Geekrant vs the Windy City

 Greetings, Geekranters!

I hope I find you hale and hearty and ready to devour my latest literary effort, but before I do, a quick note. This blog is the first in a beginning of a few blog posts about flying back to the UK for the first time since I moved here. When I started writing it, I realised that it couldn't possibly start off as a travelogue just listing where I'd been. Every great journey has a starting point, crossroads, twists and turns and a finish. So after a while the whole thing got kind of philosophical in nature. I hope you don't mind and will read on, dear reader, if at times my writing seems a little slipshod and formless.

So, as you know, these humble offerings of mine have always been an attempt for me to make sense of my existence, here in this “new world”. So much of that has been an attempt to understand my life here as opposed to where I came from, American culture versus British culture, one way of looking at life in comparison to another. All of this has been comparing the reality that I once knew with the reality that I know now.

At some point, I had to return home, if for no other reason than to collect some more material (okay, so I wanted to go home for a long time, to see my family but that doesn't have the feeling of a snappy one liner now does it?).

Its strange, how every journey is about traveling full circle. One could argue that all life is cyclical, in some ways we always return to the beginning. So often we go back to where we started. The past is prologue, as they say, and our future can be seen in the dreams of starlit childhood nights.

Now, it is true that many of us are scared of our pasts, or broken by life's assaults on our self worth,(let's face it if Hollywood superstars need therapy how are the rest of us supposed to get out of here unscathed.) it all to often seems that half the human population is running from all that once defined them. All the running from our pain, while still being relentlessly drawn home, to where it all began.

Now, while I really don't include myself in this group of people, due to always loving where I came from and loving where I live now. That being said, it is important to note that going home for the first time after a long time away is a monumental experience for any person. As someone whose very existence here seems to require spending so much time trying to understand, work out, and write about living in two worlds, it is even more monumental. In some ways, I have two homes now, on opposite edges of what can sometimes seem to be an ever widening sea. I dwell now with a foot in both worlds.

So going home, crossing that great ocean for the first time in over two years, is like leaving home, to go home, for me. The return journey I found out, feels like the same.

Now it has to be said that whatever philosophical mindset it places me in, the simple fact of most journeys like this is they tend to travel full circle, departing and arriving back in one place, an airport, port or border crossing. In my case, in most of my airbourne journeys, that means Chicago.

Throughout all the years of the transatlantic relationship of Mrs Geekrant and I, our crossroads and our home port has always been Chicago. From tearful good byes to laughter filled greetings, we have become immensely familiar with Chicago and the largest of its airports, O'Hare International Airport.

All this lengthy, and probably far too wordy, preamble to say, any blog of any trip I make home, by necessity, starts in Chicago and will finish in Chicago. So I hope that you will indulge a wannabe writer and read on.

It is interesting, to me at least, that Chicago has been such a crossroads in the life of my wife and I, for it has been a crossroads in this part of the world for much of modern history.

So some history, to explain myself. The northern Mid Western states are defined by the Great Lakes. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois all border at least one of these massive bodies of water and for the Voyageurs, the French trappers and fur traders who first explored the area, they were the gateway to the discovery of this new land of wonder.

Equally important to the Voyageurs and modern Mid-Westerners is the mighty Mississippi, the muse of Twain. A great highway running through the heart of the area. To these early traders and explorers, traveling the Mississippi opened territory after territory to them. “Strange new Worlds, New Life and New Civilisations” to borrow a phrase from Roddenberry. Who knows whether it occurred to them but they were walking some of the first steps of modern America as we know it today.

So the Great Lakes were important to the first settlers and traders and so was the Mississippi and even now they are an important part of the regional and national economy. On their own, however, their impact would be forever limited, if it hadn't been for Chicago and Chicago wouldn't have the impact it had if it had been located anywhere else.

Chicago was built close to a portage (a path or cut-through connecting two bodies of water so that boats may be carried between) that in effect allowed for easy transition between the Great Lakes (and by extension the Atlantic Ocean and East Coast of the United States) and the Mississippi. The construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848 turned this portage into a viable transport link for much larger vessels and enabled the rapid growth of the Mid-West during the Industrial Revolution.

Now while I've been to O'Hare on several different occasions, I've only actually been to Chicago as a city upon one other occasion. As you may remember from past editions of my ever popular publication, my friend Neil visited Mrs Geekrant and I, here, in Madison in the late spring of 2016.

Now while I have declaimed at length about that subject, I have, as yet, failed to mention our trip to Chicago. As I recall, it was because I was unsure what to say on the matter. I mean, what does one say about a place that so much has been written about, so many films have been made. Honestly, what can I say that 15 seasons of ER couldn't?

At some point, the writer, if that is indeed what I am, has to deal with the subjects that he feels inadequate to describe. So I have to at least try, and it seems fitting to do it in the midst of talking about a journey home, considering that was when I visited Chicago, for my first time, it was to send Neil home.

The Mid-West's climate can sometimes feel a little overwhelming to someone who grew up with the changeable yet relatively calm weather of the United Kingdom. As I noted in one of my previous posts, winters here can be brutal, blizzards are not uncommon and sub-zero temperatures are often the norm. Summers are often the other extreme, beautiful, full of sunlight, but also damp with humidity and full of the potential for wild thunderstorms and tornadoes.

So when we reached the airport, this time, ready for our flight, it was in cold conditions worthy of a Siberian freeze. Back in 2016, we drove into Chicago in early June, the sky, full of bright sunlight, which reflected off the azure blue waters of Lake Michigan and proved a fine backdrop for Neil's last day in the United States.

To visit Chicago, to gaze upon its lakeside forest of steel and glass buildings reaching towards the heavens, is in so many ways, to step into the city that most shows America's growth in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, this is the birthplace of the skyscraper, the location of the 1893 World's Fair, Ferris Bueller's playground and the smoky bar infested city where the blues went electric.

It is also strangely beautiful. Chicago had a “great fire” in 1871, which burned down many of the previous wooden framed buildings. So in many ways, it is true to say that to look upon Chicago, the famous, touristy, lake shore area, at least, is to look upon the dreams of the American past. To see where all the great longings and desires of the first great pioneers led to. Many people, both within the U.S. and from outside, find themselves drawn to New York, with its glamour, glitz and its never sleeping reputation but I still feel drawn more to Chicago.

We didn't have that much time to spend there on that day and we certainly weren't up for sight seeing when we went there this time around, but we tried to see as much as we could. As much as we could turned out to be Navy Pier... and not a whole lot else. Maybe that's why I still feel drawn to Chicago, I feel short changed, like I didn't see the full enchilada or polish hot dog as we're talking about Chicago.

Somehow, however, although it might have been the only thing we saw that day, Navy Pier still spoke to us of the city and the area that had birthed. The more time that I live so far from my homeland, the more I begin to realise how much places can absorb the histories and characters of the people who dwell there. Navy Pier did just that.

It headed out into Lake Michigan for nearly a full kilometre, jutting forward into that inland sea, like the prow of some majestic ship, but also just as much like some wooden jetty on the Mississippi where Mark Twain piloted steamboats and wrote of Huckleberry Finn. It whispered of the Mid-West and sang of the past and the future.

Its strange, for someone born of a relatively small island, who as a child never lived more than 30 miles from the sea, to stand on something so familiar to me and yet so alien. To look out at what looks like a sea and yet know that it doesn't feel quite like one. To stand on the boardwalk of a pier and instead of seeing sand nearby, see a plethora of skyscrapers heading away from me, like blue, remembered hills, disappearing into the haze of a summer's day.

We wandered along that walkway, for hours, with its amusements and boat tours, like early 20^th immigrants seeing Coney Island for the first time. We stood and looked out into something so elemental, created by God in the beginnings of time, the physical reality of the place and then looked back at the city, something so human, the reality of mankind trying to create a world for itself where there was once just lakes and marshes and the faintest beginnings of the prairies.

As I said before, I was not sure how to write about any of this. I'm not sure how to write about going home. So much of living in another land is easily explainable, in terms of physical matters, the differences in cuisine or how much American news anchors drive me up the wall and back down again with their fake smiles, things that can be turned into a quick witted rant or informative text.

So much of living here though is different in the heart, in the soul. It is nearly impossible to quantify, to put down on paper. It is a thousand moments, feeling welcomed and alien at the same time. I am an adopted Mid-Westerner, but a very British one all the same. So I choose to begin this blog series, about going, by talking about crossroads and how Chicago always has been a crossroads for me in this life. Partially because it seems somehow to dig deep into my heart and my feelings travelling home... but also because our flight got cancelled and we got stuck in Chicago for an extra day and I need to say something good about the place before I start ranting. I hope you don't mind.

Until next time,

Goodbye Geekranters.