Chicago's O'Hare Airport has always fascinated me. For the dozens, perhaps couple hundred times, or more, that I've either driven or been driven through Chicago, I never tire of watching the airplanes "drop" out of the sky, as they follow their final approaches for landing. This is an especially vivid phenomenon at night when the planes' headlights appear out of the sky like searchlights on a UFO.
Today Capt. SO and I had the Aqua RV out on the big pond. As we motored through the shipping channel on our way to Lake Michigan, we encountered legions of dead alwives, tiny fish that have died by the thousands, perhaps millions, as the result of who-knows-what natural occurrence in Lake Michigan and the Bay of Green Bay. As you move through the water, you can see the fish carcasses floating in a variety of formations. Some formations look like parallel lines, as if Mother Nature drew a diagram with a ruler, that resembles a music staff. Other formations are in a circular pattern, swirling like little eddies, while yet other carcasses float in one giant line, much like the oil-containment lines put up in the Gulf of Mexico during the last oil spill. I can only imagine the stench that these dead fish will create once their bodies wash up onto the miles of shoreline.
There was a light mist on the eastern horizon and every minute or so the mist opened up to reveal boat after boat emerging, ready to complete their westward crossing of Lake Michigan. The appearance of each boat reminded me of aeroplanes dropping from the sky in Chicago. Like the Chicago planes preparing for their final descent into O'Hare, these boats were on their final approaches into the relative safety of the shipping canal, perhaps to a marina destination either as transients or slip-holders. It is a favorite pastime of mine to imagine where a boat has been and where it might be headed to.
Just as the alewives lifeless forms are floating on top of the water in the mist - their journeys having come to an unfortunate end, the boats are emerging from the mist, probably reveling in the fact that they can see land and knowing that the hardest part of their travels are behind them.......for the moment.
