Sifting through views of life along the lakefront

Mary Schmich

June 22, 2008

My blood pressure goes down just hearing the words "summer place."

For the lucky few, "summer place" means a beach house or a creek-side cabin or one of those Tuscan villas whose summer rent equals some people's yearly salary. For the rest of us, the summer place may be a just a rooftop, a back porch or a stoop.

A few characteristics of a summer place:

—You can expose bare skin to fresh air.

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—Work e-mail is an intrusion.

—You can be quieter than usual, or noisier.

—You can feel the warmth bake the worry from your brain and bones so thoroughly that it hits you: Life is indeed a bowl of cherries and not, as you were thinking before you sat down in the summer place and stripped off your socks, a vat of prune pits.

We usually think of summer places as private spaces, but those of us who live in Chicago have a public summer place—the lakefront.

And this summer I want to look for stories of our shared summer place, of life out where the prairie meets the water and Chicagoans of all flavors meet each other. In my story search, I'd like some help.

If you have a summer lakefront story that would be worth telling in a column, I'd like to hear from you.

It doesn't have to be your story. It can be someone else's, something interesting you've observed, something you've been wondering about, worrying about, driven crazy by.

I want to hear stories that show the range of life that's lived along Chicago's strip of Lake Michigan. I'm not talking about memories of the lake, but tales of 2008. Here. Now.

What's happening out there on those miles of city shore?

Love stories, interesting people, trends, trouble.

Down by the steel mills, up near the mansions.

What's going on in the middle of the night? If you know, let me know.

I'm less interested in staged events—no fundraisers—than in the lakefront's impromptu life.

Those of us who spend time doing the usual lakefront things—biking, running, walking, playing volleyball—may not pause to absorb the complexities around us.

Sometimes it takes the news to point out that our summer place isn't just a pretty spot to watch the Air and Water Show and curse at in-line skaters.

Late last summer, for example, after a Vietnamese fisherman was attacked and then drowned at Montrose Harbor, we learned a little more about the racial and ethnic aspects of the urban fishing scene.

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Sifting through views of life along the lakefront

Related topic galleries: Fishing, Montrose

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