Happy 4th of July . . .

After having written the entry below, I feel like maybe I shouldn't post this, since I don't want to scare my sisters who are coming to visit me next week. Let me just say that what's described below only happened because I was in an area of a million people, and that will not be occurring when you're here.

As it turns out, going to a place where you know there'll be a million other people is a very poor idea.

Last night, I went to Grant Park to meet a couple friends and watch the fireworks. It seemed like an innocuous, happy sort of summer plan. We arranged to meet at 8 o'clock at Buckingham Fountain, a massive fountain in the park.

Yup, it's the one from Married with Children.

I was still at work at 7:30, so I just hopped a bus to take me across the Loop. That was bad idea number 1. After the driver closed the doors on me, I sat on the bus in ridiculous traffic for 25 minutes. Then there was an announcement stating that the bus had been rerouted, and was no longer going to be going anywhere near where I was headed. STUPID buses. So I got off and walked.

Grant Park was insanely crowded. I didn't realize that that was where the Taste of Chicago was going on, and the double hit of Taste and fireworks had the place overloaded. A walk from Michigan Avenue to the fountain which might normally take 3 minutes took at least 20. People were jammed so close together, I was just shoving them out of my way to get through. I finally got to the fountain, half an hour late, and I couldn't see either of my friends. I called one of them, and she insisted that she was also standing right in front of the fountain! We spent five minutes trying to triangulate on each other. My God. Friend number 2 showed up about 15 minutes later, having been caught on another bus which was rerouted even further off course than mine had been.

At least we were together, we thought. We'd somehow managed to find each other, we had an EXCELLENT spot near the fountain, and nothing to do now but wait for the fireworks.

Oh, so wrong.

Suddenly, there was this MASSIVE surge in the crowd and we were being shoved into the people behind us, hard. T and I were separated from S almost immediately, and people just kept shoving harder and harder. People were running into us, because there was just no room for us to move to get out of their way, and how they even having been running if we were packed in so tightly? But somehow they were. We could hear screaming and the sky started looking smoky. Was there a fire? I couldn't see anything really, just hoards of scared people. More screaming, people shrieking something about guns -- you couldn't decide if you should get down to avoid gunfire, or stay standing to avoid being trampled. I chose standing, since the crowd was the threat I knew for sure existed.

And then it stopped. And the crowd eased back. And no one knew what had happened. And everything seemed fine. C and I found S, and we were all scared. We were debating if we should try to leave (the only reason for debate was the worry of whether we would even be physically able to get out through the crowd, or if we should stay where we were and wait for the fireworks to end and the crowd to disperse), when it happened AGAIN. I came very close to going down in the crowd, and this is where good manners be damned, you just use the people near you to hold you up. More screaming, more shouting about guns, more fear. And then it eased off again. This time we knew for sure we were leaving.

We started trying to wiggle our way out of the crowd, holding hands so we wouldn't lose each other, headed as best we could for Michigan Avenue. We managed to get out of the worst of the crowd, the part where bodies are just jammed into each other, and it seemed like we were going to make it out.

So wrong. Another surge! And this time it wasn't just a crowd being shoved into us, it was dozens or hundreds of screaming people running directly into us. Still somehow managing to hold hands, we ended up joining in the running, just to avoid being knocked down. And we ended up almost exactly where we had started.

I was pretty scared at this point, wondering if we would be able to get out of there. The lake was behind us, and vendors for Taste of Chicago were lining the area to our left and right, booths packed in right next to each other, with no room to get between them. The only way out was to go back through the crowd, and so far that wasn't working.

We didn't really have any choice, so we tried to go out through the crowd again, sticking as close to the side of the area near the vendors booths as we could. We came to a clearing where a bunch of people were gathered in a circle and there was a cluster of cops on top of someone. It looked to me like they were holding someone down, but S. thought they were gathered around someone shot or trampled. Could have been either one, I guess.

About this point, the fireworks finally started. Happy 4th of July. I think that they helped calm the crowd down, and we were able to keep walking out without anymore stampedes. When we were almost at Michigan Avenue, we finally stopped and turned around toward the lake, and watched the rest of the show. We agreed our view from there was excellent.

I checked the news for any word about what the fuck was going on in that park last night, but there's nothing about it. Apparently when the fireworks were over, several people did actually get shot in the Loop area near where we were, so that trumped out little Stampede of Fear. A cop I had stopped to ask for a quicker way out of the park had told us that people were just starting the stampedes to scare the crowd, and we hear people talking about having purses missing, so we wondered if they had just started a panic to create opportunities for theft. I guess after dark in a crowd of a million people is a good place to try that out.

So, fireworks at Grant Park. Not a good place to take your kids.