I took Peppy with me: the chilly day was starting to get dark, a time when melancholy and loneliness can tighten their grip. Every time I logged on to my server, I checked for messages from Jake: e-mail, Skype, Facebook. Silence from Switzerland. I’d stopped sending my own messages—it made me feel too much like some forlorn figure in a fifties romance, waiting by the phone.

We passed the Amtrak station, a snug-looking little limestone building. A plaque on the station wall at about waist level commemorated the high-water mark from the 1951 flood. As I stopped to read the history, a dark SUV pulled up behind us and barely slowed before taking off with a great revving of its engine. I jerked Peppy’s leash to pull her close to me: I didn’t want to lose her to some would-be NASCAR racer.

Giant grain elevators blocked my view up the tracks. As we were crossing, a freight train rounded a curve, hooting mournfully. We jumped out of the way in time, but my heart was beating uncomfortably. Race-car drivers, fast trains, excitement I never experienced in Chicago.

We were about half a mile from the riverbank here. I imagined the muddy waters rushing in, taking away cars and houses, rotting the grain in the elevators. I shivered with something more than cold.

We skirted a dumping operation and a scrapyard whose sign proclaimed, lou & ed: breathing new life into old metal. It was as though I were looking at a microcosm of my South Chicago childhood. Instead of steel mills and the CID landfill, North Lawrence held grain elevators and scrapyards.

When we reached the residential stretch of Sixth Street, the houses looked old and feeble, not strong enough to survive a wild wind, let alone floodwaters that would have covered their roofs. Industry, salvage, dumping, and housing for the poor—they always go hand in hand.

As we trudged along Sixth Street, I saw what Gertrude Perec had meant about the houses being built next to the ground. They didn’t sit on foundations; doors opened level with the walkways. I would have guessed a Kansas house wouldn’t be built without a basement against tornadoes, but these little bungalows couldn’t run to anything more than a crawl space under the floor. Mud, spiders, snakes—I’d rather take my chance on the winds.

The Ferring house was still standing, or at least a house at that address was still there. With its peeling paint and sagging eaves, it looked as though it could have dated back to the Civil War.