As his plate of french fries cools, Sagittarius fingers the rough surface and sharp edge of an arrowhead, chipped into shape from a tan stone hundreds or maybe thousands of years ago by an American Indian craftsman, sure of hand and delicate of touch. For all its roughness, the arrowhead is not crude. It manifests a careful balance, and it is well-made. Slightly plump in the center, it narrows down at its base to fit into the notch of the shaft of an arrow. Of its corners, the one that forms its business end–its point–is the most acute, the better to enter easily and deeply into the flesh of prey, or an enemy.
The arrowhead seems to have particular resonance for Sagittarius. Perhaps it’s because he was born under the Zodiac sign of the Archer Sagittarius nearly half a century ago. He takes delight in the feel of the stone, and the knowledge of its antiquity. He is sitting at a table in Russell’s, a barbecue beef place in Rolling Meadows that brags of its own longevity. The throw-away cup of Diet Coke that Sagittarius sips from proclaims on its side that Russell’s has been in business since 1930.
Sagittarius is on a mission. He has been sent into Chicago’s suburbs by his bosses at the newspaper with one charge: to have fun. He has been given a week. And he’s succeeding.
Many people have fun–every day–in the suburbs. Of course. But Sagittarius is a creature of the city, and he approaches the hinterland as something of a foreign landscape. He looks at the suburbs as a visitor would, with fresh eyes. This is not so odd. Even if Sagittarius lived in the suburbs, he would likely be familiar only with his own section. In all the other sections, he would be a stranger. In his mission, Sagittarius is Everyman (and Everywoman). The suburbs are so large and so multifarious that it would be easy enough for anyonesuburbanite or Chicagoanto have fun playing the tourist.
True, Sagittarius does have the advantage of being paid to have his fun. But there are drawbacks: In the space of five days, he will drive 499 miles–to University Park and Des Plaines, to Batavia and Park City–and much of the time he won’t be on an expressway or tollway. He will pack nearly 20 attractions into his tour–as if he were trying to hit all the churches of Florence or all the vineyards of Bordeaux. He won’t lollygag.
But don’t cry for Sagittarius, Argentina.
In his travels, he will see giant mastodon skulls and touch the tooth of a mammoth. He will study photographs of a saint and examine a replica of Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s. He will watch buffaloes lunch. He will stand at the source of the Chicago River.
His is an idiosyncratic tour, but so would anyone else’s be. He avoids shopping malls and riverboat casinos and the usual sorts of popular entertainment. And–call him a drudge–many of his stops are somewhat educational in nature. Sagittarius likes to learn about thingsor, at least, learn of things.
Consider the Fermilab in Batavia (630-840-3351) where government scientists are studying the mysteries of matter; and the Sri Venkateswara Swami Temple of Greater Chicago in Aurora (630-844-2252) where Hindu believers gather to pray to a galaxy of gods; and the Goelitz Confectionery Jelly Belly Factory in North Chicago (847-689-8950) where more than 40 varieties of Jelly Bellys and dozens of other candies are manufactured.
Sagittarius doesn’t really understand any of this, even after visiting each of these places. But he feels good to know that someone else does. For him, all the explanations of the production processes at the Jelly Belly factory seem to boil down to one layer of sugar on top of another on top of another with a sweet fruit jamthe jelly in the bellyat the center.
Similarly mystifying is his guided tour of the imposing Hindu temple that has risen in a former cornfield at the northern edge of Aurora. Yet, this stop is one of his favorites, in part because of the temple’s lack of tourism polish. There are no slick leaflets handed out, no T-shirts or coffee mugs for sale. No, instead, one of the temple faithful leads Sagittarius from one altar to another, explaining the different attributes of each god. And, if Sagittarius, limited as he is, is unable to keep all the attributes and all the gods straight, he can still feel the wonderful richness of this unfamiliar faith.
Not everything’s unfamiliar: At one point, Sagittarius learns that Hindus rub ashes on their foreheads to remind themselves that death, in its time, will come–just as Roman Catholics do on Ash Wednesday. He also notices that next to some of the altars is a small safe in which believers can place money offerings to be used for religious purposes–just as Catholics do when they light a candle at the side altar in a church.
The most profoundly incomprehensible place is Fermilab. That’s not surprising, because what researchers there are trying to do is to learn, as they say, “the nature of nature.”
From the beginning, the Fermilab people have recognized that, being lost in their formulae and subatomic theories, they run the risk of coming across to the average Joe as mad (or at least addled) scientists. So they have included in their world elements that make the complex more approachable and more understandable. They maintain, for example, a small herd of buffalo, several old farmhouses and a tiny restored pioneer cemetery where, among the gravestones, is one for Thompson Mead, who was born two years before the Declaration of Independence, served as a general in the New York militia during the War of 1812 and died in Du Page County a decade before the Civil War. And, on one of the walls of Fermilab’s main building, near some of the more daunting diagrams and charts about particularly obscure experiments, are several framed collections of arrowheads found in and around the Fermilab grounds.
Far south in Will County, the massive sculptures featured in the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park at Governors State University in University Park (708-534-4105) are meditations on the interplay between humans and the landscape. But, in truth, Fermilab strikes Sagittarius as the most eloquent sculpture of them all.
Many of the Manilow pieces, scattered–and often hidden–around the university’s grounds, call to mind large objects of modern life: rusting factories, a forest of drilling equipment, a space capsule, a line of telephone poles. One sculpture–“Bodark Arc” by Martin Puryear–is a semi-circular path that’s best seen from the air (as a photograph in the park’s $15 catalog shows).
Yet, in many ways, these intentionally purposeless works seem like playthings compared with the way that the Fermilab scientists have carved up their own landscape with a vengeance. On the Fermilab self-guided tour, Sagittarius stands on the 15th floor of the complex’s main building and looks out at a channel that forms a huge circle on the plain (paralleling the lab’s underground high-energy superconducting accelerator); a booster facility that looks for all the world like a water-filled amphitheater awaiting a new Esther Williams; and two parallel streets shooting straight east, like arrowsor lines on a piece of paper.
This is art waiting to be discovered.
Some of Sagittarius’ stops are silly; some are not. The replica of the centuries-old Leaning Tower of Pisa, found outside the Leaning Tower YMCA in Niles (847-647-8222), is half the size of the original, and totally odd. Odd, too, is Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines (847-297-5022). For one thing, you can’t buy any food there; you have to cross Lee Street to a modern McDonald’s if you want a Big Mac. And this isn’t the actual restaurant; it’s a replica. The original building was torn down a decade ago, and this structure, complete with period details from the mid-1950s, was put up in its place.
Sagittarius likes history, and, on his suburban tour, he indulges his fancy. He travels to the northernmost source of the Chicago River: a large pipe that emerges from under a mobile home park in Park City next to Waukegan. There are no signs posted to indicate the significance of the pipe.
To get there, Sagittarius drives to the Greenbelt Forest Preserve on Green Bay Road just south of Belvidere Road, and follows the forest preserve lanes to the parking lot near Shelter B. From there, he walks north and northwest along a path until he comes to a small bridge. Looking north from there, he sees, about 100 feet away, the pipe opening. In the other direction, he watches the small stream flowing from the pipe join other rivulets and head south to the city and on, eventually, to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.
Sagittarius also travels to Skokie to the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois (847-677-4640), which is dedicated to ensuring that the mass extermination of Jews and other M-.undesirables by the Nazis is never forgotten. It is a sobering experience to walk through the foundation’s exhibitsnot fun, not at all, but necessary. On three walls of one room are hundreds of photographs of laughing families and friends–at the beach, skiing, feeding geese, boxing, standing for portraits, living lives that would soon be cut short. In another roomthe torn fragment of a burnt Torah with the words: “before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore, choose life.”
There are other photographs, images of Jews with their hands over their heads being marched away by gun-toting soldiers, images of the camps and the crematoria. There is the photo of one man kneeling at the edge of a pit, a Nazi gun to his head, the trigger about to be pulled. And, at one point, as Sagittarius is looking at a video, he sees, reflected in the screen, the faces of haggard concentration camp prisoners from a photograph in the next room. It is as if they are looking over his shoulder, maybe judging him, or maybe just wishing him well, that he never has to face what they have faced.
A couple of days later, Sagittarius is surprised to see another concentration camp photo, this time at the National Shrine of St. Therese in darien (630-969-3311). It is part of the small display about Father Titus Brandsma, a Roman Catholic priest who was arrested for urging newspapers in occupied Holland to reject German propaganda. He died, the victim of Nazi medical experimentation, in July 1942.
The shrine, of course, is devoted mainly to St. Therese, a French nun known as the Little Flower, who died a century ago on Sept. 30, 1897, at the age of 24. Although she lived the quietest of lives, she is venerated around the world for her simplicity and holiness.
She is also, Sagittarius discovers, one of the few church-designated saints of whom photographs exist. This fascinates him. Instead of having to put up with some artist’s conception of what the holy person must have looked likealmost always heavily idealizedSagittarius is able to see for himself. On one wall, he studies a large image of Therese, taken when she was 11, and notes the liveliness in her eyes. In another photograph, this time in the habit of a Carmelite nun, Therese has a playful half smile. A third photonot up on the wall, but in many of the books for sale in the gift shopis of Therese, out of her nun’s habit and in the costume of Joan of Arc for a religious play she wrote for the sisters of her convent. A saint who enjoyed play-acting–Sagittarius likes that idea.
There is much on his suburban tour that Sagittarius likes, including:
– William B. Fosser’s Puppet Productions: “Opera in Focus” in Rolling Meadows (847-818-3220), a delightfully off-beat and lovingly presented entertainment featuring costumed puppets who act out scenes from such works as “Madama Butterfly” (to recorded arias and duets), and even dance and take bows;
– The Aurora Historical Museum (630-906-0650) with its two mastodon skulls, each the size of a small chair, that were unearthed locally in the 1930s;
– The Charles Gates Dawes House in Evanston (847-475-3410), a mansion where Dawes, a former U.S. vice president and writer of the music to the song “It’s All in the Game,” lived for much of his life;
– The Annie Lee & Friends Art Gallery in Glenwood (708-757-7100), featuring Lee’s energetic and, in some ways, Rockwell-esque paintings of middle-class African-American life;
– The Morton Arboretum in Lisle (630-719-2400) with its miles of rolling roads through an ever-changing landscape of trees, bushes and other woody plants.
As he sits in Russell’s, Sagittarius is nearing the end of his mission. He has had his fun, and, as the time approaches to head back to everyday life, he’s returning with some presents. For his bosses: a bag of Belly Flops–imperfect Jelly Bellys that taste as sweet even if somewhat misshapen. For his family: treasures from the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Elmhurst (630-833-1616).
The Lizzadro Museum is filled with beautiful objects created out of minerals, rocks, ivory, glass and such fossilized materials as petrified wood and amber. It is here that Sagittarius is able to touch the ridged surface of a mammoth’s tooth. This is where he purchases a small, orange, egg-shaped piece of onyx for his daughter, and a red one for his son, and a pair of earrings made of the olive-and-pink mineral unakite for his wife.
It is here, too, where he buys his arrowhead–for $3.50. And also a fossil fish that lived and swam in the waters around what is now Brazil anywhere from 145 million to 165 million years ago.
The fossil fish costs him $4.50. This suburban tour, Sagittarius decides, has been a good deal.
