CHAPTER 7
Chicago, from the Inside-Out
Dorp and Sam were baked into the cookies in Alabama and delivered to Chicago.
During the trip, they evaporated out of the cookies and bounced around inside the box.
The box was delivered to a shipping dock office, where a dredging ship was getting regular maintenance. The supervisor
yelled at a welder and waved the package at him. Frank the welder
took off his helmet and trotted over to get his package. He was
looking for this shipment of sweets, and so were his work buddies. It
was about break time, so Frank opened the box and took a whiff. The other
guys saw the package, so they hurried over too. Sam and Dorp were waiting to eject from the box. They went
airborne and a breeze took them over the Great Lakes.
Sam
complained: “I’m getting tired of being baked into food I can’t
taste! What a bunch of boloney.
And speaking of bologna, I wanna
sandwich! “
Dorp
said, “Would you rather be back in Horse dung? Or perhaps we should
go back to Mountain sheep or mice.”
“Please.
No! What was that boat were we just on?”
“That
was a dredging vessel. Chicago sits at Lake Michigan. Lakes and
harbors are like big ponds. And like ponds, they tend to fill in
because of agricultural silt that empties into them. Also, with
bigger and bigger ships being built; shipping companies need deeper
harbors to float these bigger boats. Dredging companies clear, widen
or deepen harbors and shipping channels for ships.
“Big
machines, Mr. Dorp.”
Dorp
and Sam lost altitude as a downwind pushed them toward the water.
”So
here we are in Chicago, Sam. We couldn’t float like this if you
had eaten a sandwich.
I wonder what living thing we’ll go into this
time.”
“Why
do we always go into some living thing?” Sam complained. “Doesn’t
water ever do anything on its own?”
“No Sam, it doesn't. But we could be put into a factory and be mixed in liquid laundry
detergent or insecticide and sit for months or years until we are
used. You know how long your mother has kept that bottle of 'economy' laundry detergent
she doesn’t like.
Or we could percolate into an
aquifer and stay there for 5,000 years.
Or we could go through the water
hydrant system and sit in a building’s fire sprinkler system for 30
or more years.
Or we could be sealed into a thermo-pane window and sit
in the sunlight for 15 years.
That’s what I was doing when a little
boy hit a baseball into the Sharples’ front window a couple of
years ago.
Sam
gasped; “Really? Wait! Hey! I broke a window in a house of the
Sharples family two summers ago!
Wait! Hey!
Are you saying you were
in that window? No stinkin’ way! Wow!
“I
was in that window, Sam.
And would like to hear my perspective on
incident with the chocolate milkshake and Miss Keller’s mailbox?”
“No!”
Sam shouted. “I mean, I… don’t… know… what
…you’re…..t.a.l.k.i.n.g…abou…Ok, busted.
So, the surest way
to keep moving in to be constantly passing through living things?”
“Yes,
it is, Sam.”
“Well,
let’s go be dog spit or something like that then. I like to move
around.”
The
air cooled in the evening, which brought Dorp and Sam to street level
at Navy Pier, a 50-acre tourist area on the east side of Chicago
where the city meets the lake. There is an active tall ship docked
there called ‘The Windy.’
Sam
was excited, “Cool, this is the kind of stuff I wanted to do. Wait
till I tell the kids at school that I saw a big ol’ sailing ship in
Lake Michigan. Why is it called a tall ship?”
“It is called a tall ship,” Dorp explained, “because its main mast is
about as tall as the ship is long. This allowed for more sails which
meant that more freight could be hauled in less time. This is like
putting a bigger engine on a ship, because that’s what sails are;
the engine of a sailing ship."
"Now back to the original conversation.
You saw a ship in Lake Michigan. That’s what you’re going to tell
your friends?”
“Of course, I’m going to tell them about this,” Sam said confidently.
“And
how did you get to the Great Lakes, Sam, seeing that your family did
not travel to Illinois this year? Will they believe you if and when
you tell them you became a water molecule and traveled around with a
Dorp and saw all this stuff?”
“Ah…Dang!
They wouldn’t believe me. They would think I made it all up. I’d
get a reputation like one kid in class who always makes things up. He
says he goes places and does things he can’t prove. No pictures, no
cool souvenirs; nothing.”
“Perhaps
he knows a Dorp.”
That
made Sam think.
They drifted across the edge of the lake between the
Navy Pier and the Jardine
Water Purification Plant.
They are neighbors on the edge of Lake Michigan.
A
breeze pushed them out over the lake more than two miles from shore.
(Lake Michigan is nearly 120 miles wide and over 300 miles long).
They drifted lower and were absorbed into the lake. They began to
sink.
That
made Sam unhappy. “Shoot! I thought we were going to onto the pier
or at least into go into Chicago. “
Dorp
consoled him. “We are going into Chicago and may yet wind up at the
Navy Pier. Did you see the Ferris wheel on the pier? The world’s
record for Ferris wheel riding was set there in May of 2013. A fellow
rode the wheel for over 48 hours.”
“Sore
rear-end, but how much cotton candy did he get to eat?
Hey! A Ferris
wheel looks a lot like the water wheel on a gristmill, no?”
“Indeed,
it does. Very observant. Look down and see that we are being sucked
into a pipe that leads to Chicago’s water treatment plant, the
largest in the world. This pipe about to inhale us, it leads to the water treatment plant that converts lake
water into Chicago’s drinking water, about one billion gallons of
water each DAY.”
Dear readers, here is the process: First, the water goes through screens
that sort out the fish and larger debris, like 1950 Packards (kidding). Then the workers add
chlorine to kill germs and fluoride for health purposes. They also
add alum to make small particles fall to the bottom of settling
tanks. After going through a series of settling tanks, Dorp and Sam
will pass through layers of fine sand to take out even more
impurities. Then they will then be ready to travel some of the 4,000
miles of Chicago water mains to their final destination.
Sam
was puzzled. “I wonder where we will wind up.”
“I
don’t know, Sam. I hope we go through a toilet or shower, or other
kind of drain because I want to show you the Chicago sewer system as
well. This is all part of your education.
“I
forget that I’m supposed to be learning on this trip, Mr. Dorp.
Anyway, how long will it take to complete the cleaning process? Wait!
Sewer system? Chicago sewer system? Are you kidding? Do you know what
kind of diseases go through toilets, not to mention everything else,
like carrots, broccoli, and, and oops! Oh! Shower? I don’t want to
go through a shower. A naked person? Ugh!”
“First
question; about eight hours.
Second, you can’t catch a disease now
Sam. You are water. You can carry a disease, but you can’t catch
it.
Third, if only your mother knew what you just told me.
Fourth,
dorps don’t care if we wet a boy, girl, horse, lightning bug, or a
vulture. We exist to get things wet.”
“Will
we go into a water tower? There are some really cool water towers in
America. I would love to ride a water tower pipe down into the
ground. Whooosh-ZOOM!”
“There
are no working water towers in the Chicago water system, even though
Chicago has one of the most famous historic water towers in the
country. But the purpose of the water tower is two-fold; to store
water in case the town water pumps fail for a time and to deliver
evenly pressurized water throughout the town. The tower has to be
higher than all the buildings in the town, or the water won’t reach
them. Taller buildings have to have their own tower on their roofs.
Children would certainly find these water towers cool:
There
is tower shaped like an ear of corn in Rochester, Minnesota.
A
peppermint-shaped tower in Shiloh, Illinois,
a pineapple-painted tower in Honolulu, Hawaii.
One painted like an 8-ball in Tipton, Missouri.
A
peach-shaped tower in Gaffney, South Carolina.
A
pumpkin-painted tower in Circleville, Ohio.
A
catsup bottle-shaped tower in Collinsville, Illinois
A
watermelon-painted tower in Luling, Texas.
One painted like a fishing bobber in Pequot Lakes, Minnesota.
Many
smiley-face water towers like the one in Adair, Iowa
Many
coffee pot-shaped towers like the one in Stanton, Iowa, near your
grandparents, which also has a teacup-shaped water tower.
"And
finally, Sam, A rose-flower painted tower in Rosemont, Illinois.
Rosemont sits on the northwest corner of Chicago, though it is a
city in its own right.
It is one of the closer water towers to
Chicago."
At last,
they were through the filtration plant and ready to enter Chicago.
Being pushed along a main pipe, and headed downtown, they found themselves pouring through smaller and smaller pipes. Sam was scared of
where he might wind up, but eventually, they were pushed through a
faucet into a pitcher in a laundry. It was a mom-and-pop
operation in a small building with a narrow front and long sides.
The
worker there was an older woman named Anna, who was bent over from 40
years of steaming curtains and drapes. She was a widow who lived in
an apartment three blocks to the east, near a sandwich shop.
Every
Tuesday night she would stop and get an Italian Beef sandwich, sweet.
She carried a pitcher of water over to a machine called a fabric
steamer. A fabric steamer takes wrinkles out of clothes and drapes by using hot steam to relax the fabric so then the weight of the drape
can pull out its own wrinkles. Anna used the
machine to heat her lunch, with a special holder she made to hold the
aluminum pan over the heat wand, just so. Anna poured Sam and Dorp
into the reservoir and they passed over the electric heating plate.
They evaporated through the steamer and passed through a curtain to
take out the wrinkles and were again airborne.
Convection
heat and moving fabric stirred the air in the laundry shop and moved
Dorp and Sam nearly to the front door.
A customer opened the door, and
the vacuum pulled them out the door into the Chicago air.
“Wow.”
Sam said. “We were inside and Bang! Now we’re outside. How did
that happen?”
”When
the man opened the door,” Dorp explained, “a vacuum was created
in that spot. The pressure in the laundry was higher than the
pressure in the doorway, so we were put out. Well
Sam, let’s see how many ways humans use water other than growing
and cooking their food."
"We just came out of a steamer at a laundry,
and right now we are looking at an outdoor water fountain."
Down the
street is a fire hydrant and a car wash. "Did you ever think about how
important water is to a country’s economy? Think about it. Don’t
just look at all the ways water is used. Also look at all the
economic opportunities that water creates, from lemonade stands to
cruise ships. They all depend on water to meet human needs and to
make people happy.”
Sam
looked up and down the street. “Hmm. There’s a drink machine that
needs water to make its drinks,
and a window washer is on the side of
that building using water to make his living.
The lady selling
flowers on the corner needs water to keep her blooms alive,
and the
mechanic down the street mixes water with antifreeze to keep car
engines cool in the summer.
There is a bricklayer repairing a
building using mortar made with water.
Oh, and there’s a place that
makes ice sculptures.
I wonder what countries do, that don’t have
much water.”
“Good
question Sam. Most humans don’t understand how much water
contributes to their local economy.
Those that have plenty of water,
take it for granted, and those that don’t have it, simply wish for
enough to survive.
"If we were in Hawaii, I could show you all the
tourist dollars created for that state simply because of the water it
sits in. People come to sightsee, surf, to fish, or simply to sleep
in beds with ocean views. The water grows the fish that so many
people use to make their living, from fishermen to restaurant staff
to scuba rental shops, and the list could go on and on."
"Alaska is
another state that profits greatly from water. The water sustains a
great fishing industry, a tourist industry and even the snow on the
mountains there brings in tourist dollars from the magnificent views that humans long to see."
Chicago, an inland city,
draws a lot of tourists simply because it sits on Lake Michigan.
Remember that our first sight of Chicago was the Navy Pier on the
Lakes. And places like Thermopolis, Wyoming and Hot Springs, Georgia,
have naturally heated water that attracts people.”
“My
grandpa and uncle went fishing in Alaska once before I was born, to
Soldatna and Homer on the Kenai Peninsula.
I hope he goes again
someday.” Sam said wistfully. “OK… So where are we headed now?”
“Let’s
see where the winds of change blow us, Sam. Oh, look; we are going to
be inhaled by a bug.”
They
had been blown into a residential area of Chicago where there were houses and lawns. A lightning bug inhaled them through one of its spiracles
in its abdomen. This is how insects breathe. The lightning bug is
part of the beetle family. The lightning bug has chemical
super-powers that let it light up without burning itself. The
lightning bug was flying around the yard near the bushes. It was a 'he' looking for a 'she'.
The male lightning bug flies around making lights. The female sits in
the bushes and flashes a reply to the male she likes.
Out of the
house came a boy about Sam’s age with a jar with holes punched in
the lid.
Sam
moaned. “Oh Boy, I know what’s going to happen now. We’re going
to be caught and stuffed in a pickle jar along with a few blades of
grass for food, and then we die in a day or two and get stashed under
the bed with old comic books and lost socks where we will remain
until spring housecleaning next year. I’ll never see my family
again!”
“Guilty
conscience, Sam?
First of all, lightning bugs do not eat grass.
Many
of them eat pollen or nectar or insects, which might explain why your
fluorescent friends died so quickly.
Baby fireflies also eat snails.
Furthermore, if you emptied out your jar daily, this wouldn’t be an
issue. Let’s see what happens.”
Yes,
they were caught by the little boy with the pickle jar. Yes, they
went in the house with a few other lightning bugs in the jar. No,
they weren’t stuck in the jar behind the little boy’s bed until
next spring. The boy brought the jar in to show his dad. His dad
opened the jar and shook the lightening bugs out.
The Dad turned off the
lights in the living room and they watched the light show.
Sam
was elated “We’re flying, not just drifting. Cool!”
Their
lightning bug flew around the room with the others then landed, on
the ceiling.
“I
have a joke. Did you hear about the two fireflies that met on a
mattress?”
“No
Sam; what happened?"
“They
married in the spring.”
Finally, the kids went to bed and their mom went around picking up the dirty
dishes. Their firefly was eating orange marmalade left over from a
bedtime snack, when mom scraped it into the garbage disposal without
seeing it.
Photo: architecture.org
CHAPTER 7
Rosemont, Ilinois water tower
Photo: foursquare.org