The Miners
There were coyote tracks at the Missouri mine. They weren’t supposed to be there. No one understood how such a distant predator got in or how to keep it out. But that’s true about a lot of places in America these days.
We were wandering the ruins of Federal Mill Number Three, the largest lead mine in the US until its closure in 1972. For centuries, most lead came from Missouri. Ammunition for every war, toxic paint for every child’s classroom, noxious petrol for every parent’s car.
Lead spread from the heartland, made in America, and when we were poisoned, we were poisoned together.
Lead exposure makes you violent. It possibly created generations of psychopaths. But folks didn’t know that when Federal Mill opened in 1906. They knew the ground sparkled when they walked. They thought the earth was meant to be stripped down and sold for parts, because its bounty was infinite, and the country was new.
But lead was finite, like freedom. The mine closed after the minerals were extracted and the ground was useless and torn. A chart from the last day of operation stands in front of rusted towers, workers’ names frozen in the hour their world ended.
Missouri did what it always does in the face of self-made disaster: it turned the mine into a park. Federal Mill became the Missouri Mines State Historic Site. It has two museums and an ORV track nearby, where the ground is too toxic for straight hiking but still ripe for fun.
I’ve had a lot of good times in abandoned Missouri mines. I kayaked through one using a Hefty bag as a sea blanket and took a pontoon ride past a scuba diving pit in another. Missouri excels at turning wreckage into recreation. Our state has been living in the aftermath of the American Dream for a long, long time.
We are an Aftermath State of Aftermath People.
I had passed the ruins of Federal Mill Number Three from the highway for twenty years. But I’d never gone inside, and it seemed like time.