The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [147]
New refugees from the heat were fleeing the steaming high-rises along the lake and joining the camp every hour, couples mostly, but also singles in groups, friends treating the blackout like a holiday, as if they were renting a Wisconsin lake house instead of squatting on a piece of city parkland. As the crowd grew, it became inevitably unrulier—noisier, rowdier, unpleasant. Nevertheless, Bobby couldn’t see a single cop in any direction. The air smelled mostly of sewage and a little of ash. The fires had started on the West Side and eventually causes would be determined. Blame would be assigned. Arrests would be made. But at the moment, the distant plumes of smoke above the trees to Bobby’s right were only an unwanted answer to a question no one had the courage to ask. How much worse can this get?
Dogs, as irritable and hungry as their owners, barked and fought and snarled and howled. Some people were trying to camp on the beach, across a pedestrian bridge over Lake Shore Drive, as if that were more romantic than the crowded park. Without shade, Bobby knew, the sun there would be too hot during the day, the sand too gritty at night. The urban beach was a lovely place to spend a morning, its waters the only real refuge from the heat, but it was an inhospitable place to live. Beyond them, an armada of boats had dropped anchor offshore, a new settlement on the cool water.
Bobby estimated some three hundred refugees from nearby apartments were now settled uncomfortably into their Eddie Bauer tents, their Land’s End air mattresses, their lean-tos improvised from custom-made curtains. The previous day, the city had delivered six portable toilets, which had been quickly overwhelmed with use. Another six arrived that morning, allegedly courtesy of Gary Jameson, who might or might not be in the Thousand but who was definitely the asshole with the generator in the big house at the edge of the park. Peering between tent flaps, he caught glimpses and snippets and smells of people making love, sleeping, smoking pot. Everyone was agitated and he could hear bits of conversation as he passed.
“Fucking ComEd. What’s their problem?”
“That house pisses me off. They got the lights on during the day, for Christ sake.”
“Some kind of fucking gesture. That’s all I want. Common decency. A gesture.”
Most North Siders of means were waiting out the crisis with friends and relatives or in suburban hotels. Bobby wondered about the Whole Foogees, the ones who had stayed behind. They believed the power might come back anytime, he guessed. They were young kids, mostly, who still saw adversity as adventure or an excuse to party, or both.
Bobby checked in at a small improvised first-aid tent—a white canopy, really. It was manned by volunteers from the neighborhood—a few nurses, a med student, a paramedic, a vet. There had already been one death, cause undetermined, but probably a heart attack, body moved to the beach, covered and quickly grieved over, waiting in the sun for the coroner, who hadn’t yet arrived. The makeshift funeral had only briefly disrupted the all-day volleyball games just a few yards upwind, they told him.
Trash now completely obstructed the road that cut through the park, linking LaSalle Street to Lake Shore Drive. That meant freer access to the less spoiled southern end of the beach through a tunnel under the highway. In twenty-four hours, Bobby guessed, the sand there would be just as saturated with feces and glass and garbage.
The media must have been stretched thin, too, but unlike the cops, the newspeople had managed a full-time presence in the park, a far safer beat than the West Side, where, it seemed, the real action was. Television helicopters