Watering Holes

“It’s the closest thing to an ocean you can get in Chicago,” he said.

I had draped my arms over the red railing to watch the flow of traffic beneath me. Cars of every make, model, and hue were pushing against one another in the steady current of steel and rubber. Car after car lurched forward, pushing and pulling like ocean waves. Their movement matched the slight breeze, but where a sea carries in salt, all that was brought here was the stale smell of smog. I wondered where everyone was going, where they had been.

I straightened a little and glanced over. My friend, who had a way of romanticizing the world as all poets do, didn’t say anything else. Behind him, the street lamps hung their arms between old brick buildings and new glass towers. A traffic light blinked, but there were few cars. For a city, Chicago had little gray in the spring. There was always sprigs of green, always the blush of brick, paint, and people.

“This ocean sure has a lot of cars,” I finally replied.

I had to agree though, this strip West Randolph Street above the Dan Ryan Express was like an ocean. I was reminded of looking out to an expanse of water stretched endlessly to the edge of the horizon. Here, where there were thousands of buildings and cars, thousands of colors condensed into small boxes of sight, I thought I was looking into the expanse of life. There below I could see a man holding the hand of his wife in the passenger seat of his car. I saw a large cooler in the backseat of another beside bags of groceries. I saw a child pulling her mother’s hands in a Toyota, a mother frowning at her husband in the Ford. I even say a man checking his phone obsessively between quick glances up at the road, a woman’s bag in the empty seat beside him.

It even sounded like an ocean here. There was the constant sound of wind but also the sound of nothing at all. Silence ebbed between me and my friend and between us and the city. It was the kind of silence punctured not with a lack of sound, but with distant sighing of no particular distinction. It sounded like we were not there.

The smell of chocolate was suddenly brought in by a change in the breeze. I opened my eyes and, somewhere, heard a sea gull crying.