You’ll also see grain elevators poking up behind the garbage mountain, and, startlingly, the smokestacks from oceangoing freighters. The landfill and factories hide a network of waterways from the road.

At 130th Street, twenty miles southeast of the Water Tower where tourists and Chicagoans both like to shop, you finally leave the expressway and head east into the heart of the industrial zone. On a weekday yours may be the only car among the semis that compete with barges and trains to supply the factories and haul their finished products.

One Hundred Thirtieth passes Metron, one of Chicago ’s few surviving steel mills, Medusa Cement, and the Scrap Corporation of Chicago -with a mountain of scrap iron to prove it. At Torrence Avenue you run into the giant Ford Assembly Plant, their largest in the world. There you turn north again, crossing the Calumet River on an old counterweight vertical lift bridge. Immediately beyond is 122nd Street, a narrow, badly paved industrial thoroughfare. Turn left under the Welded Tube Company billboard and follow the semis west.

Under a sky purple-pink with smog, marsh grasses and cattails tower above the cars. Despite a century of dumping that has filled the ground water with more carcinogens than the EPA can classify, the grasses flourish. If you are a bird-watcher, and patient, you can find meadowlarks and other prairie natives here.

After a mile 122nd Street intersects with a gravel track, Stony Island. To the right it goes up to the CID landfill. To the left it runs next to Dead Stick Pond until both of them dead-end at Lake Calumet. Medusa Cement is busy digging at the south end of the marsh; on the west the Feralloy Corporation buildings loom; to the east major construction is underway.