Sunday afternoon I went for a walk in Sequoia Park, which is really only a few blocks away from here; I had been sort of ashamed of not making it there before now.
The plan, of course, was to have a quiet walk through the woods to enjoy the sunny afternoon spent predominately in the company of trees. Oh, how silly of me! I would never go to a park in Chicago on the weekend and expect to find only trees. Why should I expect to here? I took only a few steps before my foolishness was revealed to me – though in ways I certainly wasn’t prepared to expect. From somewhere… I couldn’t quite tell where… some sort of thumping sound was coming, loudly and regularly. Thud, Thud, thud thud thud. It sounded sort of like someone was hammering on a 5-gallon pickle bucket. After a few turns I discovered the culprits:
They looked like they were enjoying themselves, which maybe makes up a little for the fact that their sound certainly didn’t seem to be causing anyone else joy, so far as I could tell…
Not long after this, another strange form of music began floating through the air: tinny calliope music, eerie in quality, as though some sort of ethereal carnival from the past was about to materialize in front of me. This, however, turned out to be caused only by an ice cream van winding its way down on the road through the park. With such music, I expected some sort of Willy Wonka-like figure to step out and spirit children away into the van (we’re thinking in a good way here: spirited away to a land of chocolate where the good are rewarded and the bad become giant blueberries). Instead: the driver, sallow and unshaven, stuck out his head and swore at two boys on bikes who rode away rather quickly. (You know, you just shouldn’t drive an ice cream truck if you don’t like kids.)
My (semi-)magical adventure through the sequoias was not yet ended, however. Up the top of a hill I climbed, when suddenly, bursting through the brush, there came a bare-chested warrior sporting a shield, a sword strapped to his back, long hair flowing over it. He rushed by, ignoring me. I tried to pretend that I regularly walked by guys with swords every day, while trying to figure out what he was up to… Maybe he was going to avenge those two boys and strike down the sullen ice cream vendor? (In which case, perhaps there will be ice cream for all, and maybe I should follow him…) Or maybe that drumming was just really pissing him off?
Or maybe he belongs to the two guys who are practicing with battle axes on that fallen log over there?
I decided to leave the park. Though it became obvious that the weaponry was perhaps somewhat more explainable as I continued on, and saw several pieces propped up against a tree: they looked like they were wood and plastic, well-covered with duct tape. All was revealed later in the evening, when I learned that there is a fairly active branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism around here.
Which is a little sad. I was finally thinking that maybe at last I had been transported into a land from a fantasy novel, where I would be assured success in all my fights against evil, as they would no longer involve dismantling the military-corporate complex and instead depend only on my (of course innate) archery and dueling skills.
