An Anglo in Español Land

I have attended the last four Ferias – each time a little more comfortable with my own Spanish skills ­– and navigated the million square feet of display space in the Guadalajara Exposition Center in awe of the range of offerings. I have also attended the last 35 American Booksellers Association conventions, and there is no comparison.

While New York’s BEA event has more hoopla and swag, Guadalajara’s FIL is way more fun. The “calles” of publisher booths are only a small part of the story. The most enticing aspects of the Guadalajara Book Fair are the 300 literary panels, presentations, and especially musical evening events that bring in all the heavyweights of the Latin American book industry. All of them seem to dress in dark suits looking far more glamorous than the swarms of booksellers at BEA decked out in air travel casual.

But since you can only spend so much time roaming trade show aisles (regardless of the industry) before you feel like you’re caught in some kind of video loop of nonstop car insurance commercials, the beauty of the Guadalajara Book Festival is getting out to see the city itself.

Guadalajara vs. New York

Guadalajara has it all over New York. Granted New York weather in late May can be pleasant, but it also can be rainy and cold. Not so Guadalajara. Held in late November, FIL occurs during the dry season for Mexico’s central highlands. Daytime sunshine and temperatures in the 70s are virtually guaranteed; and even the cool nights never fall below the 50s. There are no HVAC systems in Guadalajara; nor are any needed. An extra blanket and perhaps a small fan take care of any unusual extremes.

And unlike New York, the pace of Guadalajara is slow.

Guadalajara packs 1.5 million people into 58 sq. miles, perhaps not as densely as the 1.5 million packed into Manhattan’s 23 sq. miles, but still pretty crowded. A taxi ride from the international airport (well, the only airport) is a mere twenty minutes and $15 to El Centro regardless of time of day. You can take a couple of city buses into the center city for $1, but that makes the trip at least an hour and there is hardly space for a backpack over your shoulder in the small buses, much less a suitcase. Take a cab.

My hotel during the last few visits is two blocks from La Glorieta Chapalita, essentially a large roundabout street surrounding a large shady park with benches, a gazebo, sculptures, and a regular Sunday art show. Walk the quarter mile perimeter of the glorieta and you can pretty much find everything you need: a 7-11, a farmacia, a night club, two fancy restaurants, several outside torta and ahogado vendors, a full service grocery, a local “Cuarto de Kilo” burger joint, and a beauty parlor (packed on Saturday afternoon).

$50 a Night

My Hotel Suites Internacional is a small, locally owned place and perhaps a little on the funky side with only two desk clerks – an old man at night and young woman during the day – who mostly sit in a lounge chair watching TV. During my five day visit, I never saw another guest, although I occasionally heard door closing echoes against the ubiquitous Mexican tile floors, wood walls, and wrought iron railings. No carpet or floor rugs in this place. With a full kitchen, king bed, balcony, living room, free wireless, and large tilting casks of mineral water in the hall outside the door, my $50/night room had all I could possible want.

From this humble headquarters, I was a short fifteen minute walk from the Expo center for the Feria; but more importantly, I was right on the route of several city buses that pretty much went to all the key high points of the city: the Centro Histórico, the famous Zapopan city square in front of the 17^th century Virgen de Zapopan Basílica (now swallowed by greater Guadalajara), the large central Parque Agua Azul, even the small ceramic craft centers of Tlaquepaque and Tonalá on the outskirts of the city.

Buses and Churches

The old city buses seat about 50 and usually are jammed with another 20 standing in the aisles. But they come frequently and only cost 40 cents a ride. The downside is that they seem to stop at random places (when you see one that you want, you wave your arm and hope the driver will stop), and most apparently have never been inside a Monroe Shocks and Struts shop since they rolled off some Mexican assembly line.

When setting off early to explore Guadalajara (or any Mexican city for that matter), you soon find that the only public buildings open before 9 am are churches. That’s really kind of nice, since there are churches everywhere and they all are filled with interesting religious relics and art – and people. Sunday, weekdays, all day – there are masses scheduled pretty much every hour.

A quiet church service is not a bad way to start a day in a strange city…at least it’s a good way to get your brain thinking in Spanish after a night of English email and web crawling. While the small parish churches are nice, the central Cathedral is something else. Whether it is the National Cathedral on Mexico City’s huge Zocaló, the Metropolitan Cathedral on Guadalajara’s Plaza de la Liberación, or one in a smaller city like Morelia’s Cathedral on the Plaza de Armas; the central cathedral in Mexico is the heart of the city where at one time or another everyone touches base.

Shops and Museums

Once I got the cathedrals behind me, shops and museums were opening for the day. In all of my trips to Guadalajara, I have never missed the famous Orozco murals in the Hospicio Cabañas. It is a pleasant walk from the Cathedral through the fountains and benches of Plaza Tapatiá. Built as a hospital complex and orphanage in the 1800s, the buildings with their interlocking courtyards and arched passageways are now home to art classes and exhibits…but none as dramatic as the Orozcos in the entrance hall.

All the famous Mexican muralists had a political, even revolutionary, axe to grind, but Orozco seems to have transcended that to touch on the very spirit of the Mexican people. Like the Michelangelos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Orozcos cover the ceilings of the hall such that all of us below – tourists and locals alike – walk about with our heads tilted up, necks cramped from the awkward stance. It is worth it.

Don’t Miss The Rodeo

All that Fodor checklist stuff aside, the most exciting foray on this trip was to a Sunday rodeo in a warehouse district not too far from the richly planted Parque Agua Azul. I thought I had the location Google mapped in my head, but as I wandered farther and farther from the park in what was starting to look like an industrial wasteland of meth kitchens and rogue lead battery recycling chop shops, I was happy to see a policía in his standard bullet proof vest talking on the street with two guys in jeans and cowboys hats.

I asked him where the Charerría was. He jabbered with his amigos a bit too fast for me to catch. I tried again explaining it was a place where the traditional Guadalajara charros (cowboys) competed. Still nothing. Finally, he pointed back up the street to where I’d been and suggested that I find a tourist booth in the park. Forget it, I said to myself. What bad can happen on a Sunday?  I’ll find it on my own. Three blocks later, I happily saw the telltale signs of every rodeo: big pickups, horse trailers, and big piles of horseshit leading into a cement-walled compound.

A Wild Show

I bought my ticket for two bucks and went through a big wooden door into an empty, dusty courtyard. A guy in a cowboy hat sitting on an overturned trash can pointed to concrete stairs ahead. I climbed them a little warily. At the top I looked down into the coolest little rodeo ring I’ve ever seen.

Surrounded on three sides by concrete seats about five rows high and covered with circular panels of corrugated steel, it was a dirt ring about 75 yards in diameter. A half dozen charros on horseback were practicing their lariat twirls before the show. I was the only white face in the so far meager crowd of a couple of dozen. I took a top row seat and settled in for whatever show was coming, presuming I was in the right place.

Mariachi music blared from bad speakers while I watched the charros warm up. Each looked the same: skinny, tight snap button shirt, big sombrero with back rim rolled up and snug chin strap, special bow tie like neck kerchief (corbatín), leather chaps, cream colored sharp-pointed boots…all sitting with knees high in a big horned saddle with an advertisement for a tequila brand burned in its back. They were practicing lariat work or side-stepping their horses or doing jump starts as if chasing a bull out of the chute.

The Snap Button Shirt Crowd

Slowly the stone stadium filled with a mix of the charro’s families and girlfriends, old guys who looked like they might have once been down in the ring, and young guys wearing the same wannabe snap button shirts and light boots.

An old woman and what seemed her daughters lugged around old paint pails filled with ice and coke, beer, water, and tequila selling each for 50 cents. An old man (her husband?) was toting a big box of bagged tortilla chips which he sold for 30 cents and doctored up with salt, fresh lime juice, and salsa to your taste. Both the old man and woman managed to do all this with cigarettes flapping in their lips while they called out their offerings.

Stop and Skid

The charrería opens with a very orchestrated protocol. A long line of charros race into the ring from a 100-yard dirt runway then stop dead at the cement wall below us. An announcer says something, they all tip their sombreros, we clap. Then the rodeo itself begins.

First up is the dead stop competition––or so I call it––where riders race into the ring, make their horse plant his rear hooves and slide to a stop. Helpers measure the distance from hoof-plant to a dead stop. They then give the results to the six judges in a sort of special box behind the announcer. Each rider then makes his horse pivot in a clockwise circle for several rotations only to reverse directions and spin the other way. Somehow in all this, a winner is declared, but I can’t tell you who.

Bareback Horse Jumping

Slowly the contest worked through various charro maneuvers. There was the running bull tail pull where the rider chases the bull, grabs his tail, puts a foot on the bull’s ass, and then steps hard until the bull goes down. There was the running wild horse back hoof lariat throw––where the rider tries to sling his rope around the back hooves of a running horse to bring him to the ground. There was the bull ride followed by lassoing the bull’s horns and dragging him down.

The big finale was a rider chasing a bareback horse and leaping off his own trying to land on the other without falling. Cheers accompanied those who did, and groans were heard when they failed. The audience happily drank, smoked without restriction, and wiped the lime juice and salt off their chins.

It was a helluva a show. Who needs the world’s largest book fair with this kind entertainment?

A Narrow Window of Belief

It’s Christmas. Parents with children of a certain age go to malls, department stores, country clubs and church socials to introduce their kids to Santa. He is so ubiquitous at Christmas time, the window for belief is narrow. How can Santa be in the Sears at one end of the mall and the Macy’s at the other at the same time, they ask.

The Chicago Transit Authority solves that dilemma by postulating that when Santa hits a heavily populated urban area like Chicago, he needs the help of a rapid transit system to distribute presents to all the children ­(and his reindeer need their union break) before they fly off to, let’s say, Norway to complete their Christmas mission.

Now He’s Here, Now He’s Gone

­Now he’s here, and now he’s gone. (Check the CTA website for a time and location where Santa will be appearing near you.) My 4-year-old son and I caught up with him at the Western Avenue station last Saturday and––talk about suspending disbelief––The Santa Train arrived on time.

We scurried to find an open car. When we first squeezed in, it didn’t seem all that different from a daily commute to work. People in winter coats and earmuffs sat in the seats; a few holiday revelers wore Santa hats on their way to Christmas parties downtown. But the lighting was unusually festive. When a seat opened, and my son took it, I noticed it was covered with holly and red ornaments.

The usual drab signs for cancer treatment, abortion counseling and vocational retraining were replaced by advertisements for Tinsel Town Garbage Collection, Santa Workshop Toy Repair and, of course, a self-promotional plug: Santa Rides the Blue Line.

While I noticed the décor, my son noticed that there was a CTA elf in every car handing out candy canes. We sped through the night, and when we came to a stop, I jumped out to take a picture of Santa: and he grabbed another candy cane.

Finding The Spirit of Christmas

We never actually let my son sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what he wants for Christmas. (That occurs when we give him the Sunday supplement for Toys R Us and he says, “This one, and this one, and this one.”) He wasn’t even particularly attracted to the man. He was, instead, enthralled by the all the activity, what we sometimes call the hustle and bustle of Christmas, all laid out before him for the price of a subway token. And what I like about exposing my son to the concept of Santa in the CTA version is that it reinforces the notion Santa is a busy man––and you must find the spirit of Christmas in the people around you.

We got off the train at the Washington stop and climbed the steps into Daley Plaza where, you guessed it, another Santa was holding court. The line around Santa’s cottage at the Kris Kringle market was about 30 minutes, so my son wisely traded his place for a bar of German chocolate. At every vendor’s booth, there was a sparkling ornament, or a glistening toy that caught his eye. But the real excitement was just being there.

He was loaded up on sugar and complaints when I told him it was time to leave. We boarded a return bound train back to Western Avenue, and the slow rhythms of the ride and the CTA conductor’s voice eventually wore him down. “Next stop is Damen. Doors open on the right at Damen.” I had to carry him home asleep.

These moments are all so fleeting. And I know next year will be different, and who knows but the time will come when the luster will fall from his eyes and he won’t want to go see Santa again. But this moment will be lodged somewhere in his memory, the time when he saw Santa on an El train, and for that I will always be grateful.

Merry Christmas!

Editor’s Note: The Week Behind is taking time off for the holidays. See you in 2012.

Physically, my wife is pretty much the same woman I married. There are few more inches on her waistline, some maturing wrinkles among other facets of aging, but these changes are largely inconsequential. And I can live with her loss of memory, which is sometimes dramatic, but the accompanying lack of empathy strikes deep into my heart.

Before her illness, she projected a warmth and understanding of both herself and those she interacted with. Now she sees her world largely as an extension of her own needs and desires; and that makes my job as her caretaker extremely demanding.

I don’t take her actions personally, I tell friends. But, in fact, I do. Understanding that her callous unfeeling actions are a function of her illness, not a conscious choice, helps. But sometimes it’s hard.

Living with a Trying Person

I remember riding a tour bus with her one day sitting across from a somewhat overweight couple. My wife fixated on their girth and angrily said: “You people are really fat. You need to go on a diet”. The couple was shocked and mystified at her socially inappropriate outburst, as was I.

I asked her later how she would feel in their place. Her response was that they needed to be told that they were fat and their feelings were irrelevant.

Another time, I watched my wife grow impatient with a piece of cream cake that wasn’t defrosting. So she started to microwave it – not a good idea. When we got into a shouting match about how to thaw the cake, I suggested we cut it in half. She could microwave hers. I would let mine sit. She then declared that she was going to eat both portions.

“But we usually share,” I said.

“Forget it. I’m going to have both pieces because I want the whole thing,” she said.

I know. These are little things. But the small things pile up when you are the caretaker for a person with dementia. They undermine years of wonderful memories of being together. You realize you are living with a person you otherwise would have little to do with. My wife these days is often inappropriate, uncooperative and unpredictable. But I love her. I’m committed to her. We share a history that has defined both our identities, and I feel a moral responsibility to take care of her.

Searching The Internet

To better comprehend my wife’s odd behavior I began searching the Internet. As my exploration progressed, I realized I was also in pursuit of a way to somehow gain control (however illusory) over her disease by finding labels and research studies that would ease the stressful present––and the uncertain, disquieting future.

What I found were a large number of medical definitions supplemented by some nurses’ accounts and discussions among family caretakers on techniques to deal with the disease on a day-to-day basis. (Not surprisingly there were virtually no accounts from the ill person’s standpoint.) Nowhere did I find a discussion of the frustration, anger and resentment caregivers sometimes feel, or ways to handle it.

Dementia on TV

On television, commercials for dementia medication usually show a loving daughter deeply engaged with a psychologically absent mother, or an aging grandfather surrounded by the laughter of his grandchildren. But that’s not the way it usually goes. At the risk of being viewed as not “suffering in silence,” I’m telling you that it’s hard. In those interminable hours when it’s just you and her alone in the house you built together, sometimes you just want to escape.

The little contractual agreements you made as a young couple no longer hold: “I’ll wash the dishes if you take care of the dirty pots and pans” or “I’ll go to work if you stay home and provide the emotional support I need to feel anchored in the world” have no place in the real world terms of dementia.

Gone But Not Gone

For me and my immediate family, the person we knew as a wife and mother is no longer with us. It does no good to say, “This is not the person I married.” This is the person we have living amongst us.

There are brief moments when my wife returns to be the woman I’ve lived with for so many years. When she’ll surprisingly remembers some important, joyful past situation where we felt very close, when we can relate as a couple once more. There are also those moments when I tell friends about my wife’s behaviors and they become, in the retelling, funny.

For instance, we were in Buenos Aires, a city where English is not widely spoken, and I recall my wife angrily telling a scruffy cab driver, “You know your hair is filthy. Why don’t you wash it?” He professed that he did not understand. “No comprende,” he said. But she was right.

As her dementia worsens, I cherish those moments when the woman that I love comes back to me. But I know that dementia will only get worse. And when she is no longer accessible, where will I be? Will I ever be able to love again?

Operating independently but working in concert, Edel believes one business will supply the other. But here’s the beauty of it: they will generate tons of organic waste, enough, he hopes, to power a biogas-fed turbine that will take the building “off the grid” – requiring no outside energy to operate, and producing no waste to dispose of.

Edel doesn’t just see this. He’s making it happen in a 93,500 square-foot building on 46^th street he has re-christened “The Plant.”

Urban Farming in Chicago

With the strong support of Mayor Emanuel, Chicago recently leapt into a growing urban agriculture movement with both feet. The city council approved one ordinances authorizing urban farming in Chicago,  and another creating new rules for shared kitchen. Together, they redefine permitted activities in manufacturing districts to allow commercial production of plants and fish in hydroponic and aquaponic gardens, change a host of health department rules, and allow chefs and small food producers to share kitchen facilities on a permanent or temporary basis.

The Plant happens to be one of only two existing facilities that qualify on both fronts. (Iron Farm, home of the non-profit Growing Power, is the other.) And the funny thing is Edel is not even a farmer. He prefers to think of himself as a designer of sustainable manufacturing.

An Industrial Johnny Appleseed

Edel, 42, is a quirky guy. Tall and thin, he sports a rough stubble beard that makes him look like a modern day Johnny Appleseed. But that’s where the comparison ends. “I don’t have any real interest in being a farmer,” he says. “I did this because I love old factories so I’m always looking for ways to save, or salvage, or just keep them standing.”

That fascination with old factories began 35 years ago when he was a boy in Rogers Park, and his parents would take him to the Garfield Park Conservatory. He would sit in the atrium, he remembers, sketching pictures of the plants growing up along the rusted girders.

“This was before Garfield Park was restored, and you can see I was thinking more about palms and banana trees, but I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind forever,” he says. “I just find the combination of plants and girders really, really interesting.

Edel’s architectural interest earned him an MFA in industrial design from the University of Illinois Chicago, but artistic talents took him into television computer graphics. That’s when I met him in 2000 during his stint as the lead designer of 3-D virtual sets at the Chicago production house Post Effects.

At night and on the weekends, he would leave the virtual world and scour the area around Bubbly Creek, the Chicago river branch behind the Stockyards where meat packers would dump cattle carcasses, looking for an abandoned industrial space he could buy cheap, and reshape into his vision of the factory of the future. He had only one ironclad criterion: it had to have an adjoining railway spur where he could park the Pullman car he dreamed of someday buying.

Bubbly Dynamics

He finally found it when he stumbled on the old Lowe Paint warehouse at 1048 W. 37^th Street. The 24,000-square-foot building once served as the headquarters of Scooter World, but was better known in the city department of planning as Little Beirut.

Edel formed a company called Bubbly Dynamics to buy it in 2002. No sooner did he take possession than he discovered a white motorcycle gang run by a man named Cowboy was living in the building, barricaded behind old motorcycle parts. At night, they would explode cardboard boxes of acetylene on the loading dock and shoot out the neighbors windows; during the day, they’d get into mean and murderous fights among themselves over small sums of money .

Sheriff’s deputies had to evict them. When they left, Edel  attacked the building with a cadre of friends toting sledgehammers. (His demo parties were legendary.) Bringing the building back to life took four years. One reason was that Edel insisted on salvaging anything that could be re-cycled. His crew pulled nails from old boards to reuse them in the interior decor, stacked bricks on pallets for resale, and, if they found an old industrial machine with no apparent use, saved it for display as lobby art.

In the process of re-imaging the place, Edel experimented with all manner of energy-efficient building materials, a microprocessor controlled condensing boiler, hydronic water pumps zoned to control heat and air conditioning, and high-efficiency lighting systems. He built a small aquaponic garden in the basement to learn more about how it really worked, and planted the roof with varying shades of greenery that, when viewed from a Google Earth camera, resolve into the face of his daughter Zoe.

Today, his Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center has about a dozen small business tenants, including artists, a small bicycle manufacturer, a screen-printing company, metal fabricator and metal finishing firm. But the adjoining Pullman car that spawned the dream never materialized because railroad officials wouldn’t approve the access route. And Edel was itching to move on to bigger things.

“A Farm and Something Else”

The Plant at 1400 W. 46^th Street is four times the size of Edel’s first building, and his plans for it are four times more ambitious.

His experience building out Bubbly Dynamics showed him that as much as he did to save energy, he still didn’t have a way to generate it, and thus fulfill his longtime ambition to operate off the grid. So he started looking for a second building––with his childhood sketches still rattling around the back of his head.

“I knew I wanted to do a farm and something else,” he said. He didn’t know exactly what that “something” but a brewery was always part of the original concept. Why? Because a brewery generates high concentrates of distilled grain waste that are ideal for making biogas, and Edel had become convinced that bio-fuels were a potent source of manufacturing energy.

His search for the right building took another four years. He negotiated with the Board of Education to buy one of their Pershing Road properties, but the deal fell through. At his daughter’s play group, he started unburdening his woes to another mother who was a real estate agent. (“You want to get something done, go to play group,” he jokes.) The next day, she showed him the old Peer Foods meat packing plant.

A Piece of Chicago History

The Plant was built in 1903 by the Wm R. Perrin Company to manufacture fine slaughterhouse tools for the nearby stockyards. In 1925, it was sold to the Buehler Brothers chain of meat markets who converted it into a meat packing plant for their line of fresh and smoked ham and bacon. When Buehler Brothers expanded into wholesale distributing in 1944, they changed the name to Peer Foods and the heirs still operate the company under that name, doing $150 million a year in sales.

After 70 years operating under U.S. Agriculture Department approval, building code violations were beginning to compromise Peer Food’s health safety certification. In 2006, it moved its operations to a new factory in Indiana, and 400 Chicago jobs went with it.

When Edel saw the building four years later, the roof leaked, the smokers were malfunctioning, some of the floors were cracked and he could see butcher knives still stuck in the walls. It was perfect. He offered to buy it for the “strip and rip” price of $525,000 (roughly $5 a square foot) but he had no desire to gut the building. All the careful currying of favor with the USDA – the washable walls, the stainless steel counters, the sanitary pathways from food prep areas to the loading dock – were in place. This was a piece of Chicago history too good to throw away.

Shared Kitchens

Edel found his first anchor tenant almost immediately. The New Chicago Brewing Company has taken 19,000 square feet on the first floor for a brewery, bottling operation and tasting room that will open next Spring. His second tenant, 312 Aquaponics, moved in this August. They design and sell aquaponic systems, including custom software to monitor and control the continuously flowing water system. The water runs through a bio-filter that separates out the nitrates to fertilize the vegetable trays and re-cycles back to aerate the fish tanks.

Edel has moved his own fish-vegetable farm into the basement, and will soon open another experimental mushroom farm there. But that still leaves him with 60,000 square feet of empty space.

While he was clearing the debris out of the old factory, Edel was paying particular attention to the problems his friend Zina Murray was having trying to open a shared kitchen in Logan Square. After rehabilitating a storefront to serve as an event space and temporary kitchen for many of Chicago’s most innovative chefs, she found herself besieged by city health inspectors. Over a two-year period, she underwent 19 health inspection visits (versus two for a typical Chicago restaurant).

In her adversity, Edel saw opportunity. If he could design a commercial facility that met all the sanitary and anti-rodent provisions of the building code, chefs, bakers, caterers and other small food processors could, under their own license, could rent space from The Plant on a daily, monthly or annual basis to do what they did best: make good food.

And it all fit in his master plan.

Taking The Tour

I took a tour of The Plant last week with Melanie Hoekstra, an environmental lawyer who manages the building. You can still smell the hickory aroma of the meat smokers. Glass blocks pulled from the windows in favor of double-insulated thermal paints stand neatly stacked on pallets waiting for re-use as conference room dividers; and yes, carpenters could be seen pulling nails from boards destined to be used elsewhere.

The tour snaked through hallways and industrial spaces being retro-fitted for food service tenants. In one, she explained how The Plant plans to create a vertical farm with plant roots dangling through holes in foam boards that look like floor-to-ceiling pup tents. Metal halide lights will gently cross above on the old meat hook rails––their motion timed to the dawn to dusk passing of the sun––while nitrate-filled water trickles down from above. The process, she says, will yield 4 to 6 times as many crops per square foot as an outdoor farm.

In the basement, she shows off The Plant’s own aquaponic water system. It takes roughly 18 months to grow a tilapia fish from a fingerling to a 1-pound mature adult, she says, but this one––the first to be installed in Chicago––is nearing the point where it can produce 160 pounds of fish and 500 Kale, Arugula and Basil plants and every two months.

The Anaerobic Digester

She takes us into the bowels of the building, otherwise known as the boiler room. The highlight of the tour must be imagined, for now. This is where all of Edel’s system planning will come together.

Next February, thanks to a $750,000 grant from President Obama’s Recover and Re-investment Act, cranes will lift into place a re-furbished military jet engine that will provide all the heat and electricity for the building. Soon after, thanks to another $750,000 grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, Edel will build an “anaerobic digester” just outside the building to provide all the bio-fuel needed to make the building energy self-sufficient.

The anaerobic digester is an enclosed circular tank that will take all the waste the brewery, the farm beds and food service operations produce and divide them into fertilizer and bio-fuel. (“Think of it as a giant digestive system,” Hoeckstra says.) It will have the capacity to handle 32 tons of waste a day, so Edel hopes other food producers in the area will contribute theirs as well.

By 2013, if all goes according to plan, The Plant will be a self-sustaining manufacturing center for the production of fresh, organically grown Chicago foods. No coal, oil or nuclear energy will be needed to keep it operating. No waste products will be needlessly tossed into landfills. It will be, as he dreams, a “net zero” drain on the environment that makes America a better place.

And let’s hope he is successful because there’s a railway spur right next to The Plant that’s the perfect place to park the Pullman car of his dreams.

I Remember Rob Goldberg

Since the authorities got it so right back in 1968, let’s take another look in the trunk here in 2011, and give “them” the same authority all over again: They say you can tell a lot about a man by what he keeps in the trunk of his car. On that score my father-in-law Rob Goldberg’s life was one of the coolest, most refreshing breezes that many of us will ever have the good fortune to know. Or, at least, for a few moments, to try to think we know.

The Golf Clubs on top of the  Spare Tire

First, of course, most prominently placed on top of the spare tire, was the lightweight, canvas travel-bag of golf clubs. Not the fine set of clubs that he kept in the brown leather bag in the clubhouse at the Lincolnshire Country Club, but a handy set of beaters with a bulging bag of old golf balls and other gear stuffed into an easy-to-carry white canvas arm-sling.

Not that I ever saw him using it, but the beauty now is in imagining all the times that he once did: All the driving ranges he must have pulled over at just to whack some buckets of balls. The funky little nine-hole, par-3 courses that lured him into their dusky parking lots. The wide open fields in barren stretches along the once-lonely highways he loved to travel into Wisconsin and Michigan, verdant landscapes just waiting for a guy to pull over and work out a new swing he’d been thinking about lately.

I think especially of one of his favorite little Michigan country courses, the Glenn Shores, just north of his beloved South Haven, and all the times he walked me around there through all my mixture of moods (mostly good moods, when I was with him), though then he was probably loaning his travel clubs to me or someone else who might need them on the spur of the moment: “No clubs? No problem. I have an extra set in my car.” One cool breeze, and he’s gone… Today that bag and those clubs sit propped against a sawhorse in my garage; I hope his grandson Richard learns how to use them some day.

The Fishing Gear and the Tackle Box

Tucked down a little deeper, beside the spare tire, was the fishing rod and tackle box. Though I never went fishing with Rob (we were together a few times watching whales splashing alongside our shore cruisers off the coast of Puerto Vallarta, but we weren’t out catching those. . . .), as with the golf, it always gave me great pleasure to imagine the times that he called off the pressing duties of the day just to head out on the water and throw out some lines.          Favorite stories of the family involve Rob getting phone calls from cousins or nephews that would prompt him to head out of Chicago in early morning hours, for day-long sessions of line-wetting and problem-solving while out bobbing around in a rowboat under a warm sun.

He also had great fishing expeditions both at Cabo San Lucas and the Boundary Waters of Quetico, but most of all I enjoyed the simple material fact of that fishing gear tucked in the bottom of his car trunk. Waiting for the lure of open water and a summery breeze. Ever ready. Easy breeze.

A Job is a Job

I like to think of him walking out of one of his southside currency exchanges, one hot and bothersome summer afternoon, and just driving down toward the Indiana Toll Road, pulling off near Wolf Lake, running out on one of those shabby, weedy strips of land out there, and making his peace with the fish.

Maybe he comes home with a few perch and some sunnies, or maybe he throws them back. More likely he picks up the family and drives everyone over to Phil Smidt’s in Hammond for supper. All the perch you can eat for a couple of bucks. Not to mention the famous gooseberry pie. Probably a tangy, sharp Tanqueray martini to wash it all down.

Leisure Has a Price

Such a grand, deep sense of leisure has to be paid for somehow, certainly, and Rob never stinted in the work department, either.  Hence that black steel Luger-style pellet gun that he kept in the trunk nested in amongst a cardboard box of business papers from his Exchange businesses, cash-intensive and a magnet for thieves. But never once did I hear him speak of needing to use it – his tales of the workplace were mainly stories of rich humanity, wisdom and whimsy.

“Everyone steals,” he once said, concluding a story of an especially smart, loyal, and crafty employee whom he found out had been stealing from him. “You just don’t want them to be stupid about it.” This employee – for many years one of his favorites – eventually transgressed across that line, too, and then, “Of course I had to let her go.”

She had violated what Rob always referred to as The 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not get caught.” I’m sure the day he fired her would have been one of the days he checked in the car trunk to make sure the fishing tackle was still there and took off for Wolf Lake. Out there, even the sweet-sour-smelling breezes wafting in from the commerce of Hammond and Gary would have served to soothe his hard-working, easy-going soul.

The Wind on The Water

They say in the Bible that the wind on the face of the waters is one of the ways that we see the face of God. That God will love whomsoever God will chooses to love seems as random the wind. Where it blows, it blows.  But with the passing of Rob Goldberg, we might be forgiven for believing we once saw the face of God in his easy, grateful, evanescent smile.

Seeing my son catch a fish will be of little interest to anyone except myself. But one of the roles of a father is to keep the memories, and for that we have the ubiquitous video camcorder and an ever-improving set of editing software that works on a laptop computer.

50 Years of Home Movies

The cover photo on this story is a split screen of two photos from home movies in our family archive. The first is from a 16mm film of me fishing in northern Wisconsin that my father recorded in the 1950’s; the second is a still frame from a video I shot last month of my own son on the same lake, staying at the same cottage, doing the same thing –– although I’m pretty sure it’s a different fish.

What’s remarkable is how similar our home movies are––right down to the same shots, taken in the same location. Maybe that’s because there’s a continuity in families that home movies subtly reveal; or maybe it’s because there’s actually not much to do on a family vacation––swim, fish, run in the woods, ride in a boat––that merits cinematic treatment.

For your edification and enjoyment, I am posting up both home movies as embedded videos.

This is the same home movie recorded 50 years ago by my father.

Better Pictures . . . and Sound!

The technical differences are readily apparent. The video picture resolution stands out, as does the shift these days to the new widescreen aspect ratio. The most striking difference, however, is the presence of sound, or at least the potential for it. Hearing people talk in home movies can be a wonderful way to flesh out their stories. But it turns out––in my case, at least––the chances of having a long conversation with a four-year-old are hit or miss. (And they’re not that much better when you put an adult in front of the camcorder.)

What I also notice comparing my home movies from the 50’s and today is a sort of laissez faire attitude on the part of the filmmaker. When we make our home movies, we don’t really have a story in mind. We just sort of want to capture the moment. So we wind up stringing together our best shots, and if the battery goes dead, or the film runs out, that’s the end. Fade the music. In that sense, making home movies is like life.

A Parade is a Parade

Here’s another example from my home movie archive that astounds me. Fifty years ago, my father shot a home movie of the 1961 Memorial Day Parade in our hometown of Elm Grove, Wisconsin.

This July 4, we took my son to Winnebago, Illinois, and I shot a video of my son watching their 4th of July Parade with his cousins.

The footage is a rich display of the cars, clothing, and other cultural artifacts of the different eras. But it is, essentially, the same parade. And the same home movie––right down to the fact both movies go straight from the parade to a backyard pool party.

Now, I know home movies make for fabulous dust collectors in the closets of America. All fathers want to record the highlights of their kids growing up, but their ardor quickly fades when they confront the daunting task of editing them. Although computer-editing programs (and YouTube uploads) have made this considerably easier, it’s not easy getting back to the old tapes. The rolling migration of camcorder formats from VHS to Hi8, DV, HDV, and now SD cards makes it hard to find playback machines that even plug into a computer.

But that doesn’t keep us from hauling out the camcorder every time the vacation whistle blows. Just as our fathers did before us, we capture these special moments, shaky as they may be, because damn, that kid is cute.

Well that sounded just fine . . . until an hour later I turned to her and said, “Where did all the waysides go?”

Potty Stops, Dog Walks and Garbage Dumps

When I was growing up, waysides were the all-purpose potty stop, dog walk and garbage dump of a summer vacation. We went every year to a small lake outside Iron Mountain in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and I can tick off half a dozen places where we used to stop on the way up or back.

As we drove home this year, I noticed that a good chunk of the old highway has gone from two to four lanes. Coleman, Lena, Pound were quaint little towns we used to pass through. Now they are just another exit ramp along the expressway. And waysides? Forget about it.

Finally we stopped at a “Park and Ride” outside Port Washington. We spread our towel out on the asphalt and ate our sandwiches––and deposited our garbage in a Home Depot trashcan in the mall across the street.

For the remainder of the ride home I mulled over in my mind what happened to those idyllic waysides of my youth. Clearly, picnicking has slipped a few notches as America’s favorite pastime. But dog walking, garbage dumping and children’s potty stops are as popular as ever, if not more so. So what happened to the waysides? Were they done in by budget cuts? Supplanted by fast food joints? Or maybe in an expressway culture nobody has time to eat. Maybe in America today, the goal of every traveler is to go as far as we can as fast as we can so when we get there we have more time to relax.

Relics of a Time Gone By

When I got back to Chicago, I called the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to confirm my suspicions. Bob Spoerl, the roadside facilities engineer in charge of waysides, said I was right. Over the last decade, the number of waysides in Wisconsin has gone from 111 to 73 and the number of “rest areas”––the more well-to-do roadside stopovers along 4-lane highways––has dropped from 32 to 30 just in the last year.

“Waysides are becoming a thing of the past,” Spoerl said. Today’s travelers want fast food, wi-fi Internet connections and easy on-off ramps to food and gas. Mowing the lawn, emptying latrines and picking up garbage on a regular basis is an expense cash-starved states are loathe to continue, and private companies haven’t figured out a way to make money off of them. “It’s kind of sad,” he added, “but waysides are a relic of a time gone by.”

“One Step Ahead of the Woodsman’s Axe”

If my route home had gone north of Iron Mountain along U.S. Highway 2, I would have come across the first wayside in the nation. It’s a small tract of land with an historical marker just outside Iron River, Michigan. The marker says that in 1919 a young highway engineer named Herbert F. Larson purchased the first swath of public land here for roadside picnicking.

Larson was concerned about the huge tracts of forest being harvested by the lumber companies. In an attempt to stay “one step ahead of the woodsman’s axe,” he later wrote in his diary, he bought the land to preserve “a living forest memorial of virgin hardwoods so that posterity could see and enjoy what nature had bestowed upon us.”

Within a few years, he established another wayside in nearby Crystal Falls. The state governments of Wisconsin and Michigan took up the cause.  Soon enough, his idea was replicated hundreds, if not thousands of times across the nation as automobile touring became the rage in the 20’s.

Most waysides consisted of little more than picnic tables, a pit toilet and a fresh water pump. But that wasn’t important because they weren’t tourist destinations, they were waysides for people to stop and “enjoy what nature had bestowed upon us.”

The Commercialization of Leisure

Beginning with the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the late 30’s, waysides turned into rest areas––with a distinctly commercial twist. To offset highway construction costs, tollway authorities licensed restaurant concessions to private food chains. When Dwight Eisenhower inaugurated the Interstate highway system in the 1950’s, rest areas became a key part of the financial equation.

Howard Johnson’s, purveyor of fine restaurants and blue and orange hotels everywhere, was a prime government contractor. One of its most daring restaurant designs dotted the Illinois tollway at what was deemed an “oasis” where patrons could partake of their meal while watching the flow of traffic beneath them.

In the late 60’s, local merchants near the expressways prevailed on the Federal Highway Administration to curtail roadside rest areas because they were hurting business. They wanted passing travelers to get off the highway to sample their wares, but travelers rarely got that far.

The land around exit ramps soon became highly prized real estate, filled with fast food joints, gas stations and convenience stores. For the convenience of travelers (and a small fee), the highway authorities agreed to put their logo on blue panels leading up to the exits.

No Place for Picnics

There is no place for a picnics on today’s expressways, nor should there be. When Herbert Larson built the first wayside in 1919, there were few alternatives. The first fast food restaurant did not come along until 1916 when the first White Castle opened in Wichita, and it wasn’t until 1921 that A & W Root Beer awarded its first franchise. For decades, waysides were the only place a hungry traveler could stop and enjoy a meal.

But today, there are over 100,000 fast food joints in America. McDonalds alone has 13,700. One in every four Americans visits a fast food restaurant every day, and the most profitable franchises are closest to expressways. Besides their convenience, fast food restaurants have cleaner restrooms, bigger dumpsters and dogs can pee anywhere. So all we are missing with the disappearance of the wayside is peace of mind.

Fast is how we live, and fast is how we travel. The faster the better. It’s nice to think there was a time when we could all stop and smell the roses. But if you choose to picnic near an expressway these days, roses are the last thing you’re going to smell.

For a man, there are really only two questions: black or brown, ties or loafers. And while you are contemplating those deep issues, you are really asking yourself: now why can’t I just wear my gym shoes?

Power Feet

I have a friend who is fond of the expression “shoes make the man.” He claims he can tell where the power in the room lies simply by looking at people’s feet. Anyone can wear a suit, he says. Even the store clerks at Men’s Wearhouse have a pretty sophisticated eye toward what cut best fits a man. But for most of us, shoes are an afterthought (if a thought at all). The man who takes the time to match shoes to clothing has thought through the presentation process. He’s a man on the go.

A sharply shined dress shoe is ultimate mark of distinction, according to my friend. Although he prefers the modest anonymity of black or brown, my friend has been seen on rare occasions “sporting” beige moccasins with his casual wear, or white patent leather shoes with a white suit. Either one, he admits, is a blatant call for attention. Gym shoes, by contrast, often deemed an act of rebellion, are more likely a sign the guy is clueless about his own appearance.

My friend gives extra points to a gentleman who makes sure his shoes are shined before leaving the house. I have to believe that attitude is a holdover from his days as a traveling salesman when there wasn’t much else to do in his motel room.  I haven’t noticed any great run on the shoe polish shelf at the grocery store lately (Do they still carry shoe polish?) and I’d be hard pressed to even find a tin around the house.

When I see someone with a shine on their shoes, I figure it’s part of the waterproofing solvent they put on the shoe at the factory.

One Pair Fits All

No, I’ll never be mistaken for the power in the room. My approach to footwear is to buy one pair  of “good shoes” and wear them for all occasions. (Except in the summer when I try to get away with sandals and no socks.) I know, everyday use can be hard on a shoe––especially in the winter if you tromp through the snow without boots.  But I figure that as long as they keep out the water and the holes don’t show on top, I’ll wear those shoes til I drop.

And how do you know a shoe is worn out? When you wake up one morning and say, “Honey, where are my shoes?” And she replies, “I threw them out.”

A Visit to Payless

I don’t have a problem going to a Payless shoe store. (I grew up next door to the Paylesses, and they always seemed like very nice people.) The one nearest my home sits in a mall between a Petsmart and an appliance store, its windows plastered over with sale posters. The day I went, the bargain of the day was 50 percent off on sandals.

What you immediately notice on entering a Payless is they know their customer. There are seven aisles of shoes on display – six of them devoted to women’s and children’s sizes. The men’s department is a single aisle where shoes are displayed in open boxes by size. In my size (10 ½), the selection consists of two kinds of sandals, three dress shoes (two black, one brown) and a small assortment of moccasins and hiking boots. I picked out my dress shoes (black, no laces) in less than a minute. While we were there, my wife suggested that I also get a pair of sandals. I picked my favorite and was ready to go.

“Aren’t you going to try them on?” she asked. I set the boxes down, slipped on the sandals and walked the full 20 feet up and down the aisle. “Like wading in mud,” I proclaimed. “Let’s go.” I took my two purchases to the cash register. The clerk tallied the bill: $60. The whole experience took about eight minutes.

“You call that a shopping experience?” my wife sniffed. “You need choices to go shopping. We could have done that on the Internet.”

Nothing is Forever

I have no doubt my new shoes were lovingly crafted in China, although Payless goes to some lengths to disguise it. The dress shoes are sold under the “State Street” brand and the sandals carry an unreadable logo of initials easily mistaken for “REI.” Both are a testament to how far form-fitted rubber molding has come in the last few years.

Upon close inspection, my new dress shoes consist of three pieces of leather (or a leather-like synthetic) attached to a hard rubber platform otherwise known as the sole. Indentations along the edges imply that the casing of the shoe has been stitched to the sole, but they are just that––indentations pressed into the rubber at the factory to resemble a stitch line.

These are not shoes you are going to wear for a couple years, then take back to the cobbler to be re-soled with a fresh heel or leather sole. Over time, the rubber will just wear down around the edges. The adhesive holding the leather to the sole will crack. The factory shine will wear off. And one day you’ll wake in the morning saying, “Honey, where are my shoes?”