The Smell of Wrigleyville in the Morning

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images

I've fallen in love—what I now know to be love, and not some childish infatuation or passing crush—six times in my life: the first time I held each of my four children; some night in the spring of 2008, walking along the shore of Lake Michigan long after dark with the young woman who would eventually become my wife; and, first, in late August of 2007, when I first drank in Chicago.

I arrived for college that month at Loyola University Chicago, and while I made friends fast enough, really, I spent most of the first six weeks I was there making the acquaintance of the city. I'd visited it some uncountable number of times, over the previous decade, but that was as a kid, and it was as an outsider. Now, the city was (in some tiny part) mine, and I wanted to fully feel it.

That, of course, was the summer of Carlos Zambrano and Michael Barrett redecorating the clubhouse; Lou Piniella's reflection in Mark Wegner's sunglasses; Aramis Ramírez's walkoff homer to beat the Brewers; and Alfonso Soriano's scorching September, to secure the division title. Naturally, I spent a huge amount of time at Wrigley Field that summer and fall; I attended 12 of the last 15 Cubs home games. Because I was a frugal college student, though, I wasn't buying good tickets.

Most days, I would either get out of the earliest class the Lake Shore campus offered and hop straight onto the Red Line, or get an early start toward my 10:15 class downtown so that I could hop off at Addison on the way. Those were the days when you could line up on game day to grab whatever few tickets remained available, or to purchase standing-room tickets, for anywhere from $8 to $12. That's how I became a connoisseur of the smell of Wrigleyville in the morning.

Life is best savored via its bouquet. All our senses are important, but none is as vivid or visceral as smell. Immediately, I found the scent of the city more enthralling than anything else about it—the color, the heat, the volume of people, anything. Plenty of Chicagoans (and nearly all outsiders) lament the places where sour smells like liquor, trash or urine dominate, but those are relatively few, really. Anyone who's really spent a morning with the city—especially this time of year, the late summer or early fall—has to admit that it offers one of life's truly wonderful symphonies of aroma.

The layers are simple, but together, they're magic. First, there's the smell of the greenery in glory. Even into September, clematis climbing many walls and fences throughout the city blooms and offers up a sweet hint of nectar. The trees aren't yet rounding the corner toward fall; that's a few more weeks away. Then, there's the lake. Wrigley's about as far off the lake as you can go while still getting a noseful of it, but it's there as a subtler note even farther west. There's a tactile element to this part, of course, because the air is pregnant with water and you can feel that in your nose, but it's also about the lively smell the lake takes on from spring to fall, when algae is in bloom and the activity in and on the water stirs up more organic material. The best time of day to experience that smell swings, from one end of the season to the other. You want to catch it at about 10 PM in the spring, but by early September, that layer of the city's smell is strongest and best in the morning.

Finally, there are the people smells—especially food. It quickly got to be my habit, way back when I first hit the city, to walk the stretch of Clark St. from Addison down to Belmont each Saturday or Sunday morning, even if the Cubs were out of town. Wrigley didn't have to be occupied, on those days, for the smells of the strip of pubs and grills coming to life to be delightful. I've spent plenty of time in remote locales, marveling at nature. I've lived a long time in suburbs, which have their own charms and their own noses. But you'll never convince me that the smells of a Midwest city revving up for a festival day in September can be beaten—especially Chicago.

As you've surely heard, President Donald Trump posted a message of war and malice on social media Saturday, aimed directly at Chicago. He chose (or, clearly but unimportantly, an underling like Stephen Miller or Pete Hegseth chose) to invoke both the language and the imagery of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now to get that message across.

This was posted at 10:38 AM Central. The Cubs began a game against the Washington Nationals at 1:20 PM. It's extraordinary, when framed that way, isn't it? The president declared war on a city, and the baseball game scheduled for less than four hours later took place as though nothing had happened. It's a juxtaposition as poignant as another that had to do with the same movie. In 1981, when martial law was enacted in Poland so that the Soviet-supported puppet government could viciously put down a worker-led resistance, tanks rolled into Warsaw. An astute photographer named Christopher Niedenthal snapped a photo of one in front of a theater in which a Polish dub of Apocalypse Now was the headline attraction. Soon, in the wake of Trump's self-styled poster, there might be a similar photo of an unwelcome military vehicle in Chicago, which has famously called itself the second-most Polish city in the world. (That's never quite been true, but nor has it been baseless. My wife and I got a dog, between getting married and beginning to have our kids, from a shelter in West Rogers Park. His name was Dyzio, and he only understood Polish.)

Trump's post specifically paraphrased the most famous line from the film, wherein Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." That line is meant as a warning, fairly early in the movie, about just how deep the protagonists are about to plumb the depths of human nature through their mission into a war zone. It's the clearest distillation of the insanity at the heart of war (and, perhaps, the human condition), and it's certainly not meant as a sentiment to celebrate.

Too often, though, it's also condensed. To the quote itself is appended the sentence that bookends the monologue: "Smells like... victory." But the full quotation is:

Quote

Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ [slur] body. The smell, you know, the gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like…victory.

Although Apocalypse Now is a somewhat problematic war epic—so dedicated to its propounding of the complicated, ugly dual truths at the core of its source material (1899 novella Heart of Darkness) that it sometimes seems to glorify war, and certainly leaves much unsaid about the specifics of the Vietnam War, in which it's set—the scene in which Kilgore brutally conquers a beach (partially) for the pleasure of surfing the waves next to it is as unvarnished an excoriation of war's absurdity and evil as any image Trump and his team might have picked. In the AI image appended to the post, Trump is dressed as Duvall's insane character.

Being an utter fool is not a sufficient explanation for that; it's an intentional repudiation of the scene's initial message. It's an argument that wanton violence and destruction is a good idea, after all, as long as you're the victor, extravagantly stripping to a bare chest and casting about for a surf board amid the mortars and the smell of burning flesh. It takes a knowing, bad-faith malefactor to post that image.

What has any of this to do with baseball? Not as much as I wish it did, to be honest. We leave the firewalls nice and high, between here and there. We are all, in a sense, surfing just off the beach as the yellow-orange smoke curls outward. We're still paying attention to the Cubs, and to the Bears (whose season begins Monday night). We refuse to be denied our small and selfish entertainment, just as Kilgore did. If we're willing to drop those blinders and see the big picture, though, these things could not be more intertwined. 

Sports, if they are mere entertainment, are unjustifiable. I prefer to think they're more than that—that they are, like rock music or movies, light art. Maybe we spend 90% of our time watching them simply enjoying (or decrying) what's going on, within the specific context of the game or the song or the story, but if any of these media deserve to exist at all, then they come back to us in other moments. When we lay down to sleep at night, or when we walk the street and breathe deeply to smell the wondrous morning, or months later when we long for summer, or years later when we need some inspiration or some bracing memory of grace under pressure, we return to those experiences and see something in them that didn't feel as important when they were happening.

If that's true, then sports are as vital to a community as great theater or a vibrant music scene—and, because all art is in conversation with its audience, the community is vital to sports. Teams are sources of civic pride and unity, but civics are also the sources of the teams. The Cubs don't matter, except insofar as there is a community of people who care about them. What Trump is threatening is a deep and ghoulish fracture of that community, and of the community of White Sox fans. 

"Deportations" might sound less ghastly than "napalm" when substituted into that original quote, but what Trump is threatening is a nightmarish burning-down of communities, all right. Chicago without immigrants is not Chicago, just as America without immigrants is not America. Alas, that is what this administration wants: a Kilgore-like sense of victory, made up of eerie silence and the utter absence of the victims they view as enemies.

It's an unfortunately widespread fiction that Wrigleyville and downtown Chicago are wealthy bastions within an otherwise unclean, dying or lethal city. Like all big cities (and all small towns, and all farm communities, and all coral reefs), Chicago has real problems, but they are outweighed by its potential and its beauty. Those things—the "lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning," as Carl Sandburg called it, responding to the very same generalized accusations still being lobbed at the city 111 years later—are what the Trump administration can't seem to appreciate, and that makes it doubly important that we do.

"Deportations" coming to Chicago via militarized sweeps and enforcement is likely to mean many, many people who have lived here all their lives being unjustly arrested and separated from their families. My now-wife and I volunteered many sweet-smelling Sunday mornings at Su Casa Catholic Worker, on the South Side. It's a wonderful community resource—an intentional community where families (many of them sheltering from homelessness or domestic violence, but in a much safer and more stable way than other places can offer) live and work together, serving the neighborhood as well as themselves. It was founded, initially, to serve refugees of war in Central America; that's the kind of family that could easily be targeted by incautious military invaders.

Those refugees and their descendants look a lot like many of the players who will continue, for now, to suit up and play at Wrigley Field (and Sox Park) in the coming weeks. Those conflicts have burned out, but ones not unlike them have flared up, too. Just as the administration is gearing up for this police action, too, they've moved back toward a Teddy Roosevelt-era relationship with much of the Caribbean basin, where a great many professional baseball players are actually from.

Baseball will continue to move forward, trying as hard as it can to ignore all of this. Many fans will, too—or at least, they will continue to treat baseball as an escape and a reprieve from all worries about the wider world. That's understandable. The league itself has little choice; most individual fans don't know how to do anything other than pursue their established routines.

Because sports are art and are always interacting with the world around them, though, this firewall will continue to be breached. It will be breached more and more often, as teams try to celebrate Roberto Clemente Day later this month in a way that doesn't draw hard scrutiny from the administration. Just as many teams scaled down or sanitized the language of their statements on Jackie Robinson Day, they will do so with Clemente's. The league will quietly lobby for ongoing protection of their players from the worst consequences of the administration's policies, but they won't publicly speak up for the millions of people being endangered for looking or speaking like those players.

With each big-league city into which troops are sent, that silence will seem more ludicrous, and more people's lives will be materially affected. It will feel sillier and sillier to pretend that baseball—an everyday game, a sport that measures and marks our seasons and gives us daily reassurance that all is normal, all kosher, all good—really makes sense. The community that makes up baseball will be strained more and more. We can't immediately reverse this, but nor should we ignore it. If nothing else, it's important that we remember the smell of Wrigleyville in the morning—and the scents we ought to refuse to let the Trump administration mix into that potpourri.

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[Clark Addison]

Mathew, thanks for today’s column. I usually read these for insights on the Cubs, but sometimes life gets in the way of baseball.  This is the best thing you’ve written. 

[LBiittner]

I'd like to begin by saying this is a wonderful story about humanity in this disheveled world.. Although I extremely enjoy your articles involving hardball analytics, this nsbb feature touches the heart as well as realizing scent is the strongest tie to memory. While reading your words, I definitely revert to times I've been fortunate to visit Wrigley. Although it saddens me to admit, I've only had limited opportunities to be there in person. 

Admittedly, I don't necessarily share all the same political views. But the one subject I struggle with is the immigration situation dominating our world today. 

I question the motives on both sides of the political arena. Are immigrants to Chicago, who were invited without process for humanitarian reasons or for the $ granted to Illinois for support or the electoral college? Likewise, are Republicans assuming border crossers are gaining bennies more easily than hardluck U.S. citizens?

A little of my history on this subject. My Father was stationed in Germany during the time of the Korean War. He was on furlough to Amsterdam and met my future Mother. They fell in love, and wanted to be married once his service time was complete. My Dad soon learned the immigration process was rather complicated and very time consuming. This was back in the time of no computers and no cell phones. Communication methods were via US/Europe postal. Phones at that time were not in every household. My Dad lived in rural Illinois. He used the phone in the towns' only grocery store. My Mom, in Amsterdam,  had to use the phone at the neighborhood Doctor. 

It took them almost 6 months to complete the legal immigration process. Representative Robert Michael of Illinois was a hero for my Dad. Through the many years of maintaining her visa, green card and later her citizenship I witnessed many stressful occurrences. 

In today's world, most people want everything now. Instant gratification. No investment in the time to get something worthwhile. If given the choice, take the easy path.

My late mother was old school. She harbored resentment towards illegals who flipped their middle finger at her for following the legal process. 

The older I get, I'm learning to help others regardless of their history. Second and third chances are necessary