Escape Route

This morning, the brightness pouring in through my open windows woke me early. I laid in bed for a little bit, contemplating throwing the covers over my eyes for another hour of sleep, but then decided to fight the laziness, get dressed, and go for a walk. It was a gorgeous morning--temperatures in the sixties, accompanied by full sunshine. The pedestrian traffic was light as I headed toward the beach.

I like to observe Division Street at different times of day (this is the street I take to get to the lake). It's a dirty street for the first couple of blocks, lined on both sides with pharmacies, bars and hole-in-the wall restaurants. It seems dingier in the morning, when the remnants of the night before are visible along the gray, gum-wad-dotted sidewalks. In the morning, there are no bouncers greeting you as you walk past doorways, no eyes ogling you from patio tables adorned with beer bottles. The pedestrians consist of joggers, dog-walkers, and professionals headed to the El. I enjoy the general calm of the early hours as I head toward the lovelier, leafier blocks of Division, which are lined with vintage apartments and condos. I drink in the architecture and wonder what it's like to live in one of those places, with their personal parking garages and restored interiors. (It's always good to have aspirations.)

Soon, I approach the roaring traffic of commuting autos on Lake Shore Drive, but I duck into the underground pathway that takes me beneath the buzzing highway and I emerge on the other side at Oak Street Beach. When I get to the lake, I just want to run. My back is telling me that it's not an option this morning, so I listen to it and walk instead. As my feet fall into rhythm, my mind wanders off...

I can't help but wonder what it is about large bodies of water that adds so much to the quality of life. Perhaps I'm fooling myself, but I believe that there is something much more satisfying about my general outlook and mindset when I know that I can escape to the lake whenever I need/want to. Perhaps water is just a necessity for some people. Perhaps because I am a crab (July baby, after all), I feel at home on the beach. All I know is that the simple awareness that the lake is there fills up something inside me.

I am reminded of a quote from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon that I displayed on my facebook profile for years. I used to feel that this quote defined me in some way, but since moving away from and then returning to the Midwest, the words of Morrison's narrator impact me very differently. This is the quotation:

Truly landlocked people know they are. [...] But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country's edge--an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless. It might be an appetite for other streets, other slants of light. Or a yearning to be surrounded by strangers. It may even be a wish to hear the solid click of a door closing behind their backs. (Song of Solomon 162)

Morrison's narrator was right—-a break from the area was necessary, and it was necessarily dream-bitten, because I left the Midwest to live in an area next to my favorite vacation spot in the country—-the Smoky Mountains—-and I did not find the idyllic place I had imagined. While I enjoyed the mountains as often as I could escape to them, and I made some lasting friendships during my two years in Tennessee, I yearned to return to the Midwest. So, I found the other streets and other slants of light, but they didn't fill me up. Perhaps because I left and returned, I now find that those five Great Lakes are enough to keep me from feeling landlocked. I still feel like I am on the edge of the world, living on a body of water that ultimately connects to the Atlantic. I think that maybe that's what the lake does for me. It allows me to sense, at all times, that life is fluid and moving and that there is always escape from the confinements of daily life...

As I finished my walk, and headed back toward the city, I felt refreshed and alert. My daydreams slowly dissolved into the schedule before me. With the sunshine on my back, I strolled back to my apartment, freshened up, and felt an extra spring in my step as I fell into the mass of pedestrians headed to work.