There’s an overpass hill that arches Lake Shore Drive over Foster Avenue where we could make camp and inflate the beach ball and spread out our snacks. It’s a space I’ve walked and driven by hundreds of times without a glance or a thought, but my four-year-old daughter Lena and I settle in. She runs for miles across the hill, spending hours picking through pinecones and leaves, and generally, blessedly, having no idea what is going on in the world. She does ask about the tent on the hill opposite the road, a small homeless encampment, and a reminder (never far away in Chicago) that there are new and terrible worlds of deprivation and precarity this pandemic is unleashing on those least able to deal with it. Police drive by in loops.
I’m trying to build an entire subgenre of parenting I explain as “forest adventures,” and that brings us to the Forest Preserves of Cook County, which cover 70,000 acres, good for 11 percent of Cook County’s total area; an inexhaustible source of social-distance-compliant space. It all seems mandatory, given how terrible we feel and treat each other when we don’t get outside.
On another Sunday, we drive even further south, to Calumet Woods and to the Little Calumet River. The drive there is warehouses and railyards and otherwise anonymous (to me) stretches of green, like much of the far south side and Calumet River corridor. It’s a section of Chicago that’s the most essential (and still enigmatic) to what the city is, or was: lakes connected to rivers connected to industry. We pad through mud and sticks down to the water. The river’s banks are covered in bright velvety green, punctuated by miniature daffodils. You can hear the grinding and squealing of freight trains servicing the warehouse district we drove through to get here, but it’s all absurdly beautiful. I realize it’s ten degrees warmer than it was in the parking lot. Lena wants to make camp immediately, and it’s Huck Finn vibes from here on out. The river has a vital and steady current that she’s drawn to. She’s talking to ants crawling over flowers and picking out magic wands. “This is the best place ever,” she tells me as she takes off her shoes. “I’m just living my life.”
