Chicago

It was an odd time in Chicago. When I arrived there, the airline was in utter chaos. Some crazy story about accidentally cancelling the wrong flight, then reinstating it, then forgetting that they had already boarded the plane and trying to board duplicate passengers onto it. Something about lightning storms somewhere between Chicago and Rochester and how we should all be thankful that we weren't in the air anyway. It was 10pm. I was booked on a flight leaving at 07:35 the next morning.

I called Alex (probablevacancy). Take the Blue Line to the Red Line, he said. Computer key clicks. Yes there's a train at 1am on the Red Line. Yes there's a train back to the airport at 4am. It's great to have a Mission Control.

I've always found Chicago O'Hare to be a sort of purgatory. Maybe "limbo" is more accurate—either my own personal hell, or a place disconnected from all earthly geography, in which you're doomed to either spend an hour on every air trip, or else doomed to dash from Concourse C to Concourse B through that underground tunnel with the tron-esque neon in not enough time. My first memory of Chicago O'Hare is from when I was about ten years old, travelling as an unaccompanied minor. The flight was delayed, the connecting flight missed. The airline agent walked very fast. I scampered behind. He put me in a small room with a TV where I sat for hours, with no idea what was going on. I think I've held a vendetta against ORD ever since.

These days I think I travel through O'Hare a dozen times a year. My most recent trip to Europe, from New York, even involved Chicago O'Hare—a detour of several hours in decidedly the wrong direction. Try as I might to get an itinerary that goes through some other airport, something always comes up and I'm diverted to Chicago. But, confined to that airport, I'd never set foot in the city.

About the only thing I know about Chicago is that this is where Buckminster Fuller lived, and that it was a hub for trains, now airplanes, and I know that chiseled, double-needled dark monolith of a building that identifies the skyline. I know ORD stands not for O'Hare but Orchard Park, the field's prehistoric name. I know that some people call it the windy city, and I know that it has elevated trains. The latter I learned from The Fugitive. Apparently the elevated trains connect directly to the airport.

And so I left the airport. Cruising through the empty ticket counters, passing the night crews sweeping up, on the threshhold of unexplored territory—it felt a little bit like The Terminal if you'll forgive another obvious, second-rate movie reference.

I spent the night wandering unfamiliar streets, feeling vaguely vulnerable and still tentative and uncertain about being there in the first place. I set up shop at one cafe, one diner then another, sogging through the night which paced itself out interminably, generously. Cream of Red Pepper Soup at Pick Me Up Cafe in Wrigleytown (recommended); coffee and apple pie at Clarke's near another redline stop. Another train to downtown, to wander those abandoned streets.

Staring out into the black Lake from a concrete beach. Terrified to go back through the pedestrian subway; although well-lit and apparently evacuated, it seemed an ideal staging ground for muggers.

I read Hemingway on the train back to O'Hare, watching the horizon pinken, and silhouettes rise against the sky outside the train. I examined faces on the train, recalling the greeting at the 24 hour donut shop in San Luis Obispo, "Out late or up early?" It's not as easy to tell as you might think. I enjoyed the simple, declarative sentences of the El train announcements. "This is Washington Street." "This is Chicago." And the occassionally magnificent cognitive dissonance. "This is California."

The El train, lurching and screaming, pulls right in to O'Hare airport. There is another long underground concourse, directions to the five different terminals. I already had my boarding pass and there was virtually no line at Security. At the gate I found the airline representative soliciting Volunteers; of course this flight was overbooked after the previous cancellations. Although ambivalent on the issue, I said I'll Do It. What's six more hours at O'Hare?