I went to Auvers-sur-Oise because I wanted to stay on a houseboat, not because of Vincent Van Gogh.

I caught a late morning train from the Gare du Nord in Paris, and in thirty-five minutes, I was in the countryside. The day was overcast and gray and pervaded by the kind of humid cold that sneaks into your boots and chills you. An unexpected snowstorm in Paris had left my feet perpetually frozen, and I’d made several trips to the Decathlon near my apartment to buy thick wool socks.

Walking along the Seine one afternoon, I had seen several houseboats moored in the 16^th arrondissement near the Eiffel Tower. Wine bottles littered their decks. Ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts and ashes, wet from the melting snow. Above, the city’s traffic rushed along the river. The boats didn’t look exactly peaceful, but I kept thinking about how they bounced lazily up and down in the current.

The journey by river is a classic heroic quest, undertaken by figures as different as Conrad’s Marlow and Huck Finn. Rivers triumph over our will. We must bend to theirs. They carry us along, to wherever we may be going, and they connect us to the past. They flow though time, linking up disparate moments, forging connections between things that are present and absent.

I wanted to be on a river, but I didn’t really want to go anywhere. I just wanted to watch the river go somewhere. All I had to do was find a houseboat, a boat that played at domesticity.

And I did. I found a boat on the Oise, a tributary of the Seine.

My cabbie smoked and chatted rapidly in French as he drove me from the Auvers train station, along quiet neighborhood streets and down to the river. He asked me to repeat the address and then thought for a moment. “C’est par la,” he said, gesturing down the riverbank. It’s down that way. I walked along a muddy footpath that ran along the water. The ground was slick and uneven. There’s something about French mud that is different from other mud – it has a richness. My boots were covered in it. In fact, when these boots finally gave up the ghost a few months ago, the mud was still wedged in the deep grooves of their soles, the inky mud of the riverbank, dried to a pale gray.

The houseboat was a huge iron barge that the owner had divided into two units. She lived on one side and rented the other side out. She invited me over for tea, and we sat at her kitchen table, and I looked around at all her things. It was a beautiful home, comfortable and creative. The home of a thoughtful person. She was a painter, so there were half-finished canvases everywhere. And on the wall next to the table hung several pictures of her in front of a chateau. She said it was her old house. Before a divorce, I think she said, but we were talking in French, so I missed a few details. I thought she must be a fallen aristocrat-turned-artist or something equally romantic. The massive stone house in the photographs looked like a specter, a distant and haunting shadow.

When I had left Paris, I could tell it wasn’t going to be a pretty day. Now, it was raining, very hard at first and then just steadily, the drops pummeling the sides of the boat. I thought I would walk into town for lunch. This was when I realized that Vincent Van Gogh is the household god of Auvers. There was a bronze statue of him in the town park. The park was also named after him. He started to appear everywhere.

Van Gogh spent only seventy days in Auvers, from May to July 1890, and then he shot himself. Yet he will stay there forever, not simply because he is buried there, in the churchyard of the Notre Dame de l’Assomption, but because the town will not let him go.

I passed a shop filled with copies of his paintings, hung from the floor to the ceiling: the sunflowers, the haystacks, the café at night. Even his bedroom in Arles and the Eglise Notre Dame. They were all there, and they were all for sale. In front of the Town Hall was a placard of his painting of the building. I looked at the painting, and then at the building, and then at the painting again. I thought it must be strange to work in that boring building, an administrative center in the French countryside, a boring building that Van Gogh had painted.

It was still raining. I ducked into a used bookstore and wandered its aisles and picked out some Zola for a friend. The doors were propped open, and the light breeze stirred up the smell of musty books. I found a second-hand store filled with tchotchkes. The woman who owned it invited me to sit down and stay until the rain let up, so I sat at a table in the middle of the room and went through piles of prints and old postcards.

I thought that I should probably do something Van Gogh-oriented, so I stopped into the brasserie in the center of town to have a drink and look over my options. Café de la Paix. Inside, several middle-aged men smoked and drank beer. They glanced up at me when I walked in and then went back to their conversation. By the door was a rack of postcards of the town and of Van Gogh’s paintings, and on the café’s walls was a mural of Van Gogh. The mural depicted him in a various states: in one portrait, he was contemplative and in another, he was holding a baby and tossing it joyfully up into the air.

It was Sunday, and the town was quiet. Most places were closed. I had the sense that the men in the brasserie always spent their Sunday afternoons there. I looked through a tourist pamphlet I had picked up at the train station. The Chateau d’Auvers, a fancy place up on a hill, was closed. The Museum of Absinthe was closed. The restaurant in the Auberge Ravoux, the building where Van Gogh had rented an upstairs room, was closed. But the Auberge Ravoux also housed a museum called La Maison de van Gogh, and it was not closed.

I could buy a ticket to see where Van Gogh lived and where he died. As my pamphlet noted, he shot himself in that room.

I didn’t know what else to do in the rain.

The tour guide led a small group of us up a narrow staircase and down a hallway to the artist’s room, which had a skylight, a wooden café chair, and a glass case along the wall. Wooden beams stretched along the ceiling. We were about ten on the tour, and we didn’t all fit in the room at the same time. The guide explained that Van Gogh had always wanted to have an exhibition of his work in the Auberge Ravoux, so the current proprietor was dedicated to purchasing a painting to display in this attic room. It was a complicated process, he assured us, but they were hopeful.

Room 5, as the guide called it, held no traces of Van Gogh, but this small space insisted on holding memories, if little else. It struck me as a sad place, and it was no doubt much sadder when Van Gogh inhabited it. Now, the empty glass case was waiting for this painting. It made the room feel more barren, and I couldn’t help but think that it would probably remain empty.

This little room was all there was to the tour, which concluded with the screening of a short film entitled In the Footsteps of Van Gogh that presented excerpts from the artist’s letters to Theo set to Romantic piano music. He wrote of Auvers, “Ici, on est loin de Paris…” Here, one is far from Paris. The lines flashed across contemporary photographs of picturesque Auvers: the present, claimed by the past.

I already wanted to forget the sad little room, but maybe because it was nothing, maybe because there was nothing there, I knew I would remember it.

That evening, as I watched the lights of the other boats along the river, I thought of the dead man in the churchyard, who couldn’t have imagined these memorials, who was just passing through.