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Sunday afternoon, an old bud and I hiked through the steel plant for a couple of hours, taking photographs as if on an expedition. I hadn’t been inside the mill for a couple of years and had forgotten what a truly awesome place it is. The plant melts almost 100 tons of steel an hour when revved up, generating 20 lbs of dust in the process, and burns through $3 million in electricity each month. (Their power bill arrives in the mail like everyone else’s but with several more zeros.) This place employs almost 400 people. Yet the sluggish economy has turned it into a kind of ghost town on Sunday afternoons, when I pulled into a parking lot almost empty.

Near the top of our list was the melt shop, a place I only caught glimpses of when I’d worked here, though I could often see its lava-like metal just passing by. The shop and the rolling mill are somewhat dangerous, and the managers didn’t like the idea of summer-hires/teenagers inside them more than a few minutes. Of course, they didn’t mind us cleaning up the hundreds of pounds of hot ash (slag) in the mill’s nether regions. Here, we snapped our best photographs – me standing next to the NASA-looking control panel and its glowing red and green knobs, with a background like something out of Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” or “Alien.” Then we walked through the noirish maze to the billet yard, then the rolling mill, and then out to the storage yards where, low and behold, we encountered train tracks and brand new rail cars smothered in graffiti. Just like in my novel. Photo ops abounded.

Our tour guide and escort, my dad, told us a few new stories that I wish I could pump into the novel. First, a few weeks ago a pair of innocent rail cars lost their brakes one ordinary day and came sliding down the tracks, gaining up to 35 mph before they flipped off and tumbled into the mill’s driveway. This I would’ve liked to see from a safe distance. Also recently, a drunk driver came smashing through the front gate at 60 mph and nearly raced into the scrap yard. Wild night for him, I reckon.

Ultimately, I found myself wanting to write yet another novel about the mill, or at least a story. So much has changed with me, and no doubt others, in the last couple of years. I definitely saw the plant through the new eyes. Then I realized that most of the workers, as I’d always known, sort of, have gotten use to the bizarre architecture of the mill. Many of them have said they’ll buy the book, and I wonder what they’ll think seeing this place through the novel’s eyes.