On coming home

The city is rudely, busily, intoxicatingly alive

Just before I left Chicago for an 18-month sojourn to the desert in October 2021, one of my favorite activities became riding my bike home through the city at night. Chalk it up to the rose-colored glasses that come between making a decision to move and actually moving. But I couldn’t get enough of this little ritual. I’d glide blissfully through neighborhoods, past darkened cafe and retail storefronts, restaurants closing up for the night, and bars just getting started. I’d roll beneath the rumbling El train and by hundreds of apartments, some with their lights on, some not.

I loved thinking about all the lives unfolding behind those walls, crammed on top of one another and on both sides. I felt heartened by how many people were still awake. I glimpsed sports, dramas and reality crap on people’s TVs. Some cooked, worked, read, or gathered around the table. Cats prowled window sills; unruly plants pressed their huge leaves against windows.

Cities are loud, tiresome, imposing places that occasionally beat you down. They’re also intoxicatingly alive—humans and creatures busily pursuing their routines and indulging their delights at all hours.

When I moved to rural southern New Mexico, the contrast was breathtaking. Places close early (and on some days when they should, never open at all). People like their properties with maximum acreage and distance from their neighbors. Vehicles often outnumber humans per household, and sidewalks are scarce. At night, the silence is so deep it swallows you up. With so little built environment in a place that also polices light pollution, the sky similarly takes on a vastness that borders on overwhelming. It inevitably shoulders its way into your regular entertainment. “You gotta come see this sunset!” “Let’s build a fire and look at the stars.”

I remember when my best friends from Chicago visited and we took them to our favorite bar. As any good city-dweller would, my friend asked the bartender to recommend a few can’t-miss cultural sites, restaurants and watering holes. The bartender replied, “I don’t know, just look up at the sky a lot.”

When we first arrived, New Mexico felt like a long, deep breath of fresh air after the claustrophobia of our four little city walls, which had shrunken considerably in the pandemic. But it’s lonely in the desert, even more so when you’re a middle-aged, interloping city slicker.

We did get occasional, mostly nonhuman, visitors. An elfish desert fox I named Carol visited every day for a stretch, tiptoeing past the windows and curling himself into a gossamer doughnut on the stone wall to nap. Hummingbirds liked the cherry sage blooms in our yard (sand?). An elusive family of javelinas routinely ravaged our poor baby peach tree. One Sunday morning a coyote the size of a German shepherd stopped by to poke around in the rosemary bushes.

Before long, I started longing for my built environment again.

When we moved back to Chicago last April, we rented a little second floor apartment in Lincoln Square. Construction promptly began on three sides. At night, the streetlights rudely cast a yellow glow into my living room, and someone on my street keeps accidentally setting off their car alarm. When I look out my east-facing windows, all I see is that glorious, scruffy Chicago Common brick. My upstairs neighbors have a mischievous black-and-white cat who scampers from one side of the apartment to the other all day long.

The first time I took the Brown Line downtown from my apartment, I documented some of the stuff I saw on people’s back porches from the train.

15 grills on one deck (shared?), two large wooden rocking chairs, a stack of Crate & Barrel boxes, garbage, hammock, fake grass, fake ivy, garbage bags, giant hot tub on a small deck, traffic cones, leather loveseat, a skeleton with a blue towel around its waist, director’s chair, wading pool, folding chair and mop, fake grass and a wicker chair, six living room couch pillows, lounge chair, stop sign, putting green, bikes, two wooden dressers.

It was a delightful exercise to think about how people use these outdoor extensions of their living spaces—one person’s storage unit or pre-dumpster is another’s tropical oasis.

I tell myself that eventually this fascination will taper off, that Chicago will beat me back down. Or maybe it won’t. And I’ll remember to appreciate this relentless urban ecosystem the way I do from my bike late at night: reassuringly, mundanely, intoxicatingly alive.