Chicago vs. Seattle
It’s the inevitable side effect of moving cross-country: I can’t help spending at least half my mental energy (and probably more) making little comparisons between Chicago and Seattle. Most of these are tiny observational things, while at times I also try to grasp at some sort of more totalizing conclusion. In self-analytical mode for a moment, I suppose a lot of this has to do with struggling to explain the move to myself. You see, by about any objective or rational standard I can think of, Seattle is just intrinsically nicer and more livable, and yet I’m just so much more flat-out in love with the Great City of Chicago, with all its grids and flatness and wild weather. Sure, the missus and I still have more friends and family back here in Chicago, but honestly I’m far too introverted for that to be much of a deciding factor. I’m just digging on walking around and taking trains (trains!) and looking at all the bricks and windows, mostly.
One of the slightly larger conclusion-ish things I’ve come up with, is that by being set in such a flat landscape, and then so gridded and populated, Chicago is always presenting a different subset of details, and that’s what you have to, like, get into if you’re trying to have an aesthetic experience of the surroundings (something I’m usually trying to do, by nature and habit). Whereas Seattle, being rippled with several large hills, divided by a couple of bodies of water and sort of hunkered down between two mountain ranges, is from almost any vantage offering much more of a panoramic scene. It’s this which usually captures the attention, and makes the little scribbly details of urbanity that much less noticeable. (There also seems to me to be a relative shortage of real urbanity in Seattle in general, but that’s a story for another day.)
The other weird comparison thing I wanted to mention just now, is that despite being rather obviously smack in the North American Middle West, in a certain way Chicago feels more coastal than Seattle. It should be obvious why: Chicago has beaches! To be fair, Seattle has a couple, but they were always sort of out of the way to me, and Oak Street Beach is like bigger than, well, both of them together. Chicago is just beachy all over. This morning while walking the dog, I noticed that there is really quite a bit of sand in the alley behind our building. And this roughly 1.75 miles from the lake. Although I was supposedly living on the West Coast for the last three years, the only times I ever saw sand on the ground I had to drive almost half an hour to get there.
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