Tar paper lights

I can tell Chicago is getting ready for winter. Like a furry
caterpillar warns a farmer of a tough season, Chicago's streets are my
almanac.

There's a common (lame?) joke in Chicago that there are two
seasons--winter and road work. It's kinda true. Traffic lines on
Chicago's roads are scraped away every winter by snowplows, but I know
it's summer when I see city painters out replacing law and order to the
streets' traffic flow. Once that fresh reflective white dash goes
down, I know it's about to get hot out.

The winter side of seasonal road maintenance is tar paper. Every day
that I take the train home from work, I walk south across the Michigan
Avenue drawbridge. The pedestrian walkway across the bridge is covered
in tough stuff like skate board grip tape. I don't think it's applied
like grip tape though. It's funny to imagine crews of city workers out
with strips of grip tape, the wheel trucks taken off the bridge's deck,
adhering the rough paper, and razoring away the excess edges. Those
crew workers would be sulking teenage boys sitting on natty couches in
Mayor Daley's basement, telling each other, "Man, he just doesn't
understand me. You know, the real me. He doesn't get what I'm about.
I'm takin' off next summer man and then he'll regret all those times
he tried to tell me what to do. I'll show him!"

The real Michigan Avenue bridge has some sort of industrial tar paper
that prevents walkers from slipping on the slick metal walkways.
Remember those signs that say "Bridges freeze before roadways"? I used
to think that right in front of the bridge would be a strip of ice that
I should watch out for. That's where it would freeze, on the margin,
right before the road became a bridge or went under a bridge. My
brother or my sister taught me that it refers to laws of
thermo-dynamics. It's harder to freeze asphalt on a road because it
retains heat stored and transferred by the ground. Bridges have a much
larger exposed surface area and freeze faster because they aren't
receiving radiant heat stored by their soily neighbors. So "Bridges
freeze before roadways" really means that bridges get colder faster
than roads do. Hence the need for grip tape on the Michigan Avenue bridge.

Every fall, like that furry caterpillar come to call with his fuzzy
warning, the Chicago road crews come and re-coat the Michigan Avenue
bridge with fresh, black, sparkly no-slip grip stuff. On the day that
I walk south across the bridge and the ratty, hole-ridden, worn-out tar
paper is replaced with a gleaming new roll, I know it's time.

Last week I saw the refreshed bridge walkways and wondered how I could
see this as a good sign instead of an ill omen. I came up with my
answer tonight. Every Christmas, there's a holiday show that takes
place on Michigan Avenue where children's marching bands and Disney
characters and Swiss brass bands perform in a plaza. To prepare for
the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival, city workers groom the area for
days beforehand. They sweep and clean and scrub. They even bring out
power washers to blast the brass plaques that mark the location of the
original Fort Dearborn settlement on the banks of the Chicago River.
Maybe instead of a warning about the bundles of down coats I'll need to
swaddle in for the cold winter, I should think of the new bridge tar
paper as the first step toward the holiday festival. Maybe this is
just one day closer to a beautiful season of lighted trees and happy
children and hot cocoa vendors out on the streets.