Cityscapes and Insect Traits

Rails

           Time doesn’t fly on the Metra. It dies. As soon as the muffled chime rings and a garbled, automated robotic voice sputters over the speakers, “Caution! The doors are about to close,” it’s as if I’ve sealed myself into tube, I’ve lost my chance for escape. I’m trapped in the belly of the whale, or in this case, the capsule of the ghastly Commuting Caterpillar. Sitting inside on the fatigued vinyl seats, time whittles away with every mile, every rattle, every ticket punch. The caterpillar will never evolve into a butterfly. The cocoon stays intact.

           The Metra train cars on the Northwest Line out of Chicago are trapped within themselves since their birth in the early 1980’s (“Metra History”). It’s as if you’re riding in a time capsule, heightening the anxiety of deceased duration. Sometimes I wonder how many corporate commuters, mothers and fathers, drug addicts, Cubs, Sox, Bears, and Blackhawks fans, tourists, homeless people, and/or students like me have sat in the exact seat I’m sitting in. Their “cushioned” vinyl upholstery seems to whisper of their previous occupants if you sit in the seats long enough, or look down into the gap between the edge of the bench and the window. It is questionable that the grime, stale Garret’s popcorn, and unidentifiable stains have been there for three decades. There’s a high probability they have been, especially when the conductors are still punching paper tickets a decade and a half into the twenty-first century.

        During the hot summer months when I arrive home in the early evening, I quickly peel off my clothing to avoid inhaling the sickly but not sweet Metra perfume they now reek of. If Metra were to bottle and sell their own scent, its contents would include whiffs of stale urine, bare feet, coffee, soggy fast food, clean (but more often greasy) hair, and the souls of thousands of trapped commuters. Yours for only $82.50 for ten rides. If you buy a bottle on your return trip, a $3 surcharge will be added to the price of your perfume.

Grids

          The three boys I nanny have a Hexbug Nano Habitat Set. Little battery operated robots shaped like roaches and made of plastic and rubber move around small channels of plastic track, which are attached at hexagonal hubs. The motor inside of each little Hexbug rotates a counterweight, as stated in “Hexbug Nano: Putting the ‘Micro’ in Micro Robotic Creatures,” which causes the bug to tip forward and drag its rubber legs along the track on the up force, the down force then lifting the bug’s front legs in a hop. Apparently this sequence happens several hundred times per second, allowing the Hexbug to act like a real insect and scurry about. It becomes increasingly entrancing to watch the bugs wander about the plastic maze of tracks and hexagons, bumping into the walls and each other, rerouting themselves. You almost forget there’s a motor beneath their shells.

          The train pulls into the station and we become connected to the hub. Doors slide open and we scurry out, infesting the platform and our own individual tracks. We are complicated mechanisms hidden beneath exoskeletons. We sidestep each other, get clogged at the revolving doors in and out of Ogilvie Transportation center, at escalators, and at bathroom doors. No exterminator could handle the infestation that happens during rush hour.

           The first couple blocks outside of the station are chaotic and littered with foul play. Tall, thin business men clutching coffee mugs filled with their lukewarm egos cut you off, causing you to stutter step. The crowd in front of you splits and veers to each side of the woman they begin to pass, the one you’d love to give a pair of tennis shoes instead of the heels she’s tottering on to spare the flow of traffic. Whoops! Careful now, that gap you thought was large enough to pass another person was actually the negative space hogged by a rolling backpack.

           About a quarter mile away from the station, the crowd begins to thin. At each stoplight, a man carrying a leather briefcase or a woman in a khaki trench coat branches off to the left or right, trickling off along the grid the city is built upon, the motor tucked away beneath their jackets, their bags, their exoskeletons, dictating the coordinates.

 

 Arcs

           Everyday of my walking commute I pass the United States Post Office building on the right hand side of Adams St., heading east in the direction of Lake Michigan. It is here, at the intersection of Adams and Dearborn St. that the Federal Buildings are clustered together, cemented together by a large paved courtyard called Federal Plaza that’s half a city block long as well as wide. Here is also where Alexander Calder’s monstrous steel sculpture, Flamingo lives.

           Flamingo was built out of sheet metal and paint in 1973. Apparently it shares the same DNA as the Federal Buildings, “thereby achieving successful integration within the plaza,” according to “Calder’s Flamingo”. Flamingo’s dimensions are 636” x 720” x 288”, which translates to fifty-three feet by sixty feet by twenty-four feet. I struggle to see why the Calder Foundation insisted on measuring the sculpture in inches instead of something more tangible. Maybe it was to make something as trivial as an inch seem to tower over our heads.

           Every time I take a harsh right at the corner of the Post Office on Adams and start to cross the Federal Plaza, Flamingo is towering there at the south of the courtyard, in all its artistically inched glory. But I don’t see a flamingo when I turn that corner. Flamingos are pink but this steel one is Crayola orange. Flamingos don’t usually stand on five legs; their front two arching up and out from the body like in a contortionist act. Flamingos usually don’t look like giant, long-legged insects threatening to invade the stony façade of steel and glass Federal buildings.

           I walk between the legs of the insect as I cut across the Plaza, praying it doesn’t step on me.

Towers

           I only notice the bronze plaques embedded in the sidewalks at the end of the day, when my neck begins to fold downward in exhaustion. Walking west now on Adams St. back to Ogilvie Transportation Center to the commuting caterpillar, I find pepper on the sidewalk between S. Franklin St. and S. Wacker Dr. No salt, just Pepper Construction, trailed by a small Chicago underneath, stamped in brass and nestled by concrete.

           In compliance to code 10-20-515 of the official Municipal Code of Chicago, the contractor of a building must place a stamp or plate in the walkway before the concrete has set. The plate cannot be more than 54 square inches of surface and must be flush and even with the finished walk. It must be stamped or firmly bedded in the concrete so that it cannot become loose or be easily removed or defaced.

           Across the street from the Pepper Construction plaque on Adams St. is what will probably forever be known as the Sears Tower, no matter what anyone decides to rename it. Sometimes when I pass the Sears Tower, I crane my neck upwards, not really being able to tell how tall it actually is from this vantage point. It’s hard to imagine that I frequently walk next to the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere with 3.8 million rentable square feet, 16,100 windows, and a weight of 222,500 tons, as the “Comprehensive Fact Sheet about Willis Tower” states. I suddenly feel insignificant in the scheme of things, yet childishly giddy that I can say I walk past the most recognizable piece of architecture in the Chicago skyline on my way to and from school.

           In 1973, the Sears Tower was completed, two years before the Pepper Construction building was finished across the street. As I walk over the brass plaques stamped by Pepper Construction on West Adams St. every late afternoon, I notice that out of the three encased in the cracking cement walkway, one is missing.

Bridges

           The bridges across the Chicago River are the first and last noticeable “landmarks” I pass on my walking commute between Ogilvie Transportation Center and the college campus. Because the Chicago River is considered a navigable waterway, Federal Law requires the bridges to be able to lift the leaves so large boats and barges can pass below. Out of the countless times I’ve bustled across the bridges, I’ve only seen the leaves lifted once, for a parade of sailboats.

           Crossing the bridge by foot reminds me of the minutes I spent praying in the passenger seat of my dad’s old Ford pick-up truck anytime we crossed over expansive waterways via concrete and steel bridges. My heart would race while my body stiffened, little limbs plastered to the scratchy seat covers, eyes shut tight. Fortunately, my irrational vision of the pick-up careening sideways off the crumbling concrete and into the waterway below never became a reality. That’s not to say I still don’t get anxious crossing bridges.

           I notice as I walk over the bridges on the Chicago River that the railings are intricately and decoratively patterned. Despite their dainty appearance I feel as though I’m caught in a web; there’s no way for me to try dismantle myself from it besides feverishly scampering across it, terribly aware of the way I can feel the steel leaf of the bridge beneath me quake as busses cross with me. When I make contact with poured concrete on the other side, I sometimes feel as if I need to brush my self off tremulously to rid the fibers attached invisibly and faintly to the top of my skin.

Rails Again

           I am back where I began, back to the beginning, back to being as tired as I was when I started the day. Most likely dashing through the station, I avoid being trampled by bigger bugs with leather briefcases and now drained cups of their own ego, faster and even tardier than I am.

           Back through the hubs during rush hour, infesting the platforms. Back scurrying up the steps of the train, attempting to find an empty seat in the corpse of the Commuting Caterpillar. Back to forgetting that I am more than just a motor and an exoskeleton as time seems to disintegrate with the sliding of doors and sound of ticket punches. This is when I close my eyes and succumb to the cocoon.

I’ll be back in fourteen hours, back to infest the streets of Chicago again.