The suburbs have a bad reputation. As endless tracts of anodyne nowhere, sinkholes of boredom and isolation, far from the meaningful lives of richness and significance that are lived by residents of cities. A slur formed after World War II, when cookie-cutter Levittown housing developments crowded out farmers’ fields and young couples swapped their cramped apartments in the teeming, dynamic finger-snapping city for identical contemporary split levels on quarter-acre lots.
But it isn’t true. Or at least not always true.
There are wonders aplenty in the suburbs. For instance, my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook has foxes, hawks, owls, its own velodrome, a speed skating culture that produced 20 Olympians, Prairie Grass Cafe, and the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy hovering just above our heads.
OK, M51 is 31 million light years away. But you can see it from Northbrook.
Maybe I should just tell the story.
Not realizing what splendors we already had at home, my wife and I drove into the city Saturday. She had a taste for the excellent Italian food at Topo Gigio on Wells Street, and we decided to go early and wander around Lincoln Park Zoo.
The zoo was lovely, but missing a certain vital element — you know, it’s complicated, so we’ll dive into the zoo and what it’s missing on Friday.
Anyway, after dinner — Topo Gigio let us sit at the table nearly three hours, thank you very much — we headed home, a 40-minute drive. As we turned into Center Avenue, I noticed two dark forms sitting on the sidewalk across from our house. People.
One doesn’t sit on the sidewalk in the suburbs unless one is 6 years old, and not even then. Particularly not after 10 p.m. I figured this must be young people having a tête-à-tête. I put the car in the garage, went into the house, leashed up Kitty and came out. I gave the couple a wide berth, tracking them out of the corner of my eye. We do have a homeless guy who sometimes sleeps on the bench at Shermer and Walters, but I haven’t seen him lately. Kitty did her business and, on the way back, emboldened, I vectored over.
“Good evening,” I said. “Everything OK?”
They were not the two goth teens sharing a joint that I expected, but Jeff and Kelly, two adults who were … and a dozen novelists working for a year couldn’t come up with this … sitting beside a small high tech telescope, a Seestar S50, set up on a little tripod. Gazing at the cosmos. On Jeff’s phone was projected M51, a fuzzy spot in the center of swirling arms. A distant spiral galaxy, which I found incredible. I looked up, expecting to see it in the sky, but was met with not-very-starry darkness.
Jeff explained that the SeeStar has software that not only points it at what you’re looking for, but tracks the object as the earth rotates and “stacks” images, collecting the faint light that, in the case of M51, has been traveling toward us for the past 31 million years.
To give an idea how long that is, I was going to say that it was back when dinosaurs walked the earth. But doing that checking thing that journalists are known for, I see that 31 million years ago, non-avian dinosaurs had already been extinct for 35 million years (I say “non-avian” because birds are dinosaurs, and I’m glad to be the one to tell you. Look it up if you don’t believe me). Back then, the planet was ruled by strange creatures little known today, such as the paraceratherium, a massive hornless sort of rhino that stood taller than a giraffe, and something popularly called a “giant pig from hell,” archaeotherium, an ancestor of the hippo that was as big as a modern cow.
I can’t tell you how happy seeing the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy made me. Happier than 90 minutes at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Happier than eating my double pork chop at Topo Gigio which, truth be told, was dry. How can people pretend they are a big deal when we obviously are so very, very small? Here for an eye blink on our little speck circling a minor star on the far fringe of the universe. Oblivious to wonders twirling just above our heads, marvels that we are unable to see because we generally don’t bother looking. I asked Kelly and Jeff why they were doing this on my street, as opposed to their own, and they said it was a particularly dark street. That is true. There’s something ironic there — it can be in the darkest places where you get the best view of the incredible richness of life.