I look around for a few minutes before I realize that there is nothing in here I really had any reason to buy. I don’t even know how to use olive oil. I always feel guilty, though, when I leave a local business without buying anything, so I meander towards the cash register and pick out a small square of fudge and two vintage magnets I expect my mother will appreciate (which she did). I strike up a conversation with the shop owner, Donna, as she wraps my magnets carefully so they won’t screw with my debit card. To my surprise, when asked about how OEC was recovering from the flood, Donna gives me the full scoop:

Apparently, everyone on Main Street had lost their businesses (and their homes, since many lived in the apartments above), and 5% of those affected wouldn’t be coming back. Those who were temporarily homeless were sheltered and fed by the farmers’ market, or were shuffled from house to house until something more permanent was figured out. Donna and her family were lucky; she left at 6:30PM that night, before the water got deep. Her husband and son almost stayed in OEC that night to play some Pokémon Go, but decided at the last minute that they were too tired after a day at the beach. Donna then points to a sign above our heads.

“That’s the water line, there. That’s how high it got that night. Everything,” she gestures to the store I’m standing in. “All of this was gone, gutted. We lost our whole inventory.”

She quickly adds how lucky she was, though. Most of Park Ridge’s stock was shipped in from another location, so even when their wooden furniture still smelled of petroleum once it had dried in the sun, they were still able to order new ones. Some businesses had really lost everything: the men who had pulled a woman from a floating car had lost all of the framing equipment in the basement of their gallery that same night, so they had been forced to close.

Even with the changeover, Old Ellicott City’s character couldn’t be diminished; Donna flies through another story that had spread about how, in the wake of the disaster, a handful of homeless people had volunteered to clean up the garbage knotted in the grass of people’s backyards. As the woman’s eyes light up with the memory, I chastise myself for thinking that the man in the antique bookstore would have had what I had been looking for; I’m still learning that, in the real world, the best stories don’t always come from where I’d expect. Just as a quality paper blossoms from many, many drafts, the kind of experience I wanted from OEC required that I go through the process of trial-and-error with various people, places, and things. At this point of the day, the culmination of my drift had not quite hit me yet, but I was getting closer.

Ironically, Donna is interrupted by a phone call about bad credit, so I smile at her and take my leave. I reflect on how lucky I am that I can leave, knowing that these people’s lives will go on, for better or for worse, once I get in my car and drive away. For several minutes, a long train passes over the bridge marking the town’s entrance. It lends to an eerie soundtrack as I continue down the street, running my hand along the ancient rock that juts into the red brick sidewalk. A tiny sign asks politely that I refrain from climbing all over the 300-million-old structure, as if I’d be able to put a dent in it with my knockoff Toms.

Before I know it, I’ve wandered onto a residential road that climbs up and away from Main Street. From up here I can see the full effect of how Old Ellicott City has avoided death by building on top of itself; the façades that looked so jaded from the front mask absolute chaos in the back, where sleeper sofas and charcoal grills are strewn about like it’s some sort of Easter egg hunt. The apartments are squashed together, backyards and patios overlapping in some places. All I saw were a bunch of nooks and crannies to disappear into, and none of it made sense.

The sun actually feels hot today, so I decide to pop a squat on the steps of one of many churches on the residential street to cool off before my discomfort starts to show in the pits of my shirt. This church has a sign telling me that it offers free community breakfast and dinners twice a week. Across the street, a large blue-shirted woman stares defeatedly at the pile of leaves she’d swept into the plastic lid of a trashcan. I watch her watch the trash for a few minutes until she stands and empties the leaves into the can and continues dragging it up the sidewalk. I turn to look where she’s walking; the houses further up the street do look considerably nicer. I don’t care for that, so I turn back. The hills enclosing the center of the town seem designed to corral me back to Main Street anyway, so it’s not too difficult.

I make a quick round of the other side of the street, noting the discrepancies: painters on ladders and Tyvek Homewrap replace the storefronts once adorned with outdated community event posters and advertisements; the $5 tarot reading place has lost its neon sign; doors are painted over, as inaccessible as a doll’s house. I pause in front of what used to be Bean Hollow, a trendy café that got hit the hardest by the waters. I went there once with my friends in high school, and was pleasantly surprised to discover the secret drawers under the tables that had brimmed with journals and loose pages, each one telling a different story.

“I guess the owners are rebuilding it,” says a woman passing behind you to her partner. Not all of it.

Tacky dresses made for younger, thinner people float in the breeze outside a yoga store that used to be where I bought sage and spiritual stones made by the Navajo in Arizona. In the Phoenix, a nothing-special-pub that I had never even noticed before, a pretty girl with thick eyebrows tells me that she just started working here two weeks ago, when the owners reopened for the first time since the flood. Everything had to be replaced but the floor.

Some things remain unchanged, at least on the outside: Tea on the Tiber, as old as my surviving grandmother, is surprisingly intact, even with Patapsco running literally right beneath its foundation; the Chocolatier’s rearranged its layout a bit, but the wall running along one of the sidewalks across the street still has the keys and coins embedded in the cement. There are still many stores boasting of both their historical façades (and the worn bronze signs explaining what their building once was) and their modern interiors to maximize the customer’s shopping experience.

Finally, I stop in front of a toy store, which has surrounded itself with colorful spinning wheels and gentle wind chimes. A woman dressed in senior-signature all black stands among the toys, and I hear from her a single sigh.

Watching the old woman, I come to the eventual conclusion that my love for Old Ellicott City hadn’t been lost to the flood, but to my own absence. The freedom of being able to follow my feelings in such a drift gave me a new sense of place – my train of thought had essentially become physically realized, with new thoughts being triggered and old memories being anchored by the landmarks of the town around me. I hadn’t been walking in search of my own feelings; rather, it was my memories, judgements, prejudices, and stray curiosities that had been guiding me the whole time. With each corner I turned, I uncovered more of what I thought had been forgotten, with some new observations among the old, one of which I distinctly remember being: historical sites are a tricky thing, and living in one is even trickier – habitation will inevitably lead to modernization, whether inadvertent or intentional. Especially relevant when you have to go about gutting and replacing the basement of an ancient building, hundreds of years after the original builders have lived out their own lives, while you’re on your knees trying to put your own back together.

Eventually, I end up back where I started, sitting on some bench dedicated to some historically-significant person named Hogg (imagine, all that remains of your legacy is a haphazardly-constructed pile of splintery wood, an afterthought), watching the construction team guide the claw of a backhoe into a large hole in the ground. Old Ellicott City has corroded, no doubt – from my vantage point at the top of the hill, I can see the defunct, moth-colored factory visible in the distance, windows fogged and shattered. I think of the run-down, scruffy-looking teenagers driving around in banged-up cars, circling a town that refuses to die. I smile at the thought that this barely-recovered town will definitely outlive me.