Looking at a topographical map is so deceiving with Chicago because it is, indeed, very flat; but its main direction is up. I thought I'd be bothered by such a flat city, but the topography is in the buildings which rise up like mountains around you. The buildings are sometimes sleek, all mirrors and modernity, but I love the neoclassical and neogothic architecture. It is stunning. I once read Fountainhead, an experience that has scarred me. But I remember the argument, made with all the subtlety that the author seems to employ in all her writing, that architecture should be pure somehow, and unadorned, and manly in its simplicity. She was no more an architectural critic than she was a great writer. I love the columns and the flying buttresses and the curlicues; the marble-encased windows and the art nouveau brass doors. All transformed for the purpose of the modern megalopolis and made impossibly vertical, beyond the wildest imaginings of their initial designers.
And then there's the L, winding its way around brick buildings like some real-life train set. Chicago reminds me of a children's book; Look! There's a train, and there's a race track, and there's a plane flying overhead!
Sarah and I continued our monster tour of the American West. We visited hipster neighborhoods, where women with ironic mullets cut our hair; we escaped the heat by watching a children's movie; and we took the metra, apparently a feminized version of the metro. The metra was staffed by a man in a crisp uniform, a brass "trainman" on his hat and a black belt with a snappy coin dispenser. Sarah said she might like his job, and I thought that was probably as good a job as anything she's mentioned so far. Unfortunately, we had to part. We said good bye on a bench in a park, with trash blowing around us and a group of Mexicans nearby playing cards.
Ah, Chicago.
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