In
Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, just behind Squirrel Hill the
slag heap stands. It used to be like a volcano,
trucks would come and dump still-hot
slag from the
blast furnaces. It released acrid fumes. There was no life on the
slag heap then.
The american steel industry crashed, and Pittsburgh, that used to have enough smelters and coke plants to turn the sky and the brick facades black, is now a depressed, sleepy, pleasant town, where the retired steel workers look at the blue sky over Carnegie Mellon University. The old grimness is mostly gone,
But the slag heap is still there, a grey mass over which nothing grows. Take a walk there, early in the morning. Be careful, for the edges crumble, and you would not want to tumble all the way down to the Ohio river.
A miracle happens every now and then: some hardy seeds manage to take root in stuff from which all earthly vitality has been leeched and blasted by chemicals and fire.
I even saw a little tree. The slag is not uniform: it has layers and pockets, and maybe the tree, shaking in the dawn chill, found the lucky spot.
I do not read hope in that tree. I suspect it to be doomed. It stands overmuch alone, a single green thing in the grey. Someone (a man, the weather, an animal) will take exception to its singularity. It is not meet that trees stand alone, says the world.
How long will the slag heap last ? I say that it is good for some millenia. Maybe enough wind-blown dirt will accumulate on it that in some time it will look just like another hill. But at its cold core, remembering the fire, the old grayness, the industrial cold, will endure.