City versus Country

I tell myself and my friends that I'm a City Person. I grew up in Chicago -- sure, it was a suburb of Chicago, but it was dirty, industrial suburb attached like a carbuncle to the ass-end of a city that is affectionately known as the "Hog Butcher to the World."

When I was a kid, we would go into the city for a little fresh air and the finer things in life.

Jen and I both come from Chicago, so we tend to take most of our vacations there. An urban destination, to be sure. But Jen's mom lives in the middle of the forest. It's a lovely little suburb called Palos Park, and it's as close to the country as you're going to get within fifty miles of Chicago.

Actually, as we were descending into Midway Airport two nights ago, we flew over Jen's mom's neck of the woods. "What is that?" I thought. "A lake?"

In the middle of the glowing orange sprawl of the city is a dark spot the size of Anaheim -- no lights, no streets, no cars -- just black, inky darkness.

It's the forest primeval, and it spooks the crap out of me.

In the city, I know where to go if an unsavory character is following too closely. I can duck into a liquor store or (even in Los Angeles) call a cab, get on a bus, get out of the area. But out in the forest, I always feel like I'm going to be eaten by a dingo or fall down a crevasse.

I mean, I just don't get it. Today, I'm riding my bike (Jen and I bought bicycles this trip to keep in her mom's garage for the next fifty trips to the Midwest), and I feel like a sheep at a wolf convention. Peddling down narrow roads that edge abruptly into narrower gravel shoulders, my fingers clenched in a death-grip on the handlebars, I can only pray that the carload of dope-smoking frat boys barreling down this rutted strip of asphalt can see me in the mottled shade of the overhanging oaks.

In some places, the road simply merges with the forest on either side, so a cyclist has to duck low-hanging tree branches and dodge squirrels darting across the highway. At one point, I turned into a forest preserve in hopes of finding a trail that might take me where I want to go: a place where all I'd have to dodge are horses, not humvees. But all the trails simply go in circles to nowhere.

It's like a trap -- this place -- a tiny imitation of paradise hemmed in by murderous wreaths of marauding death-cars. I actually found myself saying "I can't wait to get into the city, so I can ride my bike."