Experimental Road

First impressions: Chain link fence with barbed wire around the entire site. Front lawn mowed, back overgrown with sumac. Big ragged hole in the Powerex, Inc. Auburn, New York sign. Doors of the brick building chained shut. Eleven monitoring wells sticking out of the grass in a straight line. Empty flagpoles. White guard house, fenced. Shiny padlock. No trespassing. Emergency contact: a name, a number. No Superfund signage posted. Little box houses across the street, nicely maintained. Health club right next door.

Seven more monitoring wells on the southwestern edge of the parking lot. A little boy with his father, learning. His big-boy bike: a two-wheeler, no training wheels. Fat Huffy wheels crossing faded yellow lines, weeds pushing through cracks in the asphalt. Wispy clouds gently fading into a high-noon summer sky.

The boy on the bike pedals and wobbles, but isn’t looking back. Trusts his father is right behind him, trusts his father is keeping him safe. Circling un-steadily in this abandoned lot with his father following close. No one else around except a woman in a car, recording her impressions.

I’m suddenly conscious of my own presence, my rental car, my notebook. I am not in Auburn on official business. I no longer have any official business. So why this need to explore and record?

Years before, my husband and I brought our two-year-old daughter to visit his parents for a month in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York, on Cayuga Lake between Auburn and Seneca Falls. I was pregnant with our youngest child and had just dropped the “working” from working mom, as if the two can be divorced. I had been an environmental regulator for the State of Connecticut, overseeing the investigation and remediation of contaminated sites.

We indulged in sleep every morning, traced the flight of the osprey in the afternoon sky. We sipped lemonade on the back porch, watched our daughter dance beneath the willows, dangled our toes off the rickety dock.

When my husband took his daily bike ride, my daughter and I stayed home and ate ice cream. Between licks, we’d touch my swollen belly and laugh at the kicks our snack induced. Her toddler hand would rest near my navel, her chocolate eyes astonished.

My in-laws came down in the evenings to join us for sunset and a meal. The air thickened with citronella, and just as the sun blurred into the gray-blue tree line across the lake, my wet-haired girl would emerge from the house, pink and candied from her bath, ready for a story.

Time in the country is supposed to be like that: cleansing, refreshing. Drinking lemonade on the porch, leaning back in the swing with the kids. And perhaps that’s what I was thinking years later, long after we’d moved out west, and my husband was busy working and I was busy mothering: good old times. My old times.

An empty afternoon and nostalgia for my work led me to the Internet, where I casually searched online databases for interesting things in places I’ve lived. That’s when this one little fact slipped off the screen, slipped like a knife from my hands with the baby underfoot: just a few miles from the cottage—where I’d poured bathwater over suds in my daughter’s silken hair and drunk lemonade made from the tap—is a hidden Superfund site.

If you ask people what a Superfund site looks like, they’ll likely tell you something resembling deep urban decay: rusting oil tanks, stagnant chemical waste-water ponds, abandoned parking lots and dilapidated buildings, graffiti and broken windows. They won’t tell you it’s a place with rolling hills of corn and clover, of vineyards and orchard rows. There’ll be no mention of red barns or lazy cows, Queen Anne’s lace and periwinkle chicory shivering by the road.

The Cayuga County Groundwater Contamination Site is nearly seven miles long. Seven miles of solvent-laced groundwater stretching all the way from the western side of Auburn, New...