Run 50: Wanted: Hippies

Miles: 7.5

Other Runners: zip

Two truths about my current city: It is flat. Sometimes, it is dangerous.

I lived in Chicago as an undergraduate and for four years ran willy-nilly through my Rogers Park neighborhood, blind to potential hazards. One winter, I ran every single day. I ran on icy sidewalks and through snow drifts, past people selling drugs on the corner at the Morse red line stop, along desolate stretches of frozen lake shore. A relative country-bumpkin from Small Town, Wisconsin, I was too awed by the slamming magnitude of wind and high-rises and waves and traffic to be concerned with safety.

I’m older now, and not always so successful at moving blindly and blissfully through my days.  It’s been a crime-heavy summer in Chicago; currently, the homicide rate is up 38 percent from where it was a year ago. The absolute worst thing anyone can do on a Monday is check the Chicago Tribune, for weekends are a particularly tumultuous time- and sometimes the tumult happens on streets I recognize, and once on a street I had recently incorporated into my long-run route.

We live in a safe neighborhood, to be sure. There are retired cops and firefighters, a big, leafy park just a walk away, and the incessant, mostly-endearing  shrieking of the passel of kids who play in the pool a few doors down. It sounds idyllic, I suppose, and I’m sure it is (and hope it continues) for my neighbors. As I run through this area, past so many low, brick homes and clean cement stoops and manicured, often treeless front yards, I generally feel very safe. I also feel… bored.

I desperately want to re-frame my life- and my running- through a lens that is entirely present; the truth, however, is that I am wearing a pair of Seattle-tinged sunglasses.

I left the house early yesterday morning for a cool(ish) Sunday morning run. The clouds to the south hung ominous in the early light, and dry leaves flickered overhead while bunnies scampered in funny patterns alongside me.  I ran to the west, thinking about storms, excited by the potential of something besides a long, dry day. There’s a tiny hill at Wright College on Montrose, so I ran up it, then down, then up again. And then I ran further west, about three more miles, convinced that I had reached hilly (“hilly”) ground. Because here’s the thing about hills: not only do they make a run much more interesting, they also work a wide variety of muscles. This fact is often only appreciated after plodding along on flat concrete for an hour- it really does a number on the knees.  Anyway. I did not find any hills. Just a lot of low, brick homes and clean cement stoops and manicured, treeless front yards.

The storm didn’t come. It grew light. I continued to run west, convinced that if I ran far enough I would find something that might feel like “home.” But what is home? As I ran along, growing more disgruntled with the blahs of northwest Chicago, I confronted the harsh reality that home is a lot closer to what I bemoaned in Seattle (and outright raged about in Berkeley) than I’d like to admit. Though I  located my physical home in some spectacularly dodgy apartment buildings in those areas, it was always within running distance of hills dotted by colorful, differently-shaped houses. Houses with yards overgrown with wild roses, or with terraced, pruned greenery a la Martha Stewart or with tree-houses or sleepy-eyed cats or magical twinkling lights or Tibetan prayer flags (sigh) or random sculptures, like a gigantic bust of Siddhartha Gautama balanced precariously on a stone slab. In other words, I have lived very close to rich, white hippies. It wasn’t great in Berkeley (when I was a waitress to said home-owners, who were often wildly demanding and generally out-of-touch with those of us who had to, you know, work). But it was better in Seattle, and now that I’m in Chicago, in a fine, safe, clean neighborhood, I want a little of the hippie mess. I want to run by just one yard where it seems like someone has flung a handful of seeds into the grass and they’ve sprouted into something that looks like a woods, and also like an explosion. I want to see benches and old rusty bicycles and lanterns and colorful pillows and ferns and a million and one secrets waiting, if you look just a little longer. I want to plan a run around not just where it’s “safe,” but where the St. Bernard lives and where the blackberry brambles are and where I can smell the four o’clocks, which only open at night.