9 Weeks in Chicago

I walked out from the eastern terminus of the Chicago Riverwalk on a drizzly, dreary Saturday afternoon, just a few days after St. Patrick’s Day. This is conveniently also the eastern terminus of the Chicago River, sometimes incorrectly referred to as the mouth. Since the river flows out of Lake Michigan, this is actually the source of the river, although this has not always been the case. The river used to be very different. 

Just south of the river is DuSable Harbor. I’ve walked by this harbor many times over the years, and I was well aware that there was a harbor there, but I had never actually noticed or remembered the name. In the winter, almost no boats can dock on Lake Michigan, so DuSable Harbor was completely empty except for a few Coast Guard vessels. Between reflecting the overcast sky and shallow littoral waters, the water was a vivid, cerulean blue. It almost seemed fake, like someone had dyed it that color, but I can’t imagine why they would do that. 

I’d come downtown specifically to walk along the river. 

DuSable Harbor, a little greyer than it appears in person

The weekend before, the streets and bridges were teeming with revelers celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. As part of a tradition going back decades, the river had been dyed green. It’s been three years since I was in Chicago for St. Patrick’s Day, and a few more since I’ve ventured down into the throngs of green-beer-drinking, shamrock-temporary-tattoo-wearing, one-fifth-Irish-on-my-mom’s-side Chicagoans and tourists. Truth be told, I was wondering if it was all the same as I remembered it. Would the crowds be as invigorating? Would the air still tingle with the excitement of Spring? Would the river be as green?

Between a slight hangover and an afternoon tattoo appointment, I hadn’t made it to see the river dyed. Walking alone on a quiet, dull afternoon was a close substitute. So I found myself headed west on the south bank of the river, returning from DuSable Harbor.

Surprisingly, it was still green. It’s always a little green. The Chicago River is not known for its pleasant color. This was the type of bright green you’d expect out of a chemical spill, though. I can’t be completely sure, but there must have been some dye still dissolved in the water from the week prior. It seemed a little odd that the water wasn’t flowing enough to clear it out in a week, but maybe my preconceptions about the river were wrong and it’s normal to have stagnant water there. The river flows out, but perhaps not all the time, or at least sometimes it trickles slowly enough for the replacing water to mix in with the old. 

As I walked around, I had a quote stuck in my mind from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “A man never steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”

The Chicago Riverwalk, mostly constructed

I started coming to Chicago years ago. My mom grew up here and I still have lots of family in the area. Over the summer or winter break I’d come up to stay with them for a week or two at a time. When I was applying for colleges, Chicago was a natural place to look and I ended up in the city at Loyola University. After school, I moved to the southwest side and got a job downtown. Three years later, I’m back to working a job that’s based out of Chicago and necessitates me making extended trips here regularly. All of that is to say that I have stepped into the Windy City many times and in many different ways.

In exploring more and more of the city, there are always new things to see, but what I have found fascinating are the big changes that are only obvious after all the construction dust has settled. There are entire high rises in the West Loop that I’m pretty sure weren’t there when I left three years ago. There’s a building at the corner of Ashland and Milwaukee that also didn’t exist back then, but for the life of me I can’t picture what was there before. A bicycle overpass on the lakefront path connects the routes north and south of Navy Pier and has shortened transit times significantly, albeit at the expense of burning thigh muscles on the uphill side and reckless speeding going down. I remember during construction when it had cops posted up on either end of it to give tickets to people who didn’t obey the temporary “walk bicycles” sign. It's now fully open to bicycle traffic.

And of course, the river walk is mostly complete. There are playgrounds down there and bars and cafes and boat docks and art installations and plenty of other attractions for tourists and locals alike. It's all new to me. 

The truth is that it wasn't exactly a coincidence that I was thinking about Heraclitus while walking along the river. The phrase had been stuck in my mind for a while and I wandered down to the river precisely because I had been thinking about it. 

I don’t really know that much about Heraclitus, except that this quote is attributed to him, and he inspired a lot of Stoic philosophers. Generally, the Stoics were trying to formulate rules for living a good life, like a lot of Greco-Roman philosophers. Their insight was that the world is full of things beyond your control (“it is not the same river”) and even humans are constantly changing (“he is not the same man”). If you can accept that as a cold, hard fact and react without letting your feelings about it control you, you’ll be one step closer to living a good life. 

The unnaturally green Chicago River

I’ve struggled a lot with what it means to live a good life. At one time, I thought it would be a music career. In my early twenties, I felt like I was headed towards settling down and starting a family. Right now, a good life means not having a permanent address. That could change at any moment. 

There’s a strong urge to settle down back in Chicago. I still find new things every time I come here. Arthur and I played in a pickleball league for the past two months and did pretty well, so we’re gonna have to come back and get better. I’ve started dating again and, not surprisingly, most people aren’t very excited about being with a partner who is only in town for a month or two at a time. I miss riding my bicycle along the lake shore, or commuting to work on it in the warm summers. 

On the other hand, it’s possible that I’m romanticizing my memories of Chicago. I left, in part, because I was sick of the city, especially the winters. The relentless, bitter cold in February and the surprise snowfalls all the way into May wore down my will to survive to the summer. I couldn't get out to ride my motorcycle for months at a time. Cheap bars were getting harder and harder to come by. Staying busy wasn't enough of a distraction from the annoying background hum that a big city radiates. Will I just end up back to being miserable in a few years if I start to put down roots again? 

So I found myself walking down the river, thinking about what a good life will look like for me if this life becomes unsustainable. I wondered about how much the city has changed and I’ve changed. Maybe the unknowns of settling in Chicago are really the same as the unknowns of settling anywhere else and I will get to a point where I can thrive there.

It is not the same river, I am not the same man. 

When I read that aphorism from Heraclitus for the first time, I was a depressed and occasionally suicidal teenager in college. I was enamored with its simplicity and incisiveness. It was a way of encountering and explaining the huge changes I was feeling, and it was helpful. It released me from the idea that I had to stay the same, that there was some value in a stable sense of self. There isn't. There never was. I am a very different person than I was back then, much less inclined to suicidal ideation, and much more prepared to venture into the unknown both internal and external. This is, in part, from sitting with and musing on Heraclitus's words. 

However, I still wrestle with how the surface level understanding of impermanence that derives from noticing changes in the world is wrong. There is value in knowing that I am the same man. The trick is not to root it in any particular incarnation of myself. 

Consider the Chicago River. As little as 200 years ago, it wasn't even really a river. It was really just marshland where water from the Mississippi River drained into Lake Michigan. Indigenous people living in the area showed it to European explorers as an alternative to carrying canoes across to Wisconsin or west to the Des Plaines River, and eventually the Mississippi River. 

Over the years, settlers showed up to support the trade route running through what is now Chicago. They decided that the marshland ought to be deeper, wider and more defined, so they dug it out to make a real river. Later, when pollution threatened the viability of Lake Michigan as drinking water, the Army Corps of Engineers reversed its flow to carry water — and whatever else happened to get dumped in the river — away from the lake. It is a testament to humanity's ability to terraform nature into submission, for better or for worse.

It also highlights how changes in expression or instantiation do not imply changes in identity, no matter how drastic. We can identify that the marshland in the 1700s is tantamount to the modern river. The water molecules are (probably) completely different. The exact route of the water flow and its direction have changed. There are concrete walls instead of dirt banks. There are even skyscrapers built over what used to be open water, with boats moored among the foundation piles. It has little in common with the river of the 1700s, but it is without a doubt the same. 

On the other hand, it is surprisingly difficult to draft a clear definition of the river. The cerulean blue waters of DuSable Harbor are definitely Lake Michigan. The sickly green water just a few hundred feet east is definitely the Chicago River. In between is a greenish, blueish mix that doesn't lend itself well to distinguishing the two bodies. 

You could draw a line and declare that on one side is the river, and the other side is the lake. There are plenty of people and groups who do just that. It would be a fully artificial line that you could reasonably draw in a number of places, and any particular choice is more a reflection of the purpose of the line than some natural law of the universe. After all, the Chicago River and Lake Michigan aren't real. They are projections. 

This is a paradoxical, but powerful tool. We can identify continuity over time, even if we struggle to rigorously define the thing. Language is incredible in that regard. 

This applies to humans too. There is no essential reason to consider the modern notion of an "individual" as truly a singular being. I share no cells, and probably no atoms with the fertilized egg that could arguably be the first thing we would consider "Gordon." I share vanishingly with the crying baby that was born 29 years ago. 

That little crying baby and that clump of cells in my mother's womb is me because we agree that they are. Nothing more. We could just as reasonably agree that my mother and I are the same, along with her mother, and her mother, all the way back to the first organism and perhaps even further back to the first protein clumps and amino acid molecules, but this would not be a particularly useful concept. 

I am me because of the continuity that starts at my conception and will end at my death is conducive to a functioning society. That's all. It is entirely a manmade construct, and 100% real. Every day that I get a little closer to accepting that, I get a little closer to a good life. 

That’s not a method, though. There’s no advice here. No one trick from the Stoics to help accept that everything is made up and the points don't matter. 

Sometimes I feel like I'm leaping into the abyss, hoping that one day I will land in the waters of a river I have seen before and know my life is good.