After four days on the rural road, we’re vacationing for a weekend in Chicago. Yesterday we spent the morning at the Art Institute. I was prepared to ignore the famous paintings for less crowded, and I’ll admit, more recherché offerings. I even pronounced myself “bored” with Impressionism. That lasted ten minutes. The hits just kept on coming. By the time I got to Monet’s London Bridge, any further resistance was futile, and I drowned.
So when we emerged to sunlight, and my loved ones pronounced themselves exhausted, it was perhaps inevitable that I would gravitate to the Riverfront, even without particularly meaning to. Being new to Chicago, I only intended to wander around and look at buildings. But even if a skyscraper is Michelangelo’s David, if you’re trying to view it from the adjacent sidewalk, all you see is the underside of its scrotum. I kept seeking a wider vista. Besides, I can’t help being a country lad, and no matter where, I will compulsively navigate to nature, even if it’s caged in concrete. When I got to the algae-laden, sluggish water, my first reaction was, meh. But I crossed to the far side, looked back to the skyline, then down at its reflection. Increasingly mesmerized, I looked for the next half-hour.
It came to me that you best understand the soul of a monumental thing by seeing its reflection in water. The most iconic photos of the Rockies are those mirrored in adjacent lakes. But whereas the Tetons on Jenny Lake are best captured in the stillness of dawn, my refracted view of these skyscrapers came at midday, in a light breeze, further roiled by the gentle wakes of sightseeing boats. One effect was to shatter the glass, to explode the rectangles, to render fantastically kinetic the static rectangles angles hulking above. The other was to mix color and light in an infinite series of combinations. The water I had thought of as “green” became every color. While the glass planes of the buildings reflected monochrome planes of tint, in the water they were like the tubes of paint becoming pointillistically mixed. Except there wasn’t a palette wide enough to encompass the range, a brush fine enough to capture the delicate strokes. Whereas the light on glass above glared and blinded, its water-spirit below was lustrous and luminous. The river reflected, not the solid buildings themselves, but the thousands of evanescent souls living inside them. My sense of solidity felt as shattered as the reflected buildings. I thought: how impossibly, optimistically fragile is the concrete and steel. No matter how we armor and encase ourselves, how we remain creatures of water.