After a short drive south toward Obergrande again, they came to the end of a rough road that had once been blocked with signs and old beams.
“So where are we now?” Erik asked as they disembarked.
“Tahawus,” Briony said, looking around her. “Sometimes called Adirondac, or McIntyre, but everyone I know uses Tahawus when they talk about it, which isn’t very often. My father calls this the loneliest place in the Adirondacks.”
It seemed to Erik that the forest at the edge of the road was filled with mist, even though the early afternoon sun was shining. “What is this place?”
“Now, it’s a ghost town,” Briony said. “Once, long ago, it was a company town, a place of industry, major mining and iron smelting operations, where a lot of people worked and lived. Iron deposits were discovered here in 1826 or so, by Archibald McIntyre, whose name was on the company, and David Henderson, whose name is on the lake I told you about earlier.”
She led him through the un-intimidating roadblocks along a green roadside with a broken split-rail fence to a massive stone structure standing slightly off the road. Erik could hear water trickling in the distance.
“This is the old McIntyre Blast Furnace. You can go and look up inside it if you want.”
Erik stared at the structure, a tall, pyramid-shaped obelisk tapering toward the top with arched openings at the bottom on each of the four sides, crumbling around the edges. “Is it structurally sound?” he asked.
Briony shrugged. “Hard to say,” she said. “I read somewhere that they—I think the Open Space Initiative, that bought it for preservation—reinforced it about ten years ago, but just as an historic relic—it’s been closed down since around 1857 or so. Thousands and thousands of acres of prime Adirondack forest were clear-cut to fuel it and the even older puddling furnace nearby. That clear-cutting, the ripping down of virgin forests, was a major cause for the push for conservation in the Adirondacks.”
“I’m game to look inside,” Erik said. He offered Briony his hand, and together they descended the slight rocky slope until they stood beside the dead blast furnace, the rubble of broken brick mixing with the forest grass. Erik bent down next to one of the arched openings and crawled a short way inside. He looked up.
Towering above him, its melted brick and stone interior coated with creosote, was the interior of an enormous circular shaft through which he could see a small circle of the sky.
The chimney.
There was something moving about the sight, being able to look at a place where men had shoveled fuel and iron ore into the hellish fires of this stone furnace, providing the steel for the building of a new and expanding nation. He backed out of it.
“That’s amazing,” he said.
“Another thing that the furnaces of this part of the mine, called the Upper Works, needed was moving water to power the bellows. They used the Hudson River—which is what you hear over there—but this close to the wellspring, it’s not the mighty river that it is downstream. There are parts of it slightly to the north of here where you can walk across it, because it’s less than ten feet wide, and at Lake Tear of the Clouds, it can be crossed in a single step.
“So David Henderson decided to try and merge it with the Opalescent River, to divert more water to run past the furnaces. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see that happen because, in a really stupid hunting accident involving a pond of ducks, he dropped his backpack and his gun inside it went off and killed him. They renamed the site Calamity Pond. There’s a marker that looks like a gravestone on it down the road a ways at the spot where he died.”
“Appropriate name.”
“It’s an appropriate name for this entire place throughout its history,” Briony said, leading him back up the rocky edge away from the road. “It’s like the place is cursed.
“After thirty years of mining and smelting, it turned out that there was an impurity in the iron ore that made it difficult to process, and finally, in 1857, operations were ceased here. One man was kept in the employ of the company and paid a dollar a day to watch over the mine and make sure there was no vandalism. Everyone else was let go, in this place that once had two farms, a blast furnace and forge, a puddling furnace, charcoal and brick kilns, trip hammers and a sawmill. The village had sixteen dwellings and a building used as a school, church, the first bank in the Adirondack mountains, and a general meeting place, all abandoned. You can see the ruins of them down the road.
“It was a ritzy hunting camp for members of WOE, the West Obergrande Elect, and various other high-and-mighty folks for a number of decades after that—the reason Roosevelt was here. Then in 1940, during the Second World War, they figured out what the impurity in the iron ore was—titanium—one of the rarest metals and a base for some of the strongest and lightest steel able to be forged.”
Erik whistled.
“A company named National Lead Industries opened a second mine in a different location, known as the Lower Works, about a mile south of here. Another community was built with about eighty-five buildings, and forty million or so tons of titanium were extracted before the operations stopped again in 1989. Leaving this.”
She came to a halt at the edge of a high woodland swale. Erik stopped beside her and she handed him the binoculars.
He raised them to his eyes.
What looked like a low, dead lake lay at the bottom of the area beyond where they were standing, on the other side of which, about a mile across the lake, was an enormous series of industrial buildings and a cooling tower, abandoned and decrepit, with long, slanted chutes stretching at different angles between broken towers, every window in the massive complex missing, like teeth from an old skeleton.
To the left of the enormous factory, a rock pile dwarfed that complex. At first Erik thought it was a natural hillside, but a few seconds later realized it was a mountainous pile of slag.
“That is sometimes jokingly called the newest of the High Peaks, Overburden Mountain, which is just an enormous pile of tailings, the impurities left over when the valuable ore is separated from the residue. Overburden is actually waste rock, and isn’t part of the processing, but it’s the name of the slag pile nonetheless. That pile is over three hundred feet high.”
“Good lord,” Erik whispered.
“What looks like a lake is actually just the mine pits, filled with water. Local legend says that those pits are over a thousand feet deep.”
Erik shuddered inadvertently.
They walked in silence back down the hillside, then down the road to where Seabiscuit awaited them, passing the bones of abandoned buildings and broken machinery on either side of the road, old rusted turbines and wheels that could still be seen among the greenery of the forest that was swallowing them slowly into history.
Just before they got to the car, Briony stopped and inclined her ear into the wind coming off the Hudson beyond the road.
“Sometimes I feel like I can hear them still,” she said quietly. “People with a lot of hope and vision, muscle and sinew, working the furnaces of both the Upper and the Lower Works amid the clanking and the roaring of the furnaces. It haunts me, the adversity they faced, the loss. But I’ve learned something recently from all this sadness.”
“What was that?” Erik asked, reluctant to interfere with her thoughts.
She turned and looked back at the old stone McIntyre blast furnace, pointing still toward the sky at the edge of the woods, green ivy spottily growing amidst its outer bricks, broken and crumbing, but still erect.
“You can only do the best you can,” she said simply. “Even when an idea or an undertaking seems perfect, sensible, successful, you never know what’s lurking that can undermine all the work and plans and dreams you have for it—like Henderson and his river, like the iron and coal miners who slaved in the heat only to have their steel not be usable. Sometimes you may not live to see it get better. But sooner or later, it does get better.
“The titanium mined at the Lower Works probably helped the Allies win World War II, used as it was in the making of stronger, lighter airplanes that were so critical in Europe and the Pacific. Because of what went on here, at the Upper Works, the slashing of the forests to feed these furnaces, the Adirondack Park exists—the largest conservation project ever undertaken in the history of the United States. And it continues to be reclaimed even more all the time. As my mom used to say, good follows good. Good work and good intention make for a good outcome—whether you get to see it or not.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she smiled her crooked smile.
Erik swallowed hard, fighting with all his might the urge to take her into his arms, to hold her until the mist of the forest had cleared from her thoughts. Whatever happened in the fashion industry to cause her to run from it must have been much more devastating than I realized, he thought, cursing himself for assuming it had been mere boredom.
Briony turned back toward the car.
“So now you’ve seen it, the high and the low,” she said, blinking to dry her eyes. “Are you ready to go back to Obergrande?”
“If that’s what you think is best, Sarah, just navigate us back,” Erik said. He opened the passenger side door and held it for her as she got into the front seat, then climbed into Seabiscuit and turned the motor on. “Where to?”
“There’s a tapas place at the edge of town we could hit for a light supper,” Briony said, putting on her seatbelt. “And then, if you still want to see it, I’ll take you to the tree.”
—Manhattan—
The door to the electronic monitoring room opened, and the man who had spent the last three days inside it returned to his desk.
The pale light from the overhead fluorescents cast a ghostly shadow on his hands, which were still trembling from the meeting.
He crossed quickly to the desk and tapped the wireless mouse nervously.
Please, he thought. Please have checked in.
The screen roared to life.
Nothing. Nothing new.
The man put his head down on the desk.
“Please,” he whispered to the floor below him.
The floor did not reply.