Walking along the Mine Hill Preserve in Roxbury, Connecticut, you realize we feel for generations the effects of the actions of our forebears. Mine Hill was the site of an iron mine in the lush and luxurious, once rural and agrarian, town of Roxbury, Connecticut. Between times it had its industrial hot spot just down the road from New Milford, complete with immigrant labor, brothels, a hotel, and a train stop.

Though the last vestiges of this industrial site are covered over with moss and decades of fallen leaves and new forest growth, the scars of blasting and mining and burning remain. There are piles of discarded quartz, an unwanted byproduct of the mining process. There are lumps of slag around the furnaces. There are the furnaces and walls and other bits and pieces of infrastructure There are tracks where carts once rolled with pig iron and what have you. There are the concrete archways of tunnels now occupied by bats. There are a few wooden buildings leaning away from the hill that want preservation but cannot seduce any benefactors in this well-heeled community.

Walking along Mine Hill Preserve, you realize that nothing is forever, that even the deepest of scars can become sites of natural beauty given time. Nature is not to be outdone. You see trees grown along the tops of walls, their root systems running parallel to the rocks and then turning deep into the soft, rich earth. You see pools teeming with life in holes formed by blasts that loosened ore from the hillside. You see ditches cradling hardwood seedlings reaching through the second growth pines for the sunlight streaming through clouds that, come what may, will always be the same.

Walking along Mine Hill Preserve, you admire the trees whose roots reach deep into the earth like hands holding onto their mother for dear life. The trees are a blessing: in the still air of a summer day, the trees tell the truth: nature will not be bested; she will be. Click here for a video view of this site.