Walking to Chicago (finally)

Some number of years ago I fell off my bike and broke my arm.  Because of when I broke it I ended up not biking for another year and so when I finally began to ride a lack of practice and fear of injuring myself again kept me from biking as often as I had been.  

When I first got a job working as an assistant Hebrew school teacher for my synagogue I would bike the three miles it took to get there.  After breaking my arm my mom drove me and this worked until I got my permit but refused to drive myself so I was back to getting myself to Hebrew school.  But I wasn’t about to bike so I started walking.

This, along with walking to school, meant that I was walking 13.5 miles a week (excluding walking that I did in school).  It quickly became my ‘thing’ to walk anywhere and everywhere if I could even if it would take me an hour or more. 

I’ve walked for hours on end to run errands or see a movie but walking was just a mode of transport that allowed me to take routes that cars couldn’t and listen to music and text and whatever else I felt like.  This continued for a year and a half or so before I started talking about walking as more than just a mode of transport.  I started talking to people about walking to every state capital or across the country, but baby steps would need to come first.  And this is where I got the idea to walk to Chicago. 

I planned it out in my head a month or so before going.  I would walk along the train tracks to avoid getting lost since I wouldn’t have a map or a smart phone to help.  Then I would finish at Union Station and take a train back to Deerfield.  So I put out an open invite on Facebook and starting talking seriously to my friends.

When the day came the sky was a bit overcast so I packed a poncho for the wet and a sweater for the cold.  I brought money and a camera and my phone and a water bottle.  I left Deerfield train station with one other friend (three people had responded to the open invite, one was a maybe and then canceled, one was a yes and then got sick, and the third made it) at 8:30 am on a Monday morning in early June.  We took a picture at Deerfield and planned to take one at every station on our way into the city

Since we were familiar with the Deerfield area we didn’t walk next to the tracks but instead walked to the next station down the line before we left the town behind and walked along the tracks through some forest for a couple miles.  This is how it went for quite a while, walking along the tracks when there wasn’t civilization around and sticking to sidewalks and trusting my friend’s smartphone to guide us when there was. 

After stopping for lunch we continued on for another couple hours before my friend received a text from his mom telling him to come home once we reached the next station because he’d have reached the city limits of Chicago.  I started texting my mom about wheter or not I would continue on alone.  We walked and I agonized over my decision as we got closer and closer to the point at which my friend would leave me.  I finally made my decision almost in sight of the station to continue the whole way to Union Station.

After this point I walked along the tracks for several miles under now clear skies.  The tracks still cut through a forest which I found weird because I hadn’t thought that there would be so much nature so close to/inside of Chicago.  I randomly met two boys with bikes while crossing a bridge.  Luckily it seemed that they weren’t doing drugs or drinking (although I’d seen plenty of broken bottles on my way) so I continued on my way after an acknowledging nod. 

As I continued I saw up ahead someone in an orange neon reflector vest and, considering the fact that the last official person I’d seen was a cop that had asked me if I knew I was trespassing if I was walking along the tracks I quickly looked for a way off the tracks which is more difficult than you might think because although there are ways to get on close to civilization where there are lots of people who might want to get to the train tracks there was a nice high fence along the border between the tracks and the forest.  Fortunately there was a way out that took me into an interesting neighborhood that was full of cookie-cutter houses, some still under construction.  It was particularly unusual to see smiling faces and talk to and be talked to.  I wandered around this community trying to stay close to the tracks and trying to avoid people in case they asked me who I was and what I was doing.  Eventually I made my way back to the fence and followed a forest path along a low hill that lead me to a back yard and another hole in the fence.

I was able to walk next to or close by the tracks for the next 10 minutes or so until I started to enter the actual city part of Chicago, but this wasn’t an issue because I was still able to zig and zag to follow the tracks.  This took me through some interesting neighborhoods (not interesting because they were particularly X but just because they didn’t look like what I’d imagined Chicago would look like and they were oddly both similar and different to my neighborhood. 

This zigging and sagging went well for half an hour or so until I zigged under a bridge and was about to turn right onto a sidewalk that would follow the tracks I’d just gone under turned into US 94 a 4 lane highway that I wouldn’t be able to walk along.  Looking around for what to do I found a bus station with a map of the area.  I noted when I should turn: right at the first street, straight for a couple blocks, left, right, and so forth before setting out.  This turned out to be a bad idea because the map had spaces between roads that I thought simply showed the map was zoomed in, instead they were spaces between major roads and I quickly became lost.  I was lost for so long in fact that I had dinner.  I estimate that it was about an hour and a half before I was back on track.

Nothing super eventful happened for the next several hours until my mom started to text me around 6:30  because she was worried about how long I was taking and because I was about to enter the worst neighborhoods in my journey just as it was getting dark.  She wanted me to come back at the next station but acknowledged that I wouldn’t feel much if I didn’t complete my mission so we decided that after reaching the next station I would skip strain to Union and try to catch an 8:35 train back to Deerfield.  My mom thought this a daunting task because I would have 90 minutes to walk 6 miles and to make it I would need to walk much faster than I had been.  So I put on the gas and began to power through the last leg of my journey.  To keep myself from getting lost I got text updates with directions from my mom.  Eventually as I got close and my time was running short I called my mom to get ‘live updates’ since my position was changing regularly and my mom was now following my progress on Google maps.  At 8:31 I told my mom I was going to hang up and sprint the last 8 blocks to try and make it to the train.  And so I flew down the street running faster than I would’ve believed possible considering that I’d been walking for 12 hours and gone 30 miles (including my hour and a half of being lost), sprinted into the station, down the stairs, and onto the loading platform where my train was waiting.  Relief flooded through me until I approached the first door and it was closed.  So was the next, and the next, and the next, so I look through the windows and see a conductor.  I knock to get her attention and to ask her to open the doors, but when she turns to face me she just shakes her head.

I then spent two hours cooling off waiting for the next train home to arrive at 10:35.  I got on this train and spent an hour or so on the ride home being ridiculously sore.  My mom picked me up at the Deerfield station close to midnight and drove me home.