.
The pioneers had it a lot tougher. Hard wooden seats, Conestoga wagons with no springs, few roads to speak of, and a two, four or maybe six ox power plant. Still, over the last couple of weeks I have come to sense a new feeling of kinship with those folks. I have spent what feels like many hours in the back of a friend’s car looking out the window at the freeways in and around Chicago. It has been an interesting experience. No complaints about the back seat. Worlds removed from a Conestoga wagon, it lives in a high end air-conditioned Mercedes 550 with an excellent sound system. I do occasionally share the seat with a large, rather rambunctious black lab who is far more interested in being in the front seat. But we all have dreams that will never be realized. Quite often the front seat conversation centers on people I have never met and places to which I have never been, so I look out the window.
There is a lot of stuff to see out the window. There is no doubt this is a huge city - Wikipedia puts the population of the metropolitan area at around 9.7 million, third in the US behind LA and New York. The view constantly changes. Buildings both gleaming and gutted, billboards for every product under the sun - yes, every product! People of any imaginable size, shape, hue and attitude. A menagerie of pets, and occasionally other faces peering back at me out of other windows. Sometimes we wave.
But I am often more taken by the flora than by the fauna and the architecture. Down in the city proper the flowers are most often enabled. Parks and fanciful concrete planters house the exotic end of the plant palette; crimsons and golds, purples and cobalt climb stalks to make a sculptor proud. But as you wind your way out toward the burbs, the spaces left alone reassert themselves. Hemerocallis - or day lilies, which probably started as a tasteful intentional border or pathway have invaded the ditches from whence they originally sprang, and garnered their most lowbrow name - ditch lilies. Occasionally leaping across deserts of concrete to the median, everywhere they provide wonderful splashes of color against a background of myriad greens.
The greens begin as unassuming tufts of grass along the edge of the highway, but soon climb up into foliage my mother could probably have named, in the colloquial, if not the Latin - probably “bachelor’s breeches," or something equally colorful. Bullrushes and stalks of foliage that must be kin to the buffalo grass of the early midwestern prairie, peak up in wild hedges 5 or 6 feet tall, often entwined with the deceptively attractive toxicodendron radicals, aka poison ivy, which thrives in the area. The "water-featured” ponds of the downtown office parks give way to their more rural inspirations often covered with enough lily pads and ivory-tinged blooms to make an impressionist salivate.
More hardwoods than pines claim the further horizons that can be glimpsed between the now more scattered buildings. They often host wisteria, another weed turned high-brow ornamental. Fields begin to crop up. Corn seems to be doing well, and my guess about the lower plants would be just that - a guess. Too low for soybeans, too high for strawberries. “You can take the kid out of town, but you can't take the . . . . . “ You get it.
Clouds scuttle across a sky that is improbably a Carolina blue. Might have something to do with winds off the plains to the west meeting the winds blowing in from Lake Michigan to the east. Towering thunderheads on one side, fluffy Bob Ross "happy little clouds" on the other. They are the kinds of views that make me wish I could paint. Instead I just settle back and look out the window.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment