Ideally, this would be where I would write up Mud Creek Park, but when Alex and I visited Mud Creek Park, it was closed because, as one would actually expect, given the name, Mud Creek Park floods pretty badly when it rains, and it had rained recently when we went up there. So instead on that day we returned to McAllister Park.
So let’s go on to Panther Springs Park. Panther Springs Park is kind of an odd one to try to reach. It looks, on the map, like you should be able to access it from Blanco, possibly from the parking lot to the Mays Family YMCA. I actually swear that Google Maps said that there was a way in there at one point. But you can’t get there that way. You actually have to go up through a residential area (fortunately not through the actual neighborhood, but the street passes one housing development after the other) to get there.
Jon Isherwood, “Sotol Duet,” 2015
Once Alex and I were in the parking lot, we had to find the way into the park. Alex and I were walking through the parking lot when a man came up and asked where the entrance to the park was. We confessed that it was our first time there, too. So we continued towards the end of the parking lot. I needed to take a picture of Isherwood’s “Sotol Duet” on the way in, so I headed that direction and the man found the entrance before we did.
Basically, Panther Springs Park is a three-mile walking trail and a dog park. There isn’t much in the way of a playground or anything of that nature. We didn’t end up walking that much of the trail because it was still pretty warm out and the humidity was something to be believed. So we walked (and met a man and is son and their dog who were herding a baby snake from the path), returned to our car, and went home.
So, the election is over and now it’s time to mop up. I don’t talk about politics, really, because that’s not what I’m here for, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say anything. However, I’m not sure what to say about the election that hasn’t been said better elsewhere.
So here are some of those things that have been said better elsewhere:
I’ll probably add more later. There are some other things that my friends have linked to that I need to dig up. Also some of my friends wrote some amazing things that I want to link to. I have to ask them whether I can link to them here.
Speaking of links, I may start linking to Amazon.com books here. I think that I need to start attempting to generate some income outside of my job sooner rather than later and that seems as good a way to do that as any. I won’t really waste too much effort on it because, again, that’s not what I’m here for. But if I happen to have read a particularly good fiction book set in a destination that I’m writing on, then maybe I’ll link to it. Maybe not. We’ll see what happens.
The Drones Come Home, by John Horgan, photographs by Joe McNally
I thought I could knock this out with my last National Geographic post, but when I was writing the post, I realized that I still hadn’t read this article. And now that I’ve read it, I’m still not sure I’ve read it.
Mostly this is about the then up-and-coming field of drones. We talk about the applications that drones can be put to, such as military and law enforcement uses, and the newest varieties of drones that were then being developed.
I really found it to be not terribly gripping reading, so I asked Alex to read it, hoping that he could distill something more exciting from it, but he didn’t see much there, either. So I guess I can say, well, I read it.
I aim to get around 8,000 steps per day. I was off on the first of November, so even though I got nearly 1,000 steps in, that still leaves me about 7,000 behind. I can generally catch that up pretty quickly. Then on the second through fourth, we sold a lot of prescriptions, which means that I spent a lot of time on a cash register. The end result of that was that I barely kept up. Actually, on the fourth, I walked around the store up one aisle and down the other — twice. So that actually had me over for the day, but still about 5,000 steps behind for the month.
Then yesterday we had a friend over for lunch. I got a couple thousand steps in before she came over, but afterwards, nothing. So I’m about 13,000 steps behind right now. It’s still early today, so I might be able to get that many in. Except that it’s raining. I know that there are umbrellas, but so many of my usual places to walk are dirt. Walking in the rain is all right. Walking in the mud is far less acceptable.
Even if I were able to catch up today (which is doubtful — 13,000 steps is nearly six miles), then on Tuesday, I’m working the election, which is a 13-hour day of sitting down. So that will put me 8,000 steps behind again.
I think I’ll try to get my 8,000 in for today (maybe driving to somewhere outside the rain and also going to the supermarket?) and just let the rest of the month take care of itself.
Update (November 6, 2016, 6:54 p.m.): So, unwilling to give up so easily, I took Alex out to try to finish up the leg of the Salado Creek Greenway that we’re working on. We get to the trailhead and I ask Alex to put my phone in the pouch that I wear when we’re hiking. And turns out I left my phone at home. We still got an hour’s walking in (and since we almost ran the whole way back we probably knocked out about three miles or so). We might have attempted more, but there were dark clouds in the distance and we didn’t want to chance getting caught in the rain so we headed back to the car. Afterwards, then we went grocery shopping, which added another couple hundred, probably.
According to the Google Map Pedometer, we walked 2.4 miles, round trip, which is 5,300 steps. Adding the grocery store to that probably brings me up to 6,000 steps or so. So now I’m faking it by moving my arm up and down 6,000 times. Perhaps we’ll take the dog for a walk tonight.
I like to leave for our destination as early as possible when I travel. When driving, that generally means leaving the night before the trip, particularly if the trip will take us up the Interstate 35 corridor. Interstate 35 is kind of a nightmare at the best of times, and morning rush hour is not the best of times. It’s nice to leave San Antonio at around 10:30 p.m., though. By the time you’re through Dallas, it’s just about sunrise and you’re on your way to Texarkana.
For flying, this generally means a flight sometime between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. For this trip, we ended up with a 6:30 a.m. flight, which, with picking up our luggage and riding on the Blue Line subway, had us in the Loop by 11:00. We emerged from the tunnel beneath Daley Plaza and walked to our hotel to check in. As luck would have it, our room was ready by then, so we dropped off our bags and headed out for the day.
Our first stop was the department store formerly known as Marshall Field’s. We admired the Tiffany ceiling and then went down to the food court in the basement. They seem to have remodeled since my last visit, but the food was excellent. I got roasted chicken with green beans and rice. Alex got just the chicken and a smoothie. He helped me finish the rice.
I then dragged Alex up to the 7th floor, where we peeked in at the Walnut Room and then looked down one of the atria to the first floor. We left the department store and then walked to the Chicago Cultural Center.
The Chicago Cultural Center is the original building for the Chicago Public Library. After the Great Chicago Fire, the citizens of London donated thousands of books to the city. The city government, understanding that this gift deserved a suitable building, built a five-story building, with mosaics and what is one of the largest Tiffany domes in the world, to house the collection.
The dome of the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois
We actually entered through the “wrong” side of the building (on Randolph Street), which is the side that the Grand Army of the Republic rotunda is on. The Grand Army of the Republic was an organization for veterans of the Union Army during the Civil War. The entrance isn’t quite as grand as the Washington Street side and the dome (by Healy and Millet) is lovely, but less impressive than the dome on the library side.
We explored some of the art exhibits in the center, including Paul Catanese’s Visible from Space.
After we left the Cultural Center, we went to Millennium Park and stood in the mist from the Crown Fountain (which seems to be showing its age a bit) and admired the Bean (more formally known as the Cloud Gate). We then walked from there to the Art Institute of Chicago, where we wandered around for a while. I made sure we caught most of the really notable works including A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Nighthawks, At the Moulin Rouge, and America Windows. American Gothic was in a for-pay exhibit but was put near a glass window so that we could see it from the outside of the exhibit. We also went into the recreation of the trading room from the Chicago Stock Exchange building and then after we left the museum went around to the back to admire the arch that once stood over the door of the exchange.
We returned to our hotel room and ordered a pizza. Alex fell asleep literally while eating, so I ate most of the pizza myself. Then, while he was still asleep, I went out onto the street in front of our hotel and checked out some of the places I remembered visiting from my days working in the Loop. One of the restaurants I used to visit is now a falafel place. I also caught a Magmar and a Jynx while I was out there.
After that, it was too dark outside for me to feel perfectly comfortable walking around by myself, so I went back to the room myself to get some rest for our next, even more exhausting, day.
Return to River Town, by Peter Hessler, photographs by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Hessler was a Peace Corps volunteer in Fuling, PRC in the late 1990s. He wrote three books about his experiences in China, the first of which was named River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, whence this article gets its name.
Fuling is, again, as the title of Hessler’s book implies, on the Yangtze River. It is, in fact, near the Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest dams in the world, and the one that produces by far the most electricity.
In Return to River Town, Hessler chronicles some of the changes that have come to Fuling since the publication of his books. He also takes us to the Baiheliang (White Crane Ridge) Underwater Museum, which protects an archaeological site that was submerged when the dam was built.
The Left Bank Ape, by David Quammen, photographs by Christian Ziegler
I’m unclear on the use of “Exclusive” in the subtitle on this article: An Exclusive Look at Bonobos. Maybe I’ve read the covers of too many gossip magazines in my day, but to me this sounds like the bonobos gave some kind of interview to Quammen that they didn’t give to anyone else. Maybe “Exclusive” means “on just bonobos and no other animals”? I guess I’ll probably never know.
I have to admit that I read this article first. Some of my friends idealize bonobo culture, and I really wonder what’s going through their heads when they say that having sex with an aggressor sounds more pleasant to them than fighting with the aggressor. I finally had to speak up and say that I find anger to be a definite turnoff and submitting sexually to someone who’s angry sounds, well, kind of like rape to me.
Over these past few years, as a result, I have a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the very word “bonobos,” so since I’m dedicated to reading absolutely everything, I figured I’d pull the metaphorical “adhesive bandage” off quickly and read this one first.
And Quammen tells us that things are different for bonobos in the wild than the ones in captivity that gave them their reputation. In the wild, bonobos do fight and it’s apparently not expected for the combatants to have sex with each other. It seems that the excessive sex-focus of bonobos is largely an artifact of captivity. In their natural habitat, in fact, the males have relatively high levels of cortisol, a hormone that increases during times of stress.
As to the title The Left-Bank Ape, bonobos are less likely to engage in outright violence than chimpanzees, however, and spend less time eating meat and more time eating plant-based foods than chimpanzees. Scientists attribute this to the lack of gorillas on their side of the Congo River. The lack of competition from gorillas has led to the lifestyle of the bonobo being, while not completely free of stress, less stressful than that of its cousins across the river.
When we left Chicago, I was wondering if I got any decent pictures of Lincoln Park. As it turned out, the only pictures of the park that weren’t of the zoo that I got, as it turned out, were one picture of the Couch mausoleum that I took from a moving bus (so it’s not the best picture ever), a few pictures of the Albert Caldwell Lily Pool, and a couple of pictures of the beach just a little south of where Lake Shore Drive would intersect with Belden Avenue if Belden Avenue went through. Which it doesn’t.
Anyway, I haven’t found anything that I liked well enough to showcase in my post on Lincoln Park, so on to the zoo. I have 47 pictures from the zoo, so I’m sure that I can find something that I can work with there.
Lincoln Park Zoo began, for all intents and purposes, with two swans in 1868. In 1874, a bear cub joined the swans, and the zoo was underway. I’m not sure when exactly the “there are two swans and a bear cub in Lincoln Park” gave way to a formal “Lincoln Park Zoo,” but the first zoo director, Cyrus DeVry, was hired in 1888, so it’s likely to have been somewhere in that period.
Over time, the zoo grew, with the addition of new buildings and species. Today, there are over 1,000 specimens of over 200 species in the zoo.
The animals above the entrance to Lincoln Park Zoo
At the moment (and for the foreseeable future), Lincoln Park Zoo is free to the public. I don’t normally talk about admissions fees because that’s not “evergreen.” Someday the admissions cost will go up which means that one of two things would have to happen. One, I would have to track the cost of admission to absolutely everything that I’ll ever write about that has an admission fee (the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Antonio Zoo, the Empire State Building, the Ruins of Pompeii) and then keep those pages updated. Two, I would have to resign myself to having out-of-date information on my page. And, honestly, this is what would be more likely to happen.
I’m making an exception to the above rule in this case because not having an admission charge is highly unusual. There are 142 accredited zoos in the United States and of those, from what I can tell, fewer than ten have no admission fee. In the case of Lincoln Park Zoo, the money to run the zoo is largely covered by the fee for parking in the lots near the zoo and the sale of food and souvenirs. They take donations as well, and I threw a few dollars in that bucket while I was there. Any shortfall beyond that is covered by the city. The parking lot, by the way, is not a “throw a quarter in the meter” type parking. It costs roughly the same as any private parking lot in a big city. Therefore it’s more cost-effective to drive if you have several people in the car with you. On this visit, we didn’t drive; we didn’t have a car available to us. We took the bus.
As one would imagine from the location, Lincoln Park Zoo is a lovely, parklike zoo, with lots of greenery. It’s a nice place to do some walking and watch the people and the animals. There is food available at the zoo, the most prominent of which (at least it’s the only one that stood out to me) is the food court at the Park Place Café. This food court has been there since Alex was maybe three, so it’s likely to turn out to be a long-term fixture at the zoo.
As to the animals, well, there are animals at the zoo. I think that the western lowland gorillas made the biggest impression on me. This is at least in part to the fact that a silverback was leaning up against the join between two windows when we were there, allowing me to get several really lovely pictures of him. Of course, gorillas and Lincoln Park Zoo have had a long association. In 1930, the zoo acquired a gorilla named Bushman. Bushman lived for another 21 years at the zoo, and during my childhood, most of the adults in my life had fond memories of him. He was taxidermied and is on display at the Field Museum of Natural History.
