My mother had a pet goat named Sarah when she was young, something of an impulse purchase by her father while he was at a livestock auction one day in Syracuse. I was quite young and impressionable when I first heard the story of Sarah from Sarah-cuse, and from that point onward I always knew where Syracuse was.

Years later, I would visit my mother's mother almost every day when she lived at the "home" in town. One day I arrived to find that she had the full attention of the staff, with several of them blocking the way between her and any exit doors. Outraged and distraught, she told me that she was just now on her way back from Syracuse, after putting her daughter on the train for Missouri. She said she had stopped at this hotel, but now nobody would let her leave.

I recited to her the genealogical trees that had sprouted and grown since that day she was recalling, and reminded her that her daughter wasn't much more than a child at the time. With details of names and places, I told her that her daughter had been my mother for the last forty years, and that I had a family my own. It wasn't one of granny's better days, and apparently I confused her enough that she decided that it would be best to go back to her room and rest.

It has been many more years since that day, and for the last two years I have flown to Syracuse five nights of every week. On most nights I fly right over the city as I approach the airport, and I often find myself scouring the landscape below, trying to imagine the city as it was in 1940, but it has always been discouraging.

From the air, the city's most prominent feature is the I-90 interchange with I-81. The wide gray ribbons of the interstate highways are quite prominent wherever they are laid, but when they converge as elevated roadways, they obscure everything around them. Beneath them, yesterday's great road of iron rails had been given the "bum's rush" out of town, and relegated to a circuitous detour to the north.

I look down and see the rails heading straight into the City, and straight out again, but in the center of town, there is no trace of the rail bed or the station. On the east side of town there remains a great train yard, probably a dull shadow of what it was in the glory days of steam locomotives, but always impressive in the early morning when the sunrise glances skyward from a hundred shiny rails. I had often thought of the view to be had from the overhead roadway that crosses the yard.

July Fourth found me stranded in Syracuse by the Company's flight schedule, and my wife drove up to spend the day with me. It was wicked hot, and we spent a lot of time just driving around in the nice air conditioned rental car. It didn't matter if we got lost, because we weren't going anywhere anyway.

Our day's wandering started at the salt museum, where we learned that most of the north shore of Onondaga Lake was once occupied by salt factories. At first they were fired by wood, then coal, and in the end the brine was evaporated by the sun. They were clustered around brine wells along the Oswego Canal which provided ready transportation of fuel, material, and the finished salt. I found it interesting that even back in the good ol' days, the State government was quick to move onto a good thing, and declared that it held a monopoly on the supply of brine.

I had also been curious about the "Solvay Process"; I had heard of it but knew nothing. It is a chemical process which manufactures soda ash from salt and another area resource, limestone. In one swoop of genius, a local market was created for the salt, a demand was created for limestone, and local employment boomed.

We stopped in the middle of the city, almost in the shadow of the two intersecting highways, and I paid quiet respects to those who had gone before. The railroad station is gone and the intersecting Erie and Oswego Canals are filled in, but the Syracuse weigh lock still stands as a museum. Outside, you can compare today's view to the northwest with a photograph of the same scene, with the canal junction and the railroad in the foreground.

We drove the city streets from south to north, noting the older buildings and seeing the circles and squares that had only been names before. We drove the streets from west to the east see the vestiges of the old Erie Canal in the greenbelt that follows the canal path the way to Rome. On the way back we lingered on the bridge over the train yard, just as I had wished I could do.

I saw the places that had been only names, and I was able to place names on places I have seen in a thousand trips over the city. As I climbed into the clear sky on the morning of the 5th, I looked near and far, right and left, tracing the previous day's travels and silently greeting all the new names and places.