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Wednesday, July 04, 2007 Fireworks Imagine cramming 1 million people in maybe 15 blocks as close to Chicago's lakefront as possible for a 25-minute minute show and you'll get a good feel for the annual Independence Day fireworks display (which for reasons unknown is held on the 3rd of July rather than the 4th--the display on the 4th lasts half the time). I've never been in such a crowded space in my life. I like fireworks--who doesn't?--but I don't like them enough to navigate crowds of that magnitude. But an hour before I was going to head home from downtown, Jeremy called me to say that he and his friends had staked out a prime piece of real estate a few feet from the lake. "If you want to see the fireworks without being overcrowded, you should come now--we need more people to fill our space." This was at 5pm. The fireworks started at 9:30pm. Apparently there are people who will camp out by the lake starting in the morning. And from a logistical point of view, there's a good reason: taking a bus, it took over an hour to make a trip that would normally take 15 minutes. I was perhaps 20 ft. from Jeremy and company when I gave up--I couldn't see them, and there was literally nowhere to move. Not to the front, not to the right, not to the left. And all around, people's cell phones weren't working very well even though the signal strength was high (too many people for the tower to handle, I guess). I ended up sitting on the grass behind a couple that said they were only a few feet from their family--they'd left to get something to eat, couldn't push their way back, and were sitting on another family's blanket. We ended up sharing drinks and pizza and watching the display in that semi-awkward, friendly companionability of strangers who are half-united by circumstance. When the fireworks were over I found my friends and we decided to walk one stop south on the L, thinking it'd be less crowded. Wrong. It was impossible to even get into the station.* So we walked to the stop a mile and a half from where we'd started--and ended up in the same train as people we knew. For all its size, Chicago can be surprisingly small. * Actually, I was impressed: in the time it took us to walk about a mile, the L went from being so crowded you couldn't step inside the station to nearly empty. Not bad. ^ Top | 1:17 AM | | | 
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