Most mornings my drive from the woods north of Nashwauk to Hibbing orients around the enormous steam cloud billowing out of Keewatin Taconite. The wind points the steam like a finger, to the north on a warm day and angrily to the south on a cold, bitter day. On a calm day the finger points upward to the heavens.
The plant has been in temporary shutdown since the new year and I’m still not used to a horizon that doesn’t include the steam out of KeeTac. People on the Iron Range are starting to realize, slowly, that this temporary idling and the other shutdowns in process or planned at all the Range’s taconite mines are vague in scope. Even as national indicators stabilize this place is, as it has always been, the last length of pipe in the economic drain. The manna from heaven always gets here last. Maybe that’s why the finger always points at the sky.
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