A Memory from Summer

I remember the way the bricks seemed to dissolve under the pressure of the water cannon. Like ice cubes splashed with warm water. Cardboard blocks stacked four stories high without mortar.

Here come a bunch of no-good window-breakers, joked the fire chief in impenetrable deadpan.

I couldn't understand what was going on for a moment. Windows were indeed breaking, but for no apparent reason---spontaneously it seemed. Hundreds of foot-square panels of glass, arranged in a grid across the side of the warehouse, began to fling themselves from their lofty perches, the steady rhythm they made as they shattered on the concrete pier below reminiscent of the water gushing from a gutter just after a heavy rain.

It was only once the window population of this hapless, charred warehouse had been decimated that I could see the no-good window-breakers: firefighters with long wooden instruments. Like the poles used to open tall windows in an old building. They had heavy iron hooks at their ends, which emerged, probing, from the side of the building like antennae.

The burnt-out warehouse, still smoldering, continued to be doused with water pumped by a fire boat anchored in the adjacent Chicago river. A mustachioed, portly chief in taxicab yellow armor told me they hadn't had the chance to use the state-of-the-art vessel in a decade.

Looking down from a bridge onto the scene, I could sense the enthusiasm with which the crewmen performed their duties. They ravaged the long-abandoned, newly-destroyed structure with the vigor of highly-trained marksmen bereft of a target for too long.

Down the river a crane surreptitiously loaded, one metal clawful at a time, a mountain of garbage onto a barge. If cranes are equipped with rear-view mirrors, he must have been watching the battle being waged. Trash to trash, the waste keeps cycling through.