We stood on a catwalk looking down on the concrete floor of the elevator. Only a narrow waist-high handrail stood between me and an unpleasant crash onto the conveyor belts below. If I fell, they’d have to change the sign posted in the doorway: 9,640 man-hours without an accident.

Pete Margolis stood at my right side. He grabbed my arm and gesticulated with his free hand. I shook my head. He leaned over next to my right ear. “This is where it comes in,” he bellowed. “They bring the boxcars up here and dump them. Then it goes by conveyor belt.”

I nodded. A series of conveyor belts caused much of the clanking, shattering noise, but the hoist that lifted boxcars ninety feet in the air as though they were toys also contributed to the din. The belts ferried grain from the towers where boxcars dumped it over to chutes that spilled it into cargo holds of ships moored outside. A lot of grain dust escaped in the process. Most of the men on the floor wore respirators, but few seemed to have any ear protection.

“Wheat?” I screamed into Margolis’s ear.

“Barley. About thirty-five bushels to the ton.”

He shouted something at Phillips and we went on across the gangway outside, to a narrow ledge overlooking the water. I gulped in the cold April air and let my ears adjust to the relative quiet.

Below us sat a dirty old ship tied to the dock by a series of cables. She was riding above her normal waterline, where the black paint on the hull gave way abruptly to a peeling greenish color. On her deck, more men in hard hats and dirty boiler suits were guiding three massive grain chutes with ropes, filling the holds through some twelve or fourteen openings in the deck. Next to each opening lay its lid—“hatch cover,” Phillips told me. A mass of coiled ropes lay near the back end, our end, where the pilothouse stood. I felt slightly dizzy. I grew up in South Chicago where steel mills dot the lake, so I’ve seen plenty of Great Lakes freighters close up, but they always give me the same feeling—stomach contractions and shivers up the spine. Something about the hull thrusting invisibly into black water.

A cold wind whipped around the river. The water was too sheltered here for whitecaps, but grain dust blew up at us, mixed with cigarette wrappers and potato chip bags. I coughed and turned my head aside.

“Your cousin was standing at the stern.” I followed Phillips’s pointing finger. “Even if someone were leaning forward they wouldn’t have been able to see him from up here.”

I tried, but the angle of the elevator cut off the view partway along the pilothouse. “What about all those people on deck? And there’re a couple down there on the ground.”