by Jeff McMahon
Ravens perch on a veneer of snow at the edge of Arizona's Canyon de Chelly; below them a smooth face of red sandstone drops a thousand feet, streaked with stains of
falling water, toward a cave and castlewalls made of stones of the selfsame red placed by long-ago hands. The ravens lift their black feet from the white crystals, flex the frost
from them, set them down again, and wait. When the wind comes up they leap. Open-winged they leap. We leap with them and we, wingless, are below them now, much
warmer, no snow down here, looking up, watching them soar out over the redrock and turn and swoop back in mirrored trajectory to their shadows on the wall. Suddenly
doubled in number they approach and taunt and flee their phantom selves -- black birds, black shadows, flying in duets.
This is a canyon. It is narrow and walled by cliffs. On the river loam there is a hogan with a blanket over the doorway. A woman steps out in black smock, the shirttails fanning
out from a silver belt, her striped colored skirt draping over her boots. She is a small woman with a broad face, high prominent cheekbones, deep eyes. Her face is the color
of some earth somewhere but not this red earth. She wanders through a row of scrawny peach trees, picks up a stick and heads for a flockette of eight white sheep gnawing
on grass beside a creek that trickles in silence not far away. A raven caws, she pauses to look up, the caw returns from somewhere far up the canyon, and the other birds
start yelling now, listening to their voices return diminished -- CAW!... caw. CAW!... caw.
Whoever first called LaSalle Street a "canyon" had been out west. Had seen a canyon. Had heard one. Knew the way the temperature can drop 40 degrees when you step
out of the sun or when you climb the cliff. Knew the changing light, the way the fickle sun floods and then forsakes. Knew about the echoes.
In LaSalle Canyon the echoes are not so much of sound but very much of light. A grand masonry faŁade echoes in the mirrored face of a glass tower. A second sun echoes
from the blue steel and glass of Chemical Plaza, casting blue light into the deep canyon, making of earth a bluer planet. And when the sun slips away and the sky above is
gray as granite and shadows hang like curtains from the stone facades, then the orange lights of the Board of Trade come up, and that otherworldly orange, color from
another era, echoes down the canyon.
Sometimes architects design echoes: the rose granite base at 190 S. Lasalle echoes the red granite of the Rookery Building at 209 S. LaSalle. The LaSalle Street "wall" --
that unity of lines above the street -- runs the length of the canyon like an echo or like a stratum of sedimentary rock.
Up and down Lasalle Canyon colors echo, and light and shadow. And these echoes are no less witnessed by the wild than the echoes of Canyon de Chelly are known to its
ravens.
In the heart of the city, in the financial heart of the Midwest, are the creatures of forest and plain, the eagles on the banks and on the Board of Trade; the deco bulls of the
Board of Trade; the crows flanking the doorway of the Rookery, smiling wryly at their own joke; the red metal lions of the Rookery; the yawning, roaring, looking limestone
lions of the City National Bank and Trust; The lions of 190 S. LaSalle, the lions of 19 S. LaSalle, the lions of 11 S. LaSalle... Echoes of lions. Lions everywhere. If they
named this lionized canyon for its animals it would be the Canyon of Lions. Or they would name it for the odd creatures below, the ones the lions watch: The Canyon of Apes
in Suits.
The blood history of that suited ape is written in canyons. In Canyon de Chelly the story of Navajo and Spaniard is remembered in names given to openings in the stone:
Canyon del Muerto, Massacre Cave. In LaSalle Canyon the history is written in the stone itself: the life of Robert Cavalier de LaSalle and the vanishing of the Pottawottamies
carved above the traffic at One LaSalle Street, not far from the watchful stone Jesus of St. Peter's. The Sumarian trader and the Indian trader barter on the Board of Trade,
beneath the blessing gesture of an art-deco Ceres, goddess of grain, goddess of the Midwest, foreign goddess of a conquering people.
And the side canyons bring in the icy lake wind. Over the Art Institute, through Federal Plaza and over the Calder, through Daley Plaza and over the Picasso comes the lake
wind, bearing a knife.
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