{"id":1628,"date":"2014-06-13T11:41:56","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T15:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/?p=1628"},"modified":"2019-11-24T12:24:01","modified_gmt":"2019-11-24T16:24:01","slug":"seed-or-weed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/seed-or-weed\/","title":{"rendered":"Seed or weed?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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[Originally written for and performed at Theater Oobleck<\/a>‘s June 3, 2014, residency at the Hideout<\/a>. Perhaps to be revised, or turned into a chapbook. We’ll see. <\/span>Gently revised version republished September 22, 2014, by Belt Magazine<\/a>, and later in the anthology Voices From the Rust Belt<\/strong> (Picador, 2017).]<\/em><\/p>\n

Down the street from my apartment there\u2019s a community garden on a vacant lot owned by my landlord — although, of course, it’s not actually \u201cvacant\u201d at all. It\u2019s home to a dozen raised beds of flowers and vegetables. There are hoses and a rain barrel and two rotating compost bins and a mess of stakes and tomato cages under the porch of the house next door. In the spring mushrooms push up through the dandelions <\/a><\/p>\n

In the first warm weeks of May I sowed buttercrunch lettuce and mesclun and red romaine, along with beets and chard and kale and carrots in the plots I\u2019d claimed as my own. I had the best intentions, I had carefully ordered an array of exotics from the heirloom seed catalog — Chantenay red core carrots; bull\u2019s blood and golden beets. I amended the soil with compost and an extravagant layer of topsoil. I even drew a map in a little spiral notebook. But, perhaps dizzy with the sudden onset of spring, when I got down in the dirt itself I quickly abandoned any attempt to impose structure on nature and began sprinkling seeds with abandon. I figured I\u2019d thin them out once they\u2019d germinated, after I saw what stuck.<\/p>\n

One month later the lettuces are coming up thick in nice straight rows. But the bok choy and the chard are sketchy, their sprouts emerging from the soil in curves and clumps, if at all. Only four of dozens of golden beets have germinated, and cilantro has invaded the carrot patch. Samaras from the maple towering to the east have rained down on the garden, blanketing it with little brown propellers and every morning I crouch over the beds, contemplating clusters of inch-high shoots, wondering, are you kale or crabgrass? Are you seed or are you weed?<\/p>\n

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I live half a block north of this garden, on Humboldt Boulevard practically on top of the Bloomingdale Trail<\/a>. That\u2019s the colloquial name given to the elevated tracks stretching 2.7 miles west across Chicago from Ashland all the way to Ridgeway, along Bloomingdale Avenue, about midway between Armitage and North. Once it was a spur line for the Canadian Pacific Railroad, but regular transit stopped on the line in 2001 and in the years that followed the tracks were reclaimed by fast-growing plants. Bull thistles and pokeweed grew thick along the railings while pineapple weed choked the tracks \u2013 as did broken glass, beer cans, dead rats, abandoned shoes, needles, condoms, and yards upon yards of VHS tape, scenes from Ghostbusters<\/em> unspooling on the breeze. Catalpa and gingko stretched their branches overhead. Wildflowers rioted in July.<\/p>\n

From the ground the trail didn\u2019t look like much \u2013 a few miles of dank, crumbling cement held together by graffiti. But from above it was a magic highway. A thin strip of rough scrubby green easily accessed at strategic points along a poorly maintained fence line, the Bloomingdale Trail gave sanctuary to drinkers, dog walkers, joggers, junkies, and anyone seeking shelter from the streets below. It was an interstitial wilderness, opportunistic plants holding tight to rocky soil, and for much of the 00s it was the city\u2019s best-kept open secret.<\/p>\n

These days the weeds are gone. In August 2013 the city broke ground on construction of a long-planned network of parks and trails along the railway that\u2019s now called The 606 — <\/a>after the three numbers all Chicago zip codes have in common. Said name change — enacted after much focus grouping and brand consultation by the consortium of agencies charged with developing the park — it seems to have succeeded in offending few and pleasing fewer, but on the street it doesn’t matter. \u00a0Everyone still calls it the Bloomingdale Trail anyway.<\/p>\n

No matter what you call it, it’s set to open in its first phase in 2015, after more than ten years of grassroots organizing and prep. Now that the city’s taken charge the project is moving full steam ahead. BUILDING A NEW CHICAGO, declare the signs hanging from its bridges, and I\u2019ve watched over the last nine months as small trucks and front-end loaders zip back and forth along the viaduct past my second-story windows. On the ground, the bright murals that marked the passage from Humboldt Park to Logan Square \u2013 whose neighborhood boundary the trail passively polices \u2013 have been sandblasted away in the name of lead abatement. The quiet man who lived underneath the overpass all last summer has moved on. If you trespass on the tracks these days you\u2019ll get a ticket.<\/p>\n

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In 1995 I was homeless in Chicago, sleeping on the floor of a friend\u2019s loft at Grand and Wood. I spent hours each day, those first weeks, adrift in a strange town, drinking coffee at the old Wishbone on Grand and poring over the Reader<\/em> classifieds looking for a job, an apartment, a map, a clue.<\/p>\n

In the afternoons I walked the streets of greater Wicker Park \u2013 Grand to North; Ashland to Western — building a muscle memory of Chicago\u2019s geography with every step. I didn\u2019t go west of Western on my own back then. In 1995, to the new in town, west of Western was the wild unknown, best approached only with a trusted guide.<\/p>\n

One night we threw a party. My friends were moving out of the loft, moving on, and I needed to as well. We posted a sign in the kitchen, bold black Sharpie on butcher paper: \u201cMartha needs a place to live.\u201d It was a party with intention, at which I had to introduce myself to strangers over and over until, by accident, one of them stuck. I moved into Carla\u2019s apartment at Augusta and Damen two weeks later. Was the seed of my life planted there accidentally or by intention? It’s unclear.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

For as long as there\u2019ve been gardens, gardeners have pondered the epistemology of weeds.<\/p>\n

Because a weed famously is defined by what it\u2019s not. A weed is just a plant growing where it\u2019s not wanted, right? A hardy plant with the tenacity to thrive, neglected, in inhospitable turf.<\/p>\n

A weed competes for resources \u2013 for space, sunlight, and water — with more desirable, intentional plants. It provides shelter where pests can overwinter. Early-season weeds offer sustenance to sap-sucking aphids and other insects, enabling them to grow strong enough to attack your tomatoes when the time is right.<\/p>\n

In the proper context a weed can be a tincture, or a tea, or the main ingredient in your pasta with wild ramp pesto. If it roots in the right place it can fix nitrogen in the soil or anchor unstable ground. In fact there\u2019s a famous story that the first life to return to east London after the devastation of the Blitz came in the form of weeds. According to Richard Mabey, author of the book Weeds<\/a>, by the end of the war braken carpeted the nave of St. James Cathedral and ragwort scrambled up London Wall. The spread of the lowly rosebay willowherb was so thick and rapid it was welcomed with the nickname \u201cbombweed.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s a weed on land no one cares about? In the loose taxonomy of common weeds, railway weeds are their own low category: tenacious, craven plants that have staked a claim to the roughest most embattled turf around. Yarrow and curly dock. Pigweeds prostrate, Russian, rough, and smooth. Spotted knapweed, hoary cress, Western goatsbeard, and toothed spurge. They all have names and properties, but in the ledger of urban improvement count for nothing.<\/p>\n

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Last summer I walked the Bloomingdale Trail a lot, climbing the fence at Julia DeBurgos Park<\/a> over on Whipple and more often than not heading east. To the west, near where the tracks split at Ridgeway, vegetation gave way to a ground cover of small hostile rocks, and long-abandoned freight cars offered privacy for all manner of illicit human activities.<\/p>\n

To the east, though, the path grew soft and lush and where, from the street, the tracks seemed a dark mass of decaying concrete, from above they vibrated with the full flower of midsummer.<\/p>\n

Accident or intention?<\/p>\n

Seed or weed?<\/p>\n

Which is better in the long run? Is it even possible to quantify their relative good? Intention builds bridges; accident coats them with rust. Intention drops bombs; accident turns the rubble green. Intention sows spinach; accident raises lamb\u2019s quarters instead.<\/p>\n

But, wait a minute. Weeds grow from seeds, same as radishes. Lamb\u2019s quarters are just wild spinach. You can eat them too, just as well.<\/p>\n

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My friend Amy used to live on Monticello, just south of the Bloomingdale tracks, and she swore for months that from her garden she could see trains passing along the tracks overhead. We scoffed. Those tracks haven\u2019t been used for years! She was seeing ghosts, we teased, and Amy\u2019s ghost train was a running refrain until, one day, I saw it too \u2013 a freight train, real as steel, moving smoothly west.<\/p>\n

I did some poking around and the most likely explanation for this is that the trains were delivering flour to a nearby industrial bakery that, though warned of the imminent redevelopment of the trail, waited until the very last possible minute to make alternate shipping arrangements. The least likely, though most lovely, explanation is the legend told by longtime trail neighbors, who swear that the circus used to use those tracks, sending carloads of animals towards the United Center, giraffes poking their necks out the top and nodding to condo dwellers as they passed.<\/p>\n

This, of course, is a fairytale. No record of such a train exists with either the railway or the city. It turns out, in fact, that Amy\u2019s ghost train may have been delivering neither bread nor beasts. Rather, in order for Canadian Pacific to hold onto the air rights above the tracks all these years, they were required by law to keep them in use. And so every once in a while, for no reason, they\u2019d run a train bearing nothing slowly by.<\/p>\n

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In April the Chicago Department of Transportation removed the old railway bridge at the Ashland Avenue end of the Bloomingdale Trail. It was taken to a work yard, scrubbed clean of rust, repainted, and then driven slowly, at dawn, one mile west to Western, where it was reinstalled, and now connects Humboldt Park to Bucktown. The video of the bridge\u2019s transit <\/a>reminds me of footage of the journey<\/a> of Michael Heizer\u2019s Levitated Mass,<\/a> the 350-ton granite boulder Heizer \u2013 a reclusive land artist perhaps best known for his 1970 earthwork Double Negative<\/a> — had excavated from a Southern California quarry in 2012 and trucked over ten nights, at a stately 2 miles per hour, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

Over those ten nights crowds of thousands gathered to marvel and clap, and others to mock and jeer. It\u2019s just a rock, the skeptics scoffed. Why waste all this time and money staking a claim to art? But like \u201cDouble Negative\u201d \u2013 which is basically two big gashes cut into the earth atop a remote Nevada mesa \u2013 the appeal of the big rock, which now sits suspended above a deep trench cut into the LACMA plaza, is as much about what\u2019s not there as what is.<\/p>\n

Weed or seed?<\/p>\n

Can\u2019t a plant \u2013 a rock, a trail, a home — be both at once?<\/p>\n

\"img_1889\"<\/a><\/p>\n

All summer long city crews have been working on the viaduct over Humboldt Boulevard, spitting distance from my door, jackhammering away every morning at the unhappy hour of 7 am. When this phase of construction is done, there\u2019ll be a new access ramp over on Whipple and bleacher seating installed along the Humboldt overpass that will give visitors a place to sit and rest, and look down at traffic on the boulevard, and in my front yard.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a long arc to this yard from that first apartment I stumbled into, the one that anchored me in Chicago. I was only there a year, but in the 18 years since I haven\u2019t strayed far from that central square, even as its perimeter has expanded, pushing past Western to California and beyond, and north to the edge of the Bloomingdale Trail, whose rocks and weeds inscribed new memories into my muscles as recently as last year.<\/p>\n

According to the plan recently unveiled by the landscape architect for the site, the trail will be home to an elaborate new ecosystem of native plants, with hanging gardens of forsythia, thickets of poplars and maidenhair ferns, and meadows of blue flax and bee balm, goatsbeard and yellow mullien — desirable, intentional, weeds no more. A spiraling observatory\u00a0—\u00a0an earthwork built from soil and rubble — will anchor the western trailhead, its access points marked by evergreen spires. A tunnel of paper bark maples will open onto a public arts space at Ashland, and magnolias will bloom over Julia De Burgos Park.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Like the circus train, it will soon be a fairytale that once upon a time in the city you could climb a fence and take a long walk through nothing, along a trail of beautiful weeds.<\/p>\n

\"img_1904\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Originally written for and performed at Theater Oobleck‘s June 3, 2014, residency at the Hideout. Perhaps to be revised, or turned into a chapbook. We’ll see. Gently revised version republished September 22, 2014, by Belt Magazine, and later in the anthology Voices From the Rust Belt (Picador, 2017).] Down the street from my apartment there\u2019s … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[284,285,286,283,281,282,148],"class_list":["post-1628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-circus-train","tag-gardening","tag-gentrification","tag-levitated-mass","tag-the-606","tag-the-bloomingdale-trail","tag-weeds"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1628"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2532,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628\/revisions\/2532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}