Spring Blogk 2k10

During spring break me and some friends drove up to Chicago for a week to visit our friends Mike and Mary at Columbia University. We met up in St. Louis and drove in my friends Dad’s mini-SUV, splitting gas between the four of us. The ride was fun and quick which was surprising considering the miserable topography of southern Illinois. It’s all either fields or some impoverished little farm village. As we made our way further north the fields, rather than just agriculture, might contain some mammoth wind mill, or even hundreds of mammoth white windmills churning majestically. I wondered what exactly those windmills were powering, whether that energy was being transmitted to America as a whole, or straight to Chicago, to just being used to power the suburban slums that pop up the further you go north. There were also signs on the road promoting soy and ethanol bio-diesel and I wondered if perhaps any of these fields surrounding us were all going towards that cause, which, personally, I consider a massive waste of space and time. Rather than leaching the earth of minerals and driving up food prices I’d rather see an alternative source of clean energy, innovation in the same vein as the windmills. Chicago was amazing. The city was in particularly high spirits because the weather was extremely good for this time of the year. Thanks global warming. The weather was amazing, even in the summer Chicago had never felt this great, sun shining, breezy, just the right amount of heat. We walked through the perfectly manicured lake front parks, and we even donned our new acquired Salvation Army swim trunks and went to the beach on lake Michigan, where we sat in the imported white beach sand and tried to see how far we could go into the freezing lake water. I guess you could say we got in touch with the only taste of “nature” downtown Chicago could offer, one that’s been completely manufactured and obsessively manicured by a veritable fleet of city workers. I wonder what the lake front was like before Chicago, or even right after the great Chicago fire when having a beautiful lake front was probably the last on the priority list. I wonder if nature had begun to retake the lake, its native formations attempting to take root in that deceptively unorganized circle of life way. All of the “green space” in Chicago is arranged stylistically, like every park is a giant art installations (although they usually do contain giant art installations ). The locations of every shrub or bush have been carefully plotted by some city contracted landscapist. Its curious that in a city where people seem to revere these chunks of “nature” so much that they would only allow it to exist in specific forms that they approve of. It seems to say that people aren’t interested in nature for nature’s sake so much as they are more interested in themselves enjoying an idea of what nature should be.