The thing that strikes me about Chicago is how clean it is, and empty. I sometimes wonder if it’s because of the pandemic, but when I came here in January it was like this, too: cold and shiny with wide streets.
I was downtown during Thanksgiving in the late afternoon, when all the shops were closed and the streets were empty and the sun cast the bronze winter’s light on the tops of the buildings. I had never seen a city this empty, all reflective windows and brick, metal and concrete.
That’s the beauty of Chicago; the expansive parks and sunsets, miles upon miles of green space upon the lake. You almost feel, sometimes, as if you are the city’s sole inhabitant, until it gloriously reminds you that you are not.
The expansiveness means that biking is by far the best way to explore.
There’s a place along the lakeshore trail where the green briefly turns to wheat and for a few minutes, you are elsewhere, nowhere near the city, or any city at all. Of all the sunsets I’ve seen, the most breathtaking are in this between-place, as if you’re half in another world. In the autumn, the lakeshore trail is brilliant, the trees in brilliant yellow and orange and lingering green, a row of scarlet down a hill. Every week, sometimes twice, I haul my bike up the short concrete barrier to the hill by the aquarium and look at how the light falls on the city and the pier.
The lake, like the sunsets, never looks the same day-to-day. Sometimes it’s bright turquoise, some days indistinguishable from the grey of the clouds. Right north of downtown, there’s an area where the concrete of the lakeshore trail comes right against the lake, the waves crossing over the path: on cold and windy days, the icy water getting into your skin and bones.
Mostly I’ve biked on the lakeshore trail and around Hyde Park, because this is where I live. The biking trails are marked along the roads here, and the scenery changes every minute. It is maybe the most diverse neighbourhood in the city, I read before I came here, and it shows here when you peer into the crowded back alleyways of apartment buildings and a couple blocks down, standalone residential mansions, and further, the manicured university grounds, and see the trees turn to concrete crossing the Midway.
I’ve been up as far as Northwestern, looking over the fountains in their lake and the carefully manicured campus, and coming down sideways through a street filled with Indian restaurants that turns from bustle into shady residential areas in a single pedal. I’ve been to the North Side, where the light and bricks remind me of the East Coast or Europe, and wealthy residents pot plants in perfect circular jars. And around the South Side, learning about history and seeing how neighbourhoods change when you cross the street. Or, you turn a street corner and all the signs are suddenly in Spanish, and you realise there are many cities within the city that you may never know.
Another couple more things about biking: places make you the biker you are. If you bike with people from D.C., they’ll say the biking infrastructure here is terrible, compared to there, where there are barriers to protect you from traffic. If you bike with people from New York, they say the infrastructure is fine, but they’ll run you into ongoing traffic anyway. I grew up in northern Massachusetts, raised to bike on roads that were former cow paths, where there is no space between the side of the road and the grass. Here, I’m amazed by the flatness, the wideness of the roads, the fact that bike lanes exist at all.
Biking is always a somewhat hazardous activity; sometimes only a serendipitous second away from death. A couple weeks ago, a car tire popped and careened into the barrier ten seconds behind me, crunching into another car in ongoing traffic. Everyone emerged from the cars unscathed.
The best part about biking is if you’re biking with someone with knowledge about the city, who knows its ins-and-outs and will tell you little things about the neighbourhoods, just enough that you’re interested and ask a few questions – but maybe it’s best to keep these things only half-known, to remind yourself that there is always more to discover. There will be time, I tell myself, time after this is all over to travel the rest of the city that is closed to me now.
