They’re in construction hardhats and neon clothing loud enough to give the engineer enough time to notice them and feel terrible forever before the train crashes into them. To a man, they’re white and fat. The old ones have burly white beards down to their collarbones. The younger ones, still in training, only have rolls of scruff barely reaching Adam’s apples.

Their morning is beginning. So is Chicago.

On July 30, I rode my bike the entire length of Chicago. On a whim, on a lark excused by the existence of this blog and a desire to go big as I near 1K, I took a day off work to ride from a Burnham golf course to an Evanston cemetery, from the southernmost point of town to the northernest north bits.

I rode past the Hegewisch train tracks, noting a spot where a homeowner had put up sawhorses to keep a spot in dibs, even though it was the dead of summer. I found the first bike path on Baltimore, turning past a military tank set out to honor the veterans and a pizza place called “Pudgy’s.” Hegewisch is bright and suburban, but poor enough to feel comfortable. It’s a place of corner bars, bored teens and a rotting commercial thoroughfare. It’s a small town gone jobless, Mayberry waiting for the factories to return.

About 128th, while unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate a series of no outlet streets, I catch sight of the first industrial structure, a massive rusting or rust-colored steel something looms over the village of cul de sacs and bungalows like a dark wizard’s tower in a children’s book. I stop to record these thoughts by an empty Little League field where teams named after pro teams play feet from a humming power transfer station.

I speak longingly of the industry, not derisively. These are jobs. A chance to build, to provide, to be. But the nature of the area is jarring slapped so close to the industrial parks. A retention pond outside a pallet company warehouse is dappled with lily pads. When I approach, the dark wizard’s tower turns out to be a bridge of the type where the middle raises straight up rather than having two sides split and tilt. There’s a deer crossing sign in front of it.

Where the sidewalk ends, I’m forced to ride alongside screaming trucks and weekday motorcyclists. There’s a hole in the berm to my right. It’s an elephantine tube of corrugated metal running under train tracks — maybe for drainage or to let animals through, but the mud rutted with tire tracks shows its current use. I ride through and find two men fishing the Little Calumet.

They’re both black with beards and floppy fishing caps. One is standing next to his bike, casting into the industrial waters amid bird chirps and leafy trees sneered over by massive metal tanks and silos on the other side of the river. The other, older man is unloading a tackle box from his car.

I should stop them, of course. I should stop them and get their stories, learn their lives, interview them, pimp my blog and otherwise do what I said I set out to do, but they’re so perfect, they’re so pastoral, they’re so wonderful and of that very moment that I just ride in a circle and say to them “Good luck.”

Tall grass leering out into the road lashes my arm as I drive down the three-foot median on the end of 122nd, but I don’t dare veer away from the grass onto the street lest I get creamed by a tanker truck that says “Quest,” one of many that suck me into a momentary slipstream as they scream by. I feel like I’m on a country road. I feel like I’m in a factory. The bike path finds me again at Stony Island.

The football was on TV, the teens were on plastic chairs pushed beneath the two-tops Tetrised into the restaurant. The usual corner pizza place contrivances were there — heat-lamp rack for the slices, illustrations of fat Italians in chef hats on 3/4 of the walls.

People shoved in and people shoved out, slices in hands. Only the teens, the football and a middle-aged man working a crossword puzzle from a barstool along the storefront window were permanent fixtures.

Eventually the man got up and went back to the kitchen. Eventually one of the teen couples left, saying goodbye to the other one on the way out. All that was left was one teen couple, an anxious-looking blonde woman standing behind the register and hundreds of photos of Hegewisch Chuckles.

Along the outer wall, circling the storefront window were photos of and trophies for the Little League teams the pizza place sponsored. Smiling girls’ and boys’ faces going back decades, an odd team here or there named for an MLB crew — the Diamondbacks, for instance — but the bulk of the teams year after year had been named the Chuckles.

The anxious-looking woman behind the register didn’t know why they were called the Chuckles. They just always had been. She never played on it when she was a kid, and seemed confused that I asked. She’d only been working there for a year. And no grape pop, but they did have orange.

The business strips down Brandon and Baltimore are tidy and homey, with a 50-50 shot of a business being shuttered. A Little League toss away from the Indiana border, Hegewisch is a South Side neighborhood writers go to in hopes of feeling cute. Locked between I-94, Wolf Lake and the Calumet River, it has the feel of a small Illinois town, separate by miles and light years from the decrepitude then glitter to the north.

The feel of a small town includes the shuttered businesses. It includes the teens walking for a slice then sauntering off for places to kiss each other. The feel of a small town includes the fact about half the people I saw wandering about and half the characters in this little drama so far were people of color. Two were coming clad in wicking gear from a November bike ride on precision-honed performance bicycles that cost more than a mortgage payment. This is a small town 2017. No one’s naive. No one’s folksy.

Yet the Chuckles tug strings. Decades of smiling faces, smiling at no more than putting on a kid-sized uniform and cracking a ball with a bat. It’s tempting to call it cute or parochial, but if that’s a folksy affectation, what else is? Pizza? Awkward teenage dates? Finishing a crossword puzzle to the sounds of football and the intermittent hiss and pop of the radiator running beneath the storefront window?

The pizza place serves slices because they always have. They’ve always sponsored exactly one Little League team a year and they’ve almost always called them the Chuckles, even if no one on shift remembers why. That’s what is in Hegewisch, as real as a half-shuttered main strip and breathing Indiana air.

You’re in nature. You’re in Chicago.

Big Marsh is beautiful even in November. Dead and quiet, cold rain pitter-pattering on your umbrella. It’s muck and water, reeds poking out — big fluffy-looking things. Some bare trees, gravel, mud. A feeling that can’t be placed.

The name is misleading. Big Marsh isn’t a marsh. It’s a hemi-marsh, a 50-50 division of emergent vegetation and open water rather than a naturally occurring herbaceous wetland. The name also isn’t the name. It goes by Park No. 564 when it’s at home.

It was an industrial waste dumping ground, once a naturally occurring marsh, but piled deep over decades with runoff, waste and eight feet of steel mill slag. Remediation and reclamation. Now it’s alone and quiet, drops of rain on still, beautiful water.

A massive landfill hill off to the side acts as reminder there’s still work to do.

Away from the hemi, demi, semi-marsh, past a paved walking trail marching by red cargo containers embedded in concrete — some set against the stairway so they could never open even if they wanted to — a sign with a red bike gear replacing the traditional “You Are Here” sign explains what’s going on. It gives the layout of the bike trails the slag heap was turned to. It outlines the skill levels of different routes, the berms and bridges, ramps and rails that will take the BMX set up, down and around.

The lowering your saddles, the full-face helmet, the wearing of shin, knee and elbow armor, body armor, and maybe a neck brace, the last of which “May be considered overkill by some riders but others wouldn’t think of riding without one.”

The single-track trail, the terrain park, the lawn, the pump park, the stairs, the entry plaza and the future bike parks. Future trail connections. Future parking lots. Future everything.

I look down at the mud below and a little grade school camp field trip training comes back.

That track’s a deer. That track might be a rabbit. That track’s a Cannondale.

No one’s here because it’s November. No one’s here because it’s Sunday. No one’s here because the rain plays pitter-patter on my umbrella.

That feeling I can’t place gets placed. I am alone. Alone on a slag heap turned bike park, by an industrial waste dumping ground turned nature-rich hemi-marsh. Even the rabbits and Cannondales have left this spot to me.

I am in the City of Chicago and I am surrounded by nature. I am in a city and I am breathtakingly alone.

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