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Spotted: my first black squirrel in Chicago! Seen them in Detroit and Toronto before, but this little peekaboo is unique among the tawny grey fauna here at home. |
How about you? Are the squirrels where you live grey, black, red, or perhaps a distinguished and scholarly white? Tell us all!
This morning before sunrise, in a small field by the railroad tracks, two rabbits scampered, and three grackles morse-coded through the grass, round bodies, brushstroke tails, dot-and-dashing urgently.
This morning a squirrel lay on my doorstep. The tight, secret curve of its ear was the first thing I knew about today. No wounds I could see, just a whole and perfect body that wasn’t living anymore.
Walking the few blocks from my train to my office, a woodcock in the street. Damaged on its way down, thin, wrong-shaped by the time I found it.
I don’t want this to be what today is. The breeze-fine fur of a tail, the lean and stiffening legs, the gnarls and angles in their bodies. So I went looking for them alive, so we can celebrate them alive. Courtesy of the internet: squirrels resourceful and shiver-quick in their movement, moving, alive. Woodcocks dancing, round-chested, prowling, instinct and alive. Thousands, millions, forests full of them living, though I can’t see them.
(Silly music, for all their grave and silly charm.)
This handsome guy stands at the entrance to the Indianapolis Zoo. I love him. The hooded eye, the nest of curls, the grave and weary drag of the face reminds me of an emperor, tired, wise, all crowned in spears of laurel.
This time last year, I was here:
Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, on Costa Rica’s Pacific shore. And now I’m homebound, and desk-bound, with no chance of getting lost somewhere. An impromptu day trip to Indianapolis was the best I could manage.
It may not have the sea-shrouded glamour of a Pacific escape, but I was happy. Just sitting on the Megabus, going, awaiting, feeling flat land lope by, I was happy. Neurons blazing in those parts of the brain that only come alive when you go somewhere else, when you write a whole new map, stitch it onto the edge of the world you know.
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Walked around the empty downtown, climbed old rock walls by the river. Robins were plumply, rosily everywhere. And I managed to get sun-burnt, which made it feel even more like a proper vacation.
January 21 marks the ninth annual Squirrel Appreciation Day. We here in Nightingale Square—by which I mean me, the cats, and the squirrels. Due to their long-standing feud over sunflower seed access rights, the pigeons were considered biased witnesses and were not polled—are big fans of the squirrel, and we hope you are too. Or at least that you, like us—and this time, I mean the pigeons too!—enjoy any excuse for a party.
Might we suggest:
Lions and bison and bulls—oh, my.
The lions: Sculptor Edward Kemeys (1843-1907) is best known in this city by his twin lion statues, trademark guardians of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The bison: Kemeys produced the two above, for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park. After the fair they were placed overlooking the entrance to Garfield Park, on the city’s west side.
The bulls: Humboldt Park’s formal gardens, meanwhile, were guarded by two other statues also created for the world’s fair: a pair of bulls by sculptors French & Potter. In 1915, the bulls were taken from their display and exchanged for the bison of Garfield Park, which still stand in their place.
Oh, my. Why the switch? No documentation remains to explain it. But I love these craggy buffalo, love their vast weight which you can sense from just a touch, and the rich-veined metal of their hide.
I think of bison as stolid, massive animals. Bronze statues, too: defined to my mind by their massy wholeness, their solid single-pieced scale. Yet these two are defined by details, by hairs and sinews. Energy sparks from their frantic-furred haunches, and runs into the earth down legs lean as bone. They are all movement, a million little directions. Not single, whole and weighty, not unmoving. Not at all.
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In my last post about Humboldt Park, a handful of photos after a morning there, I was struck by how every photo shared a sense of texture. A raveling net of stems, a chapped lake, a thousand crackling leaves. And these bison have it too, the whole park’s wildfire energy, its crackle and flicker and restlessness. I love that, unlike a museum, the park is a place where I can walk right up to these sculptures and touch them, warm or cold as the air around us, and rippling with this unquiet history. |
The prime consolation of life in a ramshackle walk-up apartment on the city’s west side? My 200-acre backyard.
Humboldt Park was first etched out in the 1870s, pooling the marshland’s wet abundance into precise lagoons. Landscaping stalled as rampant corruption in the Parks District siphoned off funding and, later, forced park superintendent Jens Jensen out of office to stem his inconvenient zeal for reform. When the political tide turned, Jensen was re-installed as General Superintendent and Chief Landscape Architect in 1905. He found a grassy snarl of work never begun and original construction decayed, a perfect climate for re-imagining a signature green space. In his trademark Prairie style Jensen created a boathouse, formal gardens, and artificial watercourses to link the lagoons.
In summer the park is sleepless, always spangled with sunbathers, fishermen, helado vendors, concert-goers and the million faces of a rapidly changing neighborhood. Today the park was dry and empty, as autumn and winter chased each other across the sky. Snow flurries fell, then melted as sunlight welled up from the lagoon’s blue depths. And the whole day, the winds chased each other through the park so that nothing was smooth, no place still for the eye to slide across. Smooth water rumpled and folded, stark lines of trees bent, dry weeds clicking with the snap of skeleton fingers.
