The Thing About Chicago's South Side is: It Has a Great View Northwards

This evening, the sun was dipping low, the lake was touched with silver, and the view from the Point struck me as a prime photographic opportunity. So I hiked up my gym shorts and marched my frightened ass out to the lake shore at 57th street with a camera. The sound of Lake Michigan is insistent, robust; splashy. It is not like Lake Erie; that Lake has patience, a well-worn sense of time and the history that has played out on its shores. (This is distinct from the bland weariness of Lake Ontario--but one does not blame poor Ontario for its exhaustion, post-rapids and cataract. If you'd been through that sort of trauma, I'd let you just lie there, too. A boring Lake. But I digress.)

Lake Michigan twitches with industry. You can feel it when you stand ankle-deep on the shore: the waves insist, they are itching to move you, somewhere, anywhere, westwards, preferably. Ships steam across her and the Lake nods her approval: splash, splash. Go, move, do. Industrious urgency is in its very character, and this befits the lake-mistress of the great American city, Chicago. New York bustles, LA glitters; but Chicago cranks, chugs, whistles and stamps. Chicago needs a lake that can keep up. Ontario would be flat on her back after an hour. Lake Michigan wants more.

That said, I will miss Chicago and its fearsome semi-sexually voracious Lake. I cut my adult teeth on this city, felt its pulse and longed to be part of its workforce. And then I was. Nuts, bolts, rivets! How appropriate that my job here involved rusty hardware. But one year was enough. Now I look homewards, eastwards, to Lake Erie.

There they have grass, and trees, and sunlight. That Lake remembers. When one sits on its shores, one gets the impression that the Lake is remembering. It remembers the settlers, the immigrants, the ships, the clapboard houses that cropped up on its shores. It remembers barges, mills, factories, remembers when it urged young men westwards, when it was the fountainhead of western industry. Now Lake Erie sits back, and collects on the industry it sent west decades ago.

Waters from Chicago make their way eastward to Erie; in the end, all things come home. And so do I.