My first taste of Chicago was Chicago of the Ground. Chicago of the highway. It’s a Chicago of interstates and road construction, a Chicago of tollbooths and traffic jams. It’s a sprawling metropolis, 50 miles from north to south, criss-crossing streets, gas stations and restaurants. It doesn’t end. It looks small on the map but each block is its own square mile of urban life.

It’s a Chicago of endless streets, of being stuck behind school buses and hesistant drivers. A Chicago of impossible left turns into oncoming traffic or unexpected right turns into red lights, of an ambulance or fire engine hurtling by every 10 minutes. Driving by with the window open you smell gasoline and burning tires and fried chicken and fresh bread, and the whole damn thing starts all over again when you enter the next block over. It’s a Chicago where it takes you three hours to cross town to the Southside, jumping from highway back to the roads, turning rights and lefts in manic progression, riding the wave after wave of traffic down Harlem avenue, past shopping malls and forests and intersecting interstates.

The way back wasn’t much better.