I did some poking around and the most likely explanation is that the trains were delivering flour to a nearby industrial bakery that, though warned of the imminent redevelopment of the line, waited until the very last possible minute to make alternate shipping arrangements. The least likely, though most lovely, explanation is the story told by longtime trail neighbors, who swear that the circus used to use those tracks, sending carloads of animals toward the United Center, elephants and giraffes nodding to condo dwellers as they passed.
This, of course, is a fairy tale, though friends in the neighborhood swear to its truth. No record of the circus train exists with either the railway or the city. It turns out, in fact, that Amy’s ghost train may have been delivering neither bread nor beasts. Rather, in order for Canadian Pacific to hold on to the air rights above the tracks all these years, they were required by law to keep them in use. And so every once in a while, for no reason, they’d run a train bearing nothing slowly by.
* * *
In April 2014 the Chicago Department of Transportation removed the old railway bridge at the Ashland Avenue end of the Bloomingdale Trail. It was taken to a work yard, scrubbed clean of rust, repainted, and then driven at dawn one mile west to Western, where it was reinstalled, and now connects the neighborhoods of Humboldt Park and Bucktown. The video of the bridge’s slow, slow transit, available online, reminds me of footage of the journey of Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass,” the 350-ton granite boulder Heizer—a reclusive land artist perhaps best known for his 1970 earthwork “Double Negative”—had excavated from a Southern California quarry in 2012 and trucked over ten nights, at a stately two miles per hour, to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Over those ten nights crowds of thousands gathered to marvel and clap, and others to mock and jeer. It’s just a rock, the skeptics scoffed. Why waste all this time and money staking a claim to art? But like “Double Negative”—which is basically two big gashes cut into the earth atop a remote Nevada mesa—the appeal of the big rock, which now sits suspended above a deep trench cut into the LACMA plaza, is as much about what’s not there as what is.
Weed or seed?
Can’t a plant—a rock, a trail, a home—be both at once?
* * *
All summer long city crews have been working on the bridge supports at Humboldt Boulevard, spitting distance from my door, jackhammering away at the unhappy hour of 7:00 A.M. When this phase of construction is done, there’ll be a new access ramp over on Whipple, and bleacher seating installed along the Humboldt overpass that will give visitors a place to sit and rest, and look down at traffic on the boulevard, and in my front yard.
It’s a long arc to this yard from that first apartment on Augusta, the one that anchored me in Chicago. I was only there one year, but in the eighteen that have passed since I haven’t strayed far from that central square, even as its perimeter has expanded, pushing past Western to California and beyond, and north to the edge of the Bloomingdale Trail, whose rocks and weeds inscribed new memories into my muscles as recently as last year.
* * *
I went up on the trail in July 2014, on a city-sanctioned tour organized for the neighbors. We had to wear hard hats and safety vests, but even so we didn’t get far. It had rained all morning and the construction site above, invisible from the ground, was a dark, rutted moonscape of mud and debris, so violently at odds with the trail of memory that as I clambered back down the embankment I realized I was shaking, stunned into emotion.
According to the plan for the site, once construction is complete the trail will be home to an elaborate new ecosystem of native plants, with hanging gardens of forsythia, thickets of poplars and maidenhair ferns, and meadows of blue flax and bee balm, goat’s beard and yellow mullein—desirable, intentional, weeds no more. A spiraling observatory—an earthwork built from soil and rubble—will anchor the western trailhead, its access points marked by evergreen spires. A tunnel of paperbark maples will open onto a public arts space at Ashland, and magnolias will bloom over Julia de Burgos Park.
Like the circus train, it will soon be a true-life fairy tale that once upon a time in the city you could climb a fence and take a long walk through nothing, along a trail of beautiful weeds.1
KATHRYN M. FLINN
This Is a Place
LIKE MANY TEENAGERS, I COULD not wait to leave the place where I grew up, in western Pennsylvania. There, my family often took a walk on a nearby Rails-to-Trails path that I liked to call the Trail of Ecological Destruction. This former railroad bed lined with invasive shrubs crosses creeks turned orange by acid mine drainage, passes the sewage treatment plant and the recycling center, and ends at a coal-fired power plant that releases more sulfur dioxide than any other power plant in the nation. I wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail, not this devastated landscape.
But, after years of working as an ecologist, I have come to realize that grim terrain like this holds endless ecological interest. I recently took a position as a biology professor near Cleveland, and I’m fully confident that ecological research in the immediate region can sustain a career’s worth of curiosity. But I choose to do local ecology for another compelling reason—I have found that the local, lived-in landscape actually works best as a tool for helping people discover and value the environment. I do local ecology not
