I read a few more of the names into the recorder I brought with me that ride day in July, but I couldn’t find the good recorder that morning. What tape I have is minutes of crackling and wind. I make out odd words like “pine cones,” “birds,” “Symphony Shores” and “I ask why, but HUSBAND Harry Davies (1880-1949) won’t answer.”

I’m typing this in October and I can’t remember why I found the graveyard so loving.

If this weekslong ramble northward to wrap up the site has a purpose, it’s to find the city’s themes. I found labor and futility where the factories rot. I found community, home and hope in the neighborhoods older relatives have told me never to go to. And here, spurred by a graveyard at 71st and Cottage Grove, I found memory.

Or I found what I can’t remember.

I do remember the tree.

It was, and presumably still is, a large tree floofing out into hefty, weight-supporting branches only a foot or two off the ground. One long branch crooked horizontal for a length of close-enough parameters that a slightly chubbed middle-aged blogger wearing khaki cargo shorts over bike togs could sit in the tree, lay along the branch and stare at a pine cone-filtered sky.

I’m not saying I climbed a tree in a graveyard, Mom, but I’m not saying I didn’t.

As I sat in my tree, I talked into the bad recorder — not bad, per se, but so sensitive and un-windscreened whatever I said was lost between breeze and bird. I remember loving what I said into that recorder. I remember thinking this was good, solid, gave a sense of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood in a way both accurate and avoiding the white tourism this bike ride risked turning into.

It’s just scratches and wind now, and I think that’s somewhat appropriate.

We live in lost history, with HUSBAND Harry Davies’ entire life crammed in that dash between 1880 and 1949. If we’re lucky, a few words spring through the noise. A name, a date, a moment caught on tape forgetting the fancy word for trees with needles. (It’s “conifer,” I remembered later.)

What better place to remember memory than in a graveyard?

Later, I’d head north. Later, I’d run into the line of crosses a Jesus guy put along Halsted to mourn Englewood’s dead. I ran that story early as #961. Later I’d ring through construction zones, try and fail to find the end of Bubbly Creek (ran that one early too) and ended up playing ’90s video games at a retro-themed hipster coffee shop in Bridgeport. That’s where we’ll pick up on Monday.

I guess Ida B. Wells is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, the internet tells me later. And Harold Washington, Enrico Fermi, Junior Wells and Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The internet’s a wonderful thing, although I almost fell down a Wikipedia wormhole just now looking up pathologist-poet Maud Slye, forever sharing Oak Woods with the activist and missionary Nancy Green, who funded her antipoverty work by appearing as Aunt Jemima.

But I didn’t know any of that in my tree. I just knew pine cones and conifer needles. Birds, cicadas, airplanes and the honks of both car and the Metra Electric in the distance.

He wasn’t leaving them there, just needed them elsewhere for a moment so he could organize the mugs shaped like individual tits. The breast mugs, the veiny, erect novelty ceramic shakers, the Mother of God and a few mugs shaped like butts were all manufactured out of the same tan-brown ceramic, laid out on a folding table in a parking lot by a child in the early morning of the Swap-O-Rama so his family could sell them under the watchful eyes of a 20-foot high fiberglass cow advertising the Rancho Santa Maria grocery store, albeit with the horns and part of the head missing.

Tits and asses organized, the boy grabbed the penis shakers from the Virgin’s side to continue his arrangement.

He was a slightly chubby kid with short-cropped hair and an innocent, overworked face. It was the face of a kid who knows Saturday means early mornings, work, helping his family, tired eyes too young for a rousing cup of coffee from one of the tit-mugs decorated with phrases like Chupale (which means “Suck it”), La Chingona (which either means a badass woman or, as Google Translate declares, just the word “Fucking”) or “llegale mi lechita” (which has a secondary meaning so filthy the program that just output “fucking” won’t say what “little milk” implies).

The boy arranged the shakers among the religious statues and truly daunting cock vases with care. Display is important at the swap. To differentiate. To draw attention and get the family money. There were three other tables in the parking lot just selling this same tan-brown collection of ceramics.

Everything’s available at the Back of the Yards swap. Everything. Care needs to be made to establish that that does not just mean “a lot of things.” It means the swap is a place where a man walks by clutching a new pair of shoes and a toilet seat.

On a brisk spring morning where the clouds lightened but no blue broke through, the boy straightened to inspect his work. Not admire, of course. That takes seconds he didn’t have. The shoppers were arriving in the parking lot and he was behind. Sales to make, hands to shake. A day of work selling the blood of the lamb and the tit mugs. The shoppers were there and the cocks weren’t ready.

The boy worked efficiently and silently in his family’s cordoned section of the lot. He was one of dozens, maybe a hundred or more display-makers arranging and setting up across the parking area. The early patrons had already done their first wander through Swap-O-Rama’s equally overwhelming indoor areas. Now potential clientele were making their ways out of doors. Time to arrange tables and see if they can lure.

Rare coins by Chicago collectable spoons. Bikes — nice bikes — next to car cleaner spray and spinner rims. Generators next to lawnmowers next to wrenches next to open containers of spices and nuts. Meat grinders next to big-eye baby statues of the Jesus next to rolling papers and pipes next to a bong that’s hooked to a gas mask next to tamale presses. Clothes. Toys. Outdoor lighting. Gas grills.

A man spit polished a line of silver and bright red washing machines. Next to him along the chain link fence separating swap from sprawling train yard a man blasted “Car Wash” and other super hits of the ’70s to lure attention toward his collection of nuts, seeds, candy and Converse sneakers. Along the rushing road marking the swap’s east end, a man sold DVDs of bootleg rodeo videos with a few mixed in of illegal dog fights. No one seemed to care.

The men working the train yard to the north lackidaisically gestured that spurs are clear waving with a distracted hand that yeah pull ‘er back pull ‘er back ok that’s enough stop as carless engines followed suit. Horns blasted the air at intervals that seemed random to an outside, but I’m sure made sense to them. Work vests and hard hats. The laughter and back slaps of men working together.

These sights, these sounds were the stage setting for a little boy at work. He sold offensive ceramics on a Saturday morning. He didn’t smile or frown, just blinked at the early morning sun.

See another scene from the Back of the Yards swap

And an aging barber from nearby Canaryville

Buy tickets for the Chicago Corruption Walking Tour

“Cage” is a better word than “shop,” it occurs to me as I watch her from the “Snak-O-Rama” food court section of the swap. “Maria’s Western Wear” has been burnished into a wooden sign also burned with a hat and spurred boots, but the avenue her store is on is an aisle in the indoor section of Back of the Yards’ Swap-O-Rama. Her rented cage section is one among dozens, scores, multiples of rented floor space, divvied however the tenant sees fit.

Some, like the woman lifting cowboy hats on a stick I’ll later see her use as a cane, opt for mesh cages to lock safely away at night. Some have set up ersatz buildings, with fake doors to protect the mock barbershop they set up in the flea market.

Others still have counters to sell home electronics, Mexican comic books, spices or bootleg toy ninjas that, while green and scaly, are absolutely in a very legal way not ninja turtles. All things are here in the swap, from car parts to the breakfast sandwich I scarfed from Snak-O-Rama as Maria lifted hats.

She was meticulous with the hats, boots, belts, shirts with those metal tips on the collar — everything needed to dress cowboy in the city.

She wasn’t cowboy. She wore short, short hair with a Navy and white horizontal striped shirt. A sweet old grandma, I could see her smiling and dispensing hot chocolate, not riding with the vaquero.

“¡Hola Marie! ¡Buenos dias!” a portly, bearded man who had previously been arranging business deals from a snack shop booth calls to her as he and his new associate walk by.

Her smile dazzles. When she was placing hats in the cage that calls her Maria, Marie didn’t smile. She just frowned in concentration on her tasks, eying each hat and belt buckle for the most subatomic of dust motes.

I watched her for a while as I finished my sandwich. I watched her like I watched the portly, bearded man cut deals from a Snak-O-Rama booth. I watched her like I watched the heavyset smiling teen with a hairnet over hair dyed blood red blare rap rock as she served Jarritos and Gatorade, like I would later watch the old woman in the Incan hat sell perennial bulbs, seedlings, saddles and stuffed alligators from a horse trailer in the parking lot.

The shops and cages were coming alive on a Saturday morning in April, shaking off their slumber and stretching like tired dogs readying for the day.

More from Back of the Yards

More from a swap

Penguins

There’s a place along Illinois Route 1 — Halsted Street to Chicagoans — where the dollar stores just become dollar stores, no extra security needed in metal and mesh. Then there’s a place further north where they disappear entirely.

There’s a place on Halsted where the churches have their own separate buildings, where the name of the pastor is put on digital billboard across from chain fast-food restaurants and gas stations, not painted on the side of a brick storefront in as close to Old English font as they could get with a can of spraypaint.

And then the churches disappear too.

People walk up and down and across these streets no matter the latitude of wealth. Old ladies pull shopping trolleys behind them and grumpy-looking men check phones for whenever it is that damn bus is coming. Young men wander aimlessly for something to do, whether they’re in Roseland, Englewood or up-and-coming Bridgeport.

Their pace is faster in the wealthier area. Their skin is lighter, too.

The barricade between the wealth and poverty seems to be moving south — the Englewood Whole Foods is up and running, feeding both mouths and fears of displacement. But the true boundary seems to lie at the Union Stock Yard Gates in a neighborhood sociologists have tried to call “New City” since the ’30s, but really we all know it’s Back of the Yards.

It’s tucked off Halsted, down an industrial strip that kept just enough food processors and manufacturers to smell lightly of bacon in the rain. Kidnapped on its own island in the roadway, kept for history but isolated enough that the damn thing doesn’t block traffic, the stone gates thousands of men walked through each day stands silently. No one walks through anymore, at least not unless they’re trying for a photo opp or to get closer to the firefighter memorial for a disaster I’ve never heard of.

These men slaughtered countless cows, pigs, sheep — whatever ritual sacrifice it took to make a city of millions bloom. Now their gateway sits in a corridor of bacon smell and metal firemen, a barricade between poverty to the south and the new bars and restaurants to the north.

People try to say there are no barricades. People try to say there’s nothing stopping others from crossing the invisible lines between wealth and poverty, between classes and cultures. It’s just a matter of gumption, moxie, hard work and belief in God and free-market capitalism.

I believe people can better their lot. I believe work can pay dividends. But I see those barricades bright as a noonlit sun. There is a line between the supermarket and the bodega, between megachurch and the mini one.

There’s a line where the trendy bars start and another where the dollar stores have razor wire.

Can those lines be crossed? Yes. Sure. Maybe. To pretend those lines weren’t built, that’s a feat I’ve never quite managed.

Now a tour of the North Side

And a look at the city from above

And a text-based roleplaying game about riding the CTA