In the morning I chatted with CH and dawdled until I got stir-crazy and then decided to bike up to the Chicago Botanic Garden. It was sunny and decently warm. I used sunscreen but nonetheless got a sunburn. I have been dehydrated most of the day.
The first ten miles of the ride are awful: up a busy street (Elston), lined with Home Depots and Best Buys, with traffic lights halting your progress every half mile, against a strong headwind. Every time you bike northeast on Elston, there is a strong headwind. The fifteen miles after that are on a nature path/bike trail, from which you can still see busy urban thoroughfares most of the time, but it's a city and you take whatever nature you can get. Further north the traffic calms down and then you are winding through trees, lagoons, and swampy muck.
There were many bikers on the path. You can bike languorously, enjoying the sunshine and your company and the freedom of two wheels. Or, if you are like me, you can put your head down and spin your legs until your overheated face looks like a blood bag and every passing biker double takes upon seeing it, and you will refuse to pause to eat your bag of walnuts even though you are very, very hungry, because you are trying to train your body to run without nutrition in case a war with China starts and your only avenue of escape from the internment camps is to Canada, in one day, by bicycle. You will suck on a backpack-bladder filled with water.
Every two miles or so you must cross a road. I lost the trail at Harms Road, and decided that the road marked "TRAIL TEMPORARILY CLOSED" must have been the continuation of the trail, and then spent half an hour pushing my bike through shit-smelling mud up to my ankles. LF called at this point to say, I saw on your status message that you were going to the botanical gardens! Let's bike together! But I had to say, Ah, LF, I said I was going to the "botanic" gardens, not the "botanical" gardens! "Botanic" is Chicago. "Botanical" is New York. Alas, I could not join LF.
I don't like biking for fitness, so I am not very fit for longer bike rides. So not long after my mud wallow my ass and legs starting aching and I started whining. Owwwweeee! I said, when nobody was around. Two hours after I started, I finally got to a sunny bench in the botanic gardens. There, I hurriedly ate an avocado with a dagger, and then sat still in the sunshine for exactly four minutes. Then, because I had lost so much time with the mud wallow, it was time to get back on my bike and find the commuter rail station. It wasn't so bad though; at the station, I got a nice quiet sit-in on a bench in the sunshine.
Here is a basic fact of life that I have only very recently learned: if you look like an unaccompanied woman, unaccompanied men will talk to you. I have just learned this because until I moved to Chicago, I always looked either accompanied or unwomanly. Since apparently I have made a sport of half hour to four hour-long* conversations with unaccompanied men, I sincerely appreciate this newly-learned fact of life. When I got on the Metra train back to Chicago, the train car I chose already had another bike in it, so I had to negotiate a bit with the bike's owner where I could lean my bike. The bike's owner was an unaccompanied man, white, medium build, in his early 40s. He was completely bald, and since we were heading to
Skokie, I thought he might be a skinhead. (This turned out to be completely incorrect, as he was an Israeli citizen.) I took the only available biker's seat, which happened to be right next my new friend's seat.
I immediately took out a Chicago Sun-Times, New Yorker, and Twix bar out of my backpack, and started gnashing away at the candy and reading intently about Burmese pythons spun out of their cages and into the Everglades during Hurricane Andrew. One would think this signaled unavailability - I really did want to just read, since I was too tired to maintain the chumminess that the sport of talking to strangers requires - but my new friend seemed very intent on talking to me, so finally I set aside my periodicals, shoved the last bite of my chocolate finger into my mouth, and said, "Hello, I'm [Bananarchist]. What's your name?
His name was Gary. He started our conversation by saying several times that the conductor had asked him to lash his bike against the train using bungee cords he didn't have. Yes, but what's the worst the conductor could do if you didn't lash your bike down? I said, with a shrug. Gary replied, I don't know, pitch a fit? We laughed, and I said I could probably stall the conductor with sweet talk for the forty minutes it would take us to get back into Chicago.
We did the usual: where are you from, how long have you lived in Chicago, how do you like living in Chicago? Immediately the topic of conversation turned to Israel, because although Gary had lived his entire life in Chicago, he decided some years ago to become an Israeli citizen and had spent the last two winters in Galilee. I asked him if it was difficult to become an Israeli citizen. His answer: If you're Palestinian, yes; if you're an American Jew, not at all. It's probably too easy, in fact. This was interesting. Why do you think it's too easy? I said. He gave a thoughtful response about zionism and AIPAC, and I said some things to indicate that I had a grasp of the geopolitics. He said he wasn't sure he was comfortable with his own decision to become an Israeli, and then I said something anodyne about disagreeing with foreign policy from a global perspective but not judging the individual for his personal decision, and then there was a pause to commemorate our shared politics.
Gary had a return ticket for Israel in nine months, which seemed to me like an awfully long time in the future. It was a ticket, he said, but it was not a commitment to go back to Israel, since he could always just get a refund. He was trying to see if Chicago would take again, but already, in his second month home, he was starting to feel disappointed by the city's slow pace of change. He had taken the train today to the north suburbs to buy a bicycle, with the intention of biking home, but he got tired and hopped onto the commuter rail. I joked that his $150 bike might be enough to keep him tethered to Chicago. He said he would sell it.
He asked my occupation, and then confessed that he was thinking about going to law school. He was unemployed but had worked primarily as a bartender until leaving for Israel. He said he had consigned himself to never making any money. He considered himself a "wannabe failed academic," because of his interest in English literature, but decided to forgo the doctorate's debt and "the fifty-fifty chance, at best, of finding work on the other side." He wanted to try war crimes in the International Criminal Court. I'm aiming for the Hague, he said, but with a smile to indicate that this was something that would never happen. He confessed that he was more of a dreamer than a doer. I encouraged him by saying that it was difficult but humanly possible to get a law degree and be trying war crimes within five years. You would think this part of the conversation would be tinged with rue, but it was not. It was matter of fact.
He mentioned off hand that he hadn't done so well at keeping the jobs he'd had. Then I asked him a question I knew would be too personal: why do you think you didn't keep those jobs? "Personality conflicts" was his response. I pushed again: what sorts of personality conflicts? You see, the reason I did this was because I didn't get a sense from him that these topics were out of reach, and the conversation, even treading in this touchy territory, was light and quick. It is amazing how quickly you can become intimate with a stranger.
Gary's response to my second question was, Oh, you know. Anger management, rage, bitterness, problems getting along with others. To name a few? I said. He chuckled. We then talked about a recent job interview he'd had for a bar position, where the manager of the bar asked him a series of questions about the maximum capacities of the bars he'd tended, his philosophy for how to handle crowded bars, and something about a mysterious "positioning in the ring." I said this was absurd, since a bartender's ability to tend bar had nothing to do with his ability to answer questions about tending bar. Gary concurred, and then told me about the other hoops of fire he'd had to jump through for previous positions: drug tests, several rounds of interviews, questionaires, oaths, etc. We paused to commemorate our shared distaste for meaningless exercises of authority.
As we entered Chicago, I finally said a few barely personal words about myself. I was happy to have chosen Wicker Park to live in rather than Lincoln Park because I was not exactly the Lincoln Park type. He said, Yes, I knew when you came in that you were not that type. What gave me away? I said. He said, You didn't seem like a sorority girl. Sorority girls don't have bikes covered in mud. They can't speak intelligently about the world. (His exact words were not as patronizing as these.)
We arrived at his stop somewhat by surprise, and he hurriedly gathered his belongings and wheeled his bike to the door. Our last bit of chatter was me telling him I hoped to read about him leading the prosecution of Ivan Demjanjuk, the Cleveland Nazi. There was no pretending that we would exchange phone numbers or that we'd ever see each other again or that we even wanted to.** We simply wished each other well, and then he walked his bike off the train.
And that was that. I got off at the next stop, biked a few blocks to my apartment, drank a liter of water, and then collapsed on my couch. Bavarian No-Longer-Boyfriend called and we had an atrocious (but unfortunately, very typical) conversation consisting of either silence or me asking open-ended questions and getting one or two words in response. I had plans to see some more Bloodshot Records bands this evening, but I realized that my legs could not support my weight for the three hours I'd have to be standing, so I lay prone all night instead. And now I am typing this little story out. It's possible that nobody else on the planet thinks these meetings with strangers are interesting, but they are completely fascinating to me! Is this normal? Is it a sign of desperation? Predation? Antisocial personality disorder? I CANNOT STOP TALKING TO STRANGERS.
* The four-hour conversations happen when I am trapped in the window seat of a plane and the person with the aisle seat is an unaccompanied man. This happened twice in January alone!
** But really, I could find him I wanted to. He told me his last name. I Googled it, and found a match in a few New York Times comments. He signs these comments Gary [Last name], [city in Galilee], Israel. The thoughts expressed are intelligent, but the punctuation is inconsistent. NEXT.
Our feet played percussion while our hands played stringed instruments and our voices sang. I am very proud of our authentic jug band-esque resourcefulness!
