More of my home town, Hamilton. Think of it, if you're American, as Pittsburgh north. Steel built the place. When the North American steel industry fell apart, so did Hamilton. This particular bit of dereliction is down near a bar mill I spent part of a summer working in. Almost anyone of the "male" persuasion who grew up in Hamilton in those days spent at least their summers, once they reached university age, working in the mills, earning tuition money. Some never left. Until the mills began to shrink, that is.

My most vivid memory of this particular mill is of climbing up into an open-top boxcar full of red-hot iron rails, about 30 cm x 10 m, in order to spray paint shipping numbers onto their ends. You've never really lived until you've skated along red-hot steel ("skated" because the soles of your safety boots were melting), with a can of pressurized spray paint in your hand.

Later that same summer I put in time in a rod mill. This was a mill that specialized in making the stock for things like rebar. Huge bars of steel, 30 cm x 2.5 m(?) would be heated white hot, then sent through a series of opposing rollers that would gradually reduce their diameter to 4 or 5 cm, while their length grew to 15 m or so. The process involved sending the narrowing, but lengthening, bars across the mill floor, guided by rollers in the floor, to sets of opposing rollers with increasingly narrow gaps between them, at high speed. Eventually, it was like watching neon tubes rocket across the mill floor. Except that these were long, white-hot, very flexible, very massive, steel rods. Every once in a while one would snag on one of the floor rollers and go shooting into the air, curling and twisting like some giant wounded snake, throwing off sparks, and sending us all running for cover. It wouldn't do to let one of these deadly snakes actually strike you - they'd burn through you without a pause. A strange combination of beautiful and deadly. Now I think, "What a great photograph that would have made!" But I'm sure glad I wasn't one of those destined to spend their lives in the mills.