craig was too sick to join us on our final day.

I got up early each morning to run, and enjoyed watching the sun come up from the shore of Lake Michigan.

The Chicago Institute of Art was intriguing—our favorite collections were the Impressionists and early-American art.

We took the architecture boat tour up the Chicago River, developing a serious case of cricked neck as we craned our necks to look at one skyscraper after another.

One building is so large, it has its own zip code.

As the tour guide regaled us with stories about the builders and their architectural and engineering feats, I began to feel my energy draining away.

I am not a city girl. I found myself longing for the rocky, secluded beaches of Grand Marais.

The library is quite imposing, with a gargoyle on each of its upper corners. I would imagine that children find it terrifying at night.

Zach was elated when tour boat passed the very building where the opening scene in The Dark Knight had been filmed. This was clearly, for him, the most important part of our visit to Chicago. Try as we might to discourage his preoccupation with the movie--he spent the next three days trying to steer us back to that location.

We did make it to the top of the Sears Tower (now called the Willis Tower)—where I enthusiastically tried to encourage a lady—a complete stranger and, I think, a visitor from Europe—to step out on the glass-bottom deck. She looked at me as if I were crazy-not only to do such a thing but to try to convince her to do the same. My behavior probably confirmed for her everything she’d ever heard about rude and obnoxious Americans. Craig, who watched this interchange from across the room, said later that he was surprised by my behavior. I don't know what came over me—perhaps the adrenalin rush from having stepped out on the deck to look down hundreds of feet. I am terrified of heights.

We visited the "Bean," where I didn't realize until processing this photo that I was catching myself in this photo, as well as Zach looking at himself.

On our final morning, Zach and I visited the Shedd Aquarium.

We most enjoyed the dolphins and beluga whales. I worked hard to get some shots of the belugas, but was having little success as they rushed past—one white swoosh after another.

Then, suddenly, one beluga came right up to where I was standing, stopped, and began to chatter, looking right at me. I honestly believe this beautiful creature was talking to me and posing for pictures. Zach thinks otherwise, but I think he was jealous. I have approximately 600 photographs of this fellow, to prove my point.

We then stopped for a picnic lunch of hotdogs on the expansive grass lawn in front of the Field Museum of Natural History, from which one has a beautiful view of the shoreline.

After lunch we entered the Field Museum, where we visited Sue, the largest, most complete, and best preserved T-rex fossil yet discovered.

Interestingly, the exhibit I found most riveting at the Field was a collection of photos of the civil rights movement, many of which were taken in Birmingham. This exhibit, called “We Are a Nation of Overcomers,” was temporarily on loan from the Atlanta Museum of Art. The collection includes 150 striking photos taken during the years 1955-1968. Many were taken by reporters covering the Freedom Riders, the Ku Klux Klan, and other events surrounding the civil rights movement.

Leaving the museum, Zach and I caught a tour bus, hoping to make it to Navy Pier in time to catch a shoreline tour boat before the 5:00 deadline. We didn’t make it to the pier in time, so we stayed on the bus to get back to the hotel. The tour guide was a young man who clearly loves Chicago. He told one fascinating story after another about the spots we were passing, but forgot to tell us when we reached the point where we were supposed to get off.

So, when we did disembark, he got off with us to give us directions. In passing, I mentioned—rather cynically I confess--that what Zach really wanted was just to photograph the locations where The Dark Knight had been filmed. This young man knew every detail about the movie, where the scenes had been shot in Chicago, and was able to direct Zach to those places, which just happened to be within minutes of where we were standing.

I gave Zach 20 minutes to get his shots and return to me, then sat down and prayed that he'd be safe. He returned 20 minutes later, elated. I have to believe Zach had some angel working the ropes to place us in that location—the place he’d most wanted to visit on our trip to Chicago. I had certainly not planned this, but circumstances landed us right where he'd so wanted to be for the past three days.