Letters from a Greyhound, part 3: The Stories we tell

Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Creative Commons via user Daniel, Al Fred Photo Collection

I want to tell you a story. I have a lot of them; I hope they’re just a little entertaining. I hope, in turn, you’ll share one of yours with me. I’ll tell you about a foolhardy trip I took to the Midwest, and, in exchange, why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing in the meantime.

We’re all storytellers. The first pieces of human literature are stories; they’re how we told future generations myths, and advice. From fables to morals, we told each other stories. Storytelling is what defines us. At the end of the day we fill in the blanks with stories, with explanations and tales and justifications and excuses, each one with a beginning, a middle, a few diversions, and hopefully, an end.

Some stories aren’t even told — they’re lived, day by day. They’re lived by millions of people, most of whom will never meet each other, and yet somehow they will all come together to tell a tale, spanning generations.

There’s a story to be told about Chicago. If you’ve been following, this is the third of my letters, a set of stories I’ve taken upon myself to tell about the third largest city in the United States, and the journey I took there. It changed me — I mean, every journey changes everyone in its own way, otherwise we would never explore nor travel — but that trip to Chicago reminded me how damned beautiful these United States really are. Their raw, unsullied beauty is something I don’t know how to put into words, and I cannot really celebrate them in photographs either. They simply are, they simply were, and frankly, they will be even when we are no longer.

Chicago was built on wilderness. It was built with dirt and mud and houses that could not survive the wind, and it was built on a blank page that was being sullied by explorers out of their element, but built it was. It wasn’t built like the plantation, or the little village, it was built like a port. Plantations breed nothing but horrors. Those quaint villages and strange settlements up north were xenophobic and closed off: the religiously persecuted now persecuting other religions.

But ports? Well, trade will flow come hell or high water, and Chicago flourished through that. They built something there, something in the legacy of Point du Sable, a place people came and saw and bought. They built something there, and that “they” is some strange combination of various different tycoons, merchants, and businessmen. What they built brought an entire world to Chicago. People from various walks of life, who had nothing in common, came to Chicago. It was a way to connect to the Mississippi, and the transients that dotted the most popular route in old America all somehow congregated in Chicago. It was a shining city in the Midwest, a place to make a home for yourself, make a name for yourself.

The blank page was beyond covered. There were a million scribbles that lay across it, voices of people who’d never have lived the lives they did if it weren’t for Chicago.

It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. I mean, it could never just be Chicago — there’s too much happening in the Midwest for that. I promised you a love song for Sandusky, and I intend to deliver.

It was up and down the rivers, from bank to bank, in the ebb and flows of the Mississippi, the Chicago, the Detroit, the Great Lakes and the tributaries that flowed from them. The grand port city was built bit by bit, as America began to mine and build and smelt and sell, and the great industrial titans that found themselves unquestionably drawn to the Midwest, broke ground on the sites and locations that would become synonymous with American industry and ingenuity for decades to come.

It’s a part of the Great American Myth. I’ve spoken of it a bit — I’ve likened it to the American Dream, the Promise of the Old West, the dream to wander. To strike out on your own and show the world that it never needed to support you. That was always the center to the myth, just the pure faith that America, in her unimaginable, untamable beauty, would always deliver if you took it into your own hands. The first leg of that myth is the landing, the Pilgrims, the first steps on Plymouth and the first winters. The second is the Old West, the Cowboy and the Outlaw, the great expansion and the conquering of the plains. And the third? The third is the rivers and the lakes and the American Merchant and the great attractions that built our first melting pots.

I will one day delve into the darker aspects of those myths, the people trampled underfoot. They cannot be forgotten, and their voices cannot be ignored.