November 14, 2020: Chicago, IL
Eight months into various levels of lockdowns, I was surrounded by recyclables. Boxes, bottles, cans, newspapers, even things that probably aren’t accepted in Chicago’s single-stream: I was swimming in it. Months of reduced government services, increased residential trash production what with all the time spent at home, and the disappearance or damage of some garbage receptacles during summer protests and riots had converged to create an enormous backlog at Streets and Sanitation, so when our condo building’s single blue cart inexplicably went missing one day, the city told us that it could be months before we got a new one.
I refused to quit recycling altogether, even if there is a chance that it’s all a mirage. And I couldn’t accept my friends’ exhortations to just throw my crap in another bin in the alley because it’s “what everyone else does”: I wouldn’t want mine filled with someone else’s stuff. When we stop heeding the golden rule and the planned allocations of public space and services, society falls apart. With society already falling apart, I certainly wasn’t going to accelerate the process by filling up my neighbors’ dumpster.
So I started hording. The condo, already cluttered with the trappings of city life, the aftereffects of moving, the random stuff produced by two people still working at home, started to fill with recycling. I was tripping on broken down boxes, loose papers were randomly flying through the air, we were drinking less almond milk everyday just to delay the arrival of an empty carton. I had two options, in the form of Chicago’s two Residential Recycling Dropoff Centers, neither of which is walkable or easily public transit-able, even if those modes had been possible with piles of empty shampoo bottles and fifteen year-old National Geographics, from Wicker Park. And neither of us has a car. Things were coming to a head.
I’d left Cook County a grand total of once since March, though, and was itching to explore. So we decided to rent a car, drop off all the recyclables, and try a new part of the city. (There’s a valid question in here of whether the total environmental impact of throwing out a few loads of technically recyclable products would be less than that of renting a car and driving around. I chose not to grapple with it.) We scooped the vehicle at the Avis on Fullerton, loaded it up, and departed.
It was a simple day: a short trip to Evanston to see my sister and stroll along the lakefront there (now that she lives in the burbs, any day I have a rental car feels like it requires a journey north), followed by a drive to the southern recycling center. From there we went to Bridgeport – we were already close, and I wanted to try a new coffee shop. Bridgeport Coffeehouse is a delight, with a good selection of pastries and a wide variety of in-house roasts for drinking and as whole beans. Nearby, we found Henry Palmisano Park, an old quarry undergoing rewilding, named after a local fishing enthusiast. It has a remarkable topography for ordinarily flat Chicago: a peak (built on top of an old landfill, an additional twist in our trash-fueled excursion) you can climb for views of the city, prairie grasses and wetland, and a steep descent into the depths of the quarry, now home to a fishing hole, from which you cannot see an inch of the urban development so prominently visible from above. Though not quite as multi-layered as Hong Kong’s Kowloon Park, it really does feel like a world apart from Chicago.
On the drive home, we were reminded of all the services the city is not currently providing when, driving under an overpass, we had to crawl delicately around the perimeter of a pothole so enormous it had filled with water and become a small pond. You could not stay on the road and get around it. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the harrowing off-road experience on the Bosnian border.
With the rental car safely returned and my body and soul nourished by relatively fresh air, I kicked back at home to try a new drink: Trader Joe’s Sparkling Cranberry Flavored Juice Blend. Not an inspiring name, I know. Not really an inspiring drink, either: it was flat and pretty much just tasted like cranberry juice.
Gummies and Orange Soda 