bored
$0in which ongoing quarantine and a winter storm reignites a hobby
WHERE: CHICAGO
WHY: BITTER COLD
WHO: SNOWZILLA
//
// 02.20.2021
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// 04.27.2023 - WARMING UP
When I lived on the Northside of Chicago, it took me ten minutes to walk from my apartment to the lakefront trail. Living on the Southside, it took at least three times as long to do the same. To be sure, it was a privilege in either case. Maybe the real disparity was not so much the walk time as the walkability. Because I lived south of the Midway — an ironically mile-long public park in the Hyde Park neighborhood — it saved me more time to risk the crosswalk across four lanes of traffic.
Walkability does not make as compelling of a case about the differences between Northside and Southside as, say, the life expectancy dropping by thirty years as one rides the Red Line train from north to south. Nor did walkability thwart any one of the dozen present at Promontory Point the Saturday morning of February 20th, 2021.
I can't speak for any of them, but I also can't deny that everyone there was unhinged to at least a tiny degree. We were all still waiting for a vaccine. We were all holed up due to snowstorms that week. The moment the sun shone through the previous Friday, we all must have looked at the forecast for Saturday morning and concluded: it's worth bracing the polar vortex temperatures to see a sun rise. (In this regard too, the northern state of Illinois is more privileged in its wherewithal for cold weather than, say, the state of Texas that week).
Four years prior was the last time I watched the sun rise over Lake Michigan, from Rogers Park on the Northside. I was unable to sleep at all the night before. Following any unintentionally sleepless night is usually the day breaking my spirit, but in this case, I was just relieved. The walk across my university campus put me at zero risk of being run over, except for the coveted stray golf cart that could earn me a settlement of free tuition. The wide slab of concrete provided a lakefront-row to a cold, sterile hue of hydrogen and helium. The weather was slightly chillier than perfect. I had the view all to myself.
How presumptuous I was to think that a polar vortex as well as the inequities of privilege and urban planning on the Southside would help me have such a view all to myself again. Still I earned that presumption, and maybe so did the rest of the dozen other people, waking up before 6am. We all braced the cold and dark and risked blue fingers and toes to see a brick red sun. We went to such great lengths to meet wavelengths of light whose warmth signified their own long journey before scattering; before a child tosses it inches above the horizon into pinks and oranges; before the Edward F. Dunne water crib remembers the flames that send it some feet further into rose golds; before the devil himself emerges from a hell frozen over and makes a deal with a cowboy to send it yards into its final yellows and whites.
Trees in turn cradle a couple in their crucial shade. A snow dinosaur contemplates glistening with sweat, but manages to just glimmer and listen. After witnessing the cowboy's blasphemy, child and parent retreat while dawn is still warm. Their backs are turned to the sun so that they might remember its kindness before reverting to a cold, blank, ceaseless stare. The rest of us followed suit and scattered into our respective journeys home. All of us stole that same memory, no matter how fleeting.
I admittedly came for golden hour, but I stuck around for the context. It’s a privilege that the context has stuck with me. I chose this early set of photos to first practice the infusion of writing with photography because this is the first (and currently only) set that felt like a story that was more than just tourism, even if it’s slice of life. I hope to take more photos like that, of more impactful contexts. That way I can write more meaningfully. Just as well I hope to write first and try to let my photography extend from my writing.
// 02.20.2021
// 04.27.2023 - WARMING UP
When I lived on the Northside of Chicago, it took me ten minutes to walk from my apartment to the lakefront trail. Living on the Southside, it took at least three times as long to do the same. To be sure, it was a privilege in either case. Maybe the real disparity was not so much the walk time as the walkability. Because I lived south of the Midway — an ironically mile-long public park in the Hyde Park neighborhood — it saved me more time to risk the crosswalk across four lanes of traffic.
Walkability does not make as compelling of a case about the differences between Northside and Southside as, say, the life expectancy dropping by thirty years as one rides the Red Line train from north to south. Nor did walkability thwart any one of the dozen present at Promontory Point the Saturday morning of February 20th, 2021.
I can't speak for any of them, but I also can't deny that everyone there was unhinged to at least a tiny degree. We were all still waiting for a vaccine. We were all holed up due to snowstorms that week. The moment the sun shone through the previous Friday, we all must have looked at the forecast for Saturday morning and concluded: it's worth bracing the polar vortex temperatures to see a sun rise. (In this regard too, the northern state of Illinois is more privileged in its wherewithal for cold weather than, say, the state of Texas that week).
Four years prior was the last time I watched the sun rise over Lake Michigan, from Rogers Park on the Northside. I was unable to sleep at all the night before. Following any unintentionally sleepless night is usually the day breaking my spirit, but in this case, I was just relieved. The walk across my university campus put me at zero risk of being run over, except for the coveted stray golf cart that could earn me a settlement of free tuition. The wide slab of concrete provided a lakefront-row to a cold, sterile hue of hydrogen and helium. The weather was slightly chillier than perfect. I had the view all to myself.
How presumptuous I was to think that a polar vortex as well as the inequities of privilege and urban planning on the Southside would help me have such a view all to myself again. Still I earned that presumption, and maybe so did the rest of the dozen other people, waking up before 6am. We all braced the cold and dark and risked blue fingers and toes to see a brick red sun. We went to such great lengths to meet wavelengths of light whose warmth signified their own long journey before scattering; before a child tosses it inches above the horizon into pinks and oranges; before the Edward F. Dunne water crib remembers the flames that send it some feet further into rose golds; before the devil himself emerges from a hell frozen over and makes a deal with a cowboy to send it yards into its final yellows and whites.
Trees in turn cradle a couple in their crucial shade. A snow dinosaur contemplates glistening with sweat, but manages to just glimmer and listen. After witnessing the cowboy's blasphemy, child and parent retreat while dawn is still warm. Their backs are turned to the sun so that they might remember its kindness before reverting to a cold, blank, ceaseless stare. The rest of us followed suit and scattered into our respective journeys home. All of us stole that same memory, no matter how fleeting.
I admittedly came for golden hour, but I stuck around for the context. It’s a privilege that the context has stuck with me. I chose this early set of photos to first practice the infusion of writing with photography because this is the first (and currently only) set that felt like a story that was more than just tourism, even if it’s slice of life. I hope to take more photos like that, of more impactful contexts. That way I can write more meaningfully. Just as well I hope to write first and try to let my photography extend from my writing.
awwstin
$127,711.77*Just trying to be conscientious and not complacent. I am suspicious of people who tell me I’m good on the latter.
TELL ME: I’M NOT COMPLACENT
READ: SHORTER LETTERS
FOLLOW: NOTHING, NADA, NIL
// ASTERISK // I’m not for sale, but if you wanna buy me coffee, as in enough coffee to wipe my remaining student loan debt, go here. Run, don’t walk.