It Was a Breeze

It Was a Breeze

Jade stood looking out her 37^th floor east-facing office window. Her gaze moved past frozen snow flurries that were whipping against the windowpane to the beat of some silent frenzied tune, and then shifted her focus downward toward the white crags of ice lunging in furious play on the surface of the lake below.

She loved her office… small, cozy, with her very own huge window that served-up, on her demand, the splendor of Lake Michigan. She was particularly mesmerized by days like this, the wind blowing the whitecaps high into the frigid air, their jagged points actually freezing in mid-air before falling back to crash against the surface… nature frolicking in its raucous, frightening cascade of power and joy!

Of course, she also loved the serenity of the Lake’s calm ripples on warmer days, the glowing heat of the sun washing over the peaceful, rolling blue-green waves, beaconing earthen and airborne creatures to the fresh, soothing caress of her watery massage.

But in the harsh depths of this particular January nightfall... with the wind swirling in and out in brutish swagger among its street-gang of city skyscrapers, before racing eastward across Lakeshore Drive to embrace that gigantic, gorgeous wonder of the western world... Jade gasped aloud in awe at the raw splendor of nature’s fury.

Her own sound broke the spell of the moment, and her eyes darted to the clock on the wall… whew! She still had 32 minutes to put things away and get to her 7:56 pm train on time.

She shoved one file back into its cabinet home, pushed the lock closed, and slid the other file from her desktop into her small briefcase… a little reading material to help the train wheels turn faster. Union Station was only half-a-block south and two streets west of her Franklin St. office building, but the actual distance west was equivalent to three City blocks, because the Chicago River lay sandwiched below, between Wacker Drive and Union Station’s Canal St. entrance.

Jade hit the light switch as she closed and checked her self-locking office door, moved briskly down the deserted hallway, popped briefly into the restroom for a pit stop, and was soon in the elevator for her express solo descent to the lobby.

As she exited the elevator and strode toward the revolving door, she became aware that she was the only person in the massive lobby. She checked her watch… 7:31 pm… strange that no one else was working late. A pang of concern dashed from her brain to her solar plexus… “Was the weather out there that bad?”

She had been so busy the last few days, she hadn’t caught the news, and as a single 67-year-old sole practitioner, she might go literally days between nonclient conversations, as had been the case this week. At the exit door, she put her briefcase down, buttoned the collar of her heavy winter coat and put on her gloves and earmuffs. Bracing for the worst, she scooped up her briefcase and pushed out into the night. No wonder she was alone… the temperature must have dropped 20 degrees since morning, to what felt to Jade like single digits. Apparently, her fellow citizens were already home, enjoying an evening bite by a cozy fire.

Fortunately, the wind that had seemed so strong from her office window didn’t greet her with the blast she expected, and as she cut diagonally across Franklin St. southwest toward Adams, she was glad that the street was as empty of traffic as was her office lobby. But when she reached the edge of the building on the northwest corner of Franklin and Adams, and then made the turn westward, a gust of wind smacked her like a Mack Truck, and literally pushed her backwards… back to the relative calm behind the corner building.

Jade was 5’6” tall and weighed 129 pounds… not a great matchup versus that wind, but as she regrouped and collected her thoughts, she held out hope that it was just an isolated Windy City gust. Resolute, she clutched her thankfully light briefcase in her left fist, pitched her head at a 45-degree angle toward the ground, and again swung around the corner, back into a vicious westerly wind that was definitely not just an isolated gust. This time it stopped her momentarily but didn’t push her back, and she was able to inch forward, though each small step forward was more difficult than any of the hundreds of thousands of steps she must have taken before this day.

She was generally in pretty good shape, except for the Congestive Heart Failure that ran in her family…. a condition she diligently managed through miraculous medication, regular exercise and diet. But as she trudged westward up a slight incline, she was glad it was only one standard and one double block to the train station, because she felt her breath growing shorter with each step and knew that this short trip was getting downright dangerous. She abruptly paused to consider turning back for the shelter of her office, but the instant vision of her overnighting in that cold, empty building with no food or bed soon persuaded her to push on.

Fighting her way toward Wacker Drive, she intentionally forced her breathing to quicken, to compensate for a noticeably diminished oxygen supply. The combination of short breaths and short steps finally brought her to the red light at Wacker, which she ignored and plowed through with hardly a glance left or right. She sensed that, but for herself, Chicago had become a temporary ghost town, and while that was good for walking through red lights, it also served as a reminder that, without the likelihood of anyone finding her, a single stumble could come at the cost of her life.

Between Wacker and Canal, there was absolutely no pedestrian cover at all. Her path to safety was just a wide uphill incline toward the still-steeper pitch of the looming drawbridge over a wide Chicago River, against an incessant wind that had to be 30+ MPH, driving a subzero windchill down her throat and into her searing lungs. How her gasping lungs could feel hot in this cold, she didn’t know, but she did know that her little heart was beating like never before. She just hoped it could carry on while sustaining a 100+ pulse rate, because there was not a thing she could do to help it.

One side effect of her heart condition was that cold air always caused her nose to run and her eyes to water, and all of those orifices were flowing like the river below. She thought it odd that somehow neither her tears, her snot, nor the river froze-over in this ghastly cold. Jade’s right glove constantly mopped-up the drainage while her left hand clung to her briefcase as if it were a mobile railing, and all the while her heart somehow kept beating and her feet somehow kept moving her forward in herky-jerky slow motion, like an ice-cutting barge up a clogged river.

When Jade finally reached the drawbridge and braced for the still-steeper incline up its eastern hump, she stopped to lean against its railing, turning her back to the wind in search of a moment’s respite from the wind. Her breathing became instantly easier facing east, and she stood motionless, pondering the task at hand… reaching the plateau at the bridge’s center, from where her remaining journey would be short and all be downhill to the awaiting door of Union Station. 

Although her numbed brain didn’t cognitively deliver the answer, her body somehow did. Her left hand shifted the briefcase to her right hand, and her feet began to inch backwards into the wind and up the hill, as her left hand pushed against the railing to add a helping hand to her soldiering legs. The back of her soon-not-to-be dry right glove brushed snot from her nose and tears from her eyes while clutching the ludicrously flopping briefcase. With client info in the briefcase, leaving it on the sidewalk for some lucky finder was not an option... so flop along with her it must. A casual observer might have mistaken her flailing backward broken-stepped ascent for some kind of AI robotic experiment gone awry. 

Nevertheless, inch by inch, tiny step by step, she trudged backwards up the incline, and before long it flattened and began to bend slightly downward, pulling her out of her task-driven trance and spinning her around to stare at the prize ahead… kitty-corner and down that beautiful hill.  Jade made a beeline for that train-station door, angling across Adams straight for her target, without concern for the unrelenting wind or any possible traffic that might wish to share the street with her. 

Her breathing and heartbeat became quicker again in the face of the headwind, but now more rhythmic in their return to increased speed, as if wanting to join the party with her fast-flying feet. The distance to the door evaporated in one last push, and as the rush of warm air consumed her, she felt an exhilaration like no other that she had ever experienced. Safely inside, she leaned against the wall to catch her breath and let the warmth soak through her from head to toe. After a minute or two, she glanced down at her watch, assuming that she had long-since missed her train… and was startled into action.

The short walk from office to train that normally took 8 minutes had seemed to take a lifetime, but in fact had been accomplished in “only” 19 minutes. To her amazement, Jade had six full minutes to leisurely stroll over to the commuter Tracks to catch the 7:56, with ample time to spare. As she approached her train, the conductor standing by its open door greeted her with a smile, “You’ll have plenty of seats to choose from tonight, Ma’am. Did you have any trouble getting here?”

“Actually,” Jade replied, returning his smile, “it was a breeze.”