NO ORDINARY DAY FOR WHITACRE
Urban pioneer gets more than he bargained for on the Cal
‘ A passing barge around Blue Island flagged me down and said there might be a body in the water,’’ Ryan Whitacre said.
Welcome to the Calumet system, the post- modern, post- industrial no- man’s land of area waterways.
For the essence of the Cal, I reach for Bob Dylan’s ‘‘ Desolation Row’’:
Everybody’s shouting, ‘‘ Which side are you on?!’’
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower/ While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow/ And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row.
People don’t normally think about the Cal. Period. But people are talking about the Cal again after a 9- pound silver carp was found Thursday near the launches at Beaubien Woods during ongoing surveying by the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee. That silver triggers two weeks of intensive surveying.
Whitacre called Monday to find out when that began. Illinois fisheries chief Dan
Stephenson posted that it beganMonday and will include intensive sampling and electroshocking in the area, including Lake Calumet.
Whitacre has a full existence of combining life routines, skateboarding, tournament bass fishing and drumming. Sunday was something new. He was exploring fishing spots when he was flagged down.
Hewas coming off a drumming gig Saturday for The Saps at CJ’s Public House in Rockford. After getting home at 4 a. m., he debated staying up to fish a tournament. But he fell asleep, then explored the Cal from noon until 9: 30 p. m.— hours later than expected because of the unexpected.
‘‘ I was just going to do one pass and not see [ the body], but it was hard not to see it,’’ Whitacre said. ‘‘ At first I was like, ‘ Oh, come on, be a mannequin.’ But the closer I came to it, I could see it was a body.’’
Even forWhitacre, an urban pioneer, this was different.
‘‘ It was fresh; it didn’t look like it had been in for more than an hour or two,’’ he said. ‘‘ I had never found any bodies before. Once I found a gym bag with two basketballs in it, and I was afraid to open it.’’
Whitacre stayed with the body, in part to help the authorities find it and in part because, as he put it, ‘‘ If this was me, I would want somebody to stay with me.’’
The medical examiner said the cause of death was drowning, and the Illinois State Police said no foul play is suspected.
Wild things
Norm Minas texted Saturday: ‘‘ Mulberries starting at the [ Kankakee River] state park.’’ On the same day, John
Vukmirovich emailed: ‘‘ I found a nice 6- foot- square black raspberry thicket along the sidewalk near a wooded waste area. I picked a palmful of very ripe berries, and the thicket had many clusters that were still reddish- pink.’’
Singles
If you’re single or pretend to be, you should attend ‘‘ Jazzin’ at the Shedd’’ at 5 p. m. on summer Wednesdays. But even those happily attached will be enriched by Dan Egan talking about his ‘‘ The Death and the Life of the Great Lakes’’ in the Science Pub portion at 7 p. m. tonight.
Stray cast
I caught the end of
Wendy Rice’s last ‘‘ Saturday Morning Flashback’’ on WXRT while driving home from a mussels release. It was like snapping off my favorite orange- blue Skitter Pop on a too- high mulberry branch.