Suburban Amber

A Walk in Suburbs

As most of you know, I’m not from Chicago. I’m not even from Illinois. Every weekend, without fail, you’ll see me lugging my suitcase around waiting anxiously until I can cruise home to the suburbs…in Indiana- Hammond, Indiana to be precise. Seems horrible right? Not really. This Memorial Day weekend, I was sitting at home in my stifling, sweaty house because “it is NOT air conditioning season for God sakes! It’s still May! I’m not turning on the air in May!” (That’d be my sweet mother talking). Due to the oppressive feeling in the house, I decided to go for a walk to look at trees now that I actually know some. I started in the backyard, successfully identifying two silver maples, a pine tree that would be fantastic come Christmas, a burning bush, and what I think is a green ash tree. There is one tree in my yard that I can’t identify, but whatever it is, it’s dying. I moved out from my yard. I decided to weave my way as far into the residential areas as I could without getting turned around on our twisty, confusing streets. Sometimes I could almost forget I was in Indiana and not Chicago. There are a lot of the same species around here- maples, ashes, some scattered lindens, and what I thought was a cockspur thorn, but I wasn’t willing to climb Mr. 174th Place’s fence to find out. There are a lot more coniferous trees in my area than Chicago. I think it makes sense since in a city like Chicago, you don’t want to plant a tree that’s going to get huge and crowd out a sidewalk the way the fat bottom of giant pine could. Most of the conifers I saw were in people’s yards.
My main lament is that there are scarcely any elms where I live. I love elms. They’re one of my favorite trees. I love their little seedlings, the teeth of their leaves, the grain of their bark, their trunks that go on and on before splaying out, and the twisting branches that look like veins. I know many elms were lost in the suburbs when Dutch Elm Disease, but I’m not sure if they were ever in my neighborhood. There are very few trees that look extremely young. Most of the trees have been planted in our area for as long as I can remember. There’s a big happy catalpa dripping with pods down the street from my house. There are also some birch trees (mostly in yards) and the occasional sycamore. I wish I could have gone and visited the apple tree at my old house in Hammond- it had the perfect seat for reading books nestled where the branches split from the trunk. The best thing about the walk was getting to see the city I’ve lived in for almost my entire life in a different way. I saw things I’d never noticed before. I never realized how rich our suburban forest was. And by the end of it, I didn’t care that it was hot or that I was sweating or that my house was only going to make the problem worse. It was really great. It felt better to be outside where it was hot and the trees were than to be inside. I think there really is a therapeutic quality to being outside, even if the most natural place you can get to is the city you live in. It’s neat to look at and be concerned with something outside of yourself and the people-oriented world you live in. It was a good walk

Amber evolving

Just a thought

So today in my evolution class, we started talking about definitions of a species. It sort of went on in the same vein as we’ve been- trying to figure out what nature and wilderness mean, trying to figure out that perfect definition that nails it right on the head and encompasses every last aspect of the words and concepts. Then my professor brought up these two scientists. Their names were Mishler and Donahue. At the time of this species debate, they wrote a paper about defining what constitutes a species. Their paper addressed the issue of plurality- that the species concept can be thought of in phylogenetic terms, in morphological terms, in biological/reproductive terms, and so on. The most important thing about their work is that they just said that even though the words mean different things in different concepts, everyone recognizes that they’re talking about the same thing. It was a practical, simple approach to addressing a very complex problem. I know that we really want to figure out the perfect definitions for wilderness and nature and ecosystem and all that. However, it’s important to recognize that when we say those words, everyone understands what we’re talking about. Have you ever said the word “nature” and had someone stare at you blankly waiting for explanation? How about the word “city”? I’m guessing not. I know the field is still going to continue to grapple with the possible definitions of these terms and concepts, but I think Mishler and Donahue’s idea is pretty valid. We all have an inherent sense of what these words mean. I just thought that was a neat thing I could take from another class and apply to this one. I doubt it will make a lot of difference in our quest for the words, but I thought it was interesting.

Amber in wilderness!

Professor Heneghan asked us for a discussion of wilderness, especially after our individual exploration of the Art Institute. Throughout several courses with Heneghan, I’ve always had a really hard time coming up with an answer for this and for the definition of things like “nature” and more recently “city”. While I still don’t have an exact answer, nothing that every last person could decisively agree on, it seems a bit clearer to me after visiting the Art Institute for our assignment. As I walked my straight line down the cool, dim halls, I tried to select paintings that immediately fired the word “wilderness!!!” in my brain. I didn’t want to think about it and analyze. I didn’t want to be logical and rational about it. I just want pictures that registered as being wilderness instinctually rather than cognitively. The history of human life has been deeply entwined in nature. I hoped by letting the most primal parts of my mind identify wilderness for me, I might actually be able to understand what it is. I found myself over and over choosing paintings that depicted wild, sometimes violent scenes. Wilderness to me seems like the parts of the natural world that man can not tame. They may be savage and terrible but there is still deeply embedded beauty in a thing that can’t be bridled or subdued, like a wild horse or a storm cloud.
Some of the scenes showed people at the mercy of wilderness, often cowering and tucked away in the corner, like painting “The Eruption of Vesuvius”. I guess I chose them because they weren’t peaceful, idyllic scenes with people picnicking in the grass with a clapboard sided house in the background. Wilderness is wild. It commands respect and it does not bow to people that feel the need to control and regulate their environment. Wilderness has its own regulations, even if they seem messy or violent. I loved paintings of churning, stormy waters tossing boats around. Even if people were present in the paintings I choose, they were at the mercy of their environment. They could no more control the boat they were on than the waves themselves. Wilderness was their sea captain. The paintings I identified as wilderness often weren’t even what most people would call beautiful. Sometimes it was jagged, rocks rising still and stoic from a frothing gray sea, as in “Rocks at Port”. Wilderness is not necessarily classically beautiful; its beauty comes in its wildness. I think it may be why we’re often drawn to people who seem free, passionate, and “wild”. It reminds us of something that tugs at outskirts of our mind from a long time ago when we were imbedded in the wilderness, when it controlled our fate. I like the independence of wilderness, and its demand for respect. I like the idea of savage beauty and something that man can’t control or harness or break. I’m still not precisely sure what wilderness is, but these are the things it made me think and feel when I thought I saw it.

Amber blogging

Tree Book
I decided recently that since I’m going to be doing this kind of stuff for the rest of my life, I should probably get serious about learning local species. For my birthday, a friend of mine made me this little journal with blank, unlined pages in it. I’m going to take that journal and fill up the pages with drawn pictures of all the common local trees and some that aren’t as common but still show up. Maybe I’ll throw in a few rare ones, in case I run into them. I’ll probably draw the general leaf shape and make-up (simple, compound), something about the bark, the general shape of the tree, and any identifying characteristics like a trademark smell or flower or seedpod. I’m also going to try to learn the scientific names as well as the common names. Finally, I also want to try and learn some of the common invasive and exotic species in our area. I feel like the only things I could identify right now are buckthorn and garlic mustard. So I’d like to learn the basic invasive species. It’d be even better if I could have a general idea of what a tree might look like if it were diseased or infested with pests. Heneghan tells me this is a skill that takes years to learn, but I’m hoping that I’d be able to identify a tree crawling with Asian longhorn beetles or ravaged by some kind of blight. I’m pretty excited about this little project. Summer is a good time to do this and I feel like I’ve already got a head start on it because of what we’ve learned in class. Once finals week is over, my tree book project will move fully into action. Yay!

From Amber:
The Good City

When I was walking to a test early yesterday morning, I realized how peaceful it was outside at that hour- the way the light fell through the leaves, how quiet everything was, the lazy way everything, even the traffic, seemed to move, and the smell of damp grass and wet earth from the sprinklers. It was all so calm and lovely. It made me think about how much I love this city. I know with my constant weekend excursions to Indiana it may seem like I can’t wait to get out of here, but I really do love Chicago. After reading Jeff’s post from awhile back about what constitutes a good city, I started thinking about my own personal reasons for finding Chicago “good”. While I appreciate things like clean water, adequate, and garbage disposal, those aren’t the things that bring me to define this city as good. What it is, what it’s always been for me, has been the diversity of the city. Everything about this city is diverse- our people, our architecture, our wildlife, our hinterlands, our neighborhoods. And that’s the way it is in the natural world as well. You categorize the healthiest, best, most desirable landscapes as “good” when the have a large, extremely diverse native biomass. I’ve been to other cities, Philadelphia, New York (just in passing through), Dover, Cincinnati, and they all left me feeling fairly cold. Of course, I may just be partial to the city I grew up so close to, but Chicago really does have a different feeling than those other places. It just feels more diverse to me, it feels more natural. And I think we’re a city that doesn’t forget the wild. We’ve done a good job on incorporating green life and wildlife into our urban world. It just seems to me that everywhere I’ve gone has had the same building (same heights, same materials) crowded over and over into a barren space lined with concrete and asphalt and steel. Chicago almost reminds me of a climax community. There are so many “species”, species of plants, animals, buildings, people, landmarks, neighborhoods. Our city really does feel alive. I think that’s why this place always felt so good to me, I liked living in a city that lives and breathes and grows. It’s not static, just as a climax community is not static. It’s good.