Follow the Gray Gravel Road

A couple of weeks ago, Paul, our excellent destroyer of earth, laid down the gravel for the driveway, a thick gravy of limestone shards leading to the empty patch that imagines our house.  He drove the big red truck up the drive, its hydraulic pistons urging the bed upward at the same time until its back end opened up and – with apologies for the scatological image -- out flowed the stone river as the truck moved slowly on toward the house site.  His son came along later on a tractor with a huge roller that tamped it all down.  When the drive was finished, it was so pristine that Michael didn't want to walk on it with his muddy boots, but off we trudged corrupting its surface, up the hill, around the bend, and down again where our staked out Oz beckons.  

The gravel for our driveway was dug and chopped up right here in Greenport by A. Colarusso & Sons, a local company founded by great-great grandfather Antonio in 1935. It is now into its fourth generation of digging rocks and making streets and highways. The quarries, from which its gravel is mined, are part of the Becraft geologic formation, presumably one of the world's richest sources of limestone, and, in this case, limestone with friction qualities that make it an excellent source for our gravel driveway.

The Colarussos had been leasing much of the land feeding their mines from Holcim, a giant Swiss-owned supplier of mineral and cement. A few months ago, they were able to buy 1,800 acres, which included the quarries, from this Monster Lessor for $8.75 million, a cheap price considering local land values these days. Holcim recently merged with Lafarge, a French cement monster, to form the world's largest cement and construction materials company. Holcim avoided an anti-trust action by agreeing to shed some its assets, possibly why it rid itself of its Greenport property.

But there's also a deeper story.  Holcim, formerly Holnam, has an offspring, the unfortunate St. Lawrence Cement Company, that was beaten back a few years ago by local environmentalists from building a Godzilla cement plant on the land Colarusso has now bought.  Among other egregious intrusions, the plant would have constructed a 400-foot smokestack, spreading a plume of emissions six miles into the air over Hudson and Greenport, right down the road from our up and coming house.

 

 

So Colarusso's ownership now includes the quarries and property on Greenport's rural southern end near where we live. Under the contract, Colarusso can't compete by making cement, and one hopes that Holcim has pulled back most of its forces from the neighborhood to clobber local citizens in other towns. So long, adieu, auf wiedersehen, bye bye.  (Of continuing concern is LeFarge, Holcim's new twin brother, whose cement plant right across the river is still using fly-ash in its process, a concoction that in 2009 made it New York's second-largest emitter of airborne mercury.)

Not only are most of the people up here connected to every other person here through churches, kindergarten classes, marriage, or blood, but the living things that grow in the earth and the non-living things taken from it are also connected.  We have local farms that feed us and we also have local mines that make our roads. So, Colarusso is here digging up my town's back yard, but they are old neighbors. I am leaning on the side of hope that, compared to Holcim, the family is likely to be better stewards of the earth that they have lived and died on for more than a century than alien invaders from Switzerland and France.  Nevertheless, no one is perfect. 

Colarusso's blasting has shaken Greenport houses near its quarries for years. And it also has a right-of-way on the "Haul Road", which passes through a series of wetlands still owned by Holcim, down to the City of Hudson's southern riverfront.  Colarusso is seeking to build a concrete bulkhead stretching 170 feet along the Hudson shore. The DEC doesn't think the project threatens anything historical or environmental, but local groups have risen up to fight its incursion. According to the South Bay Task Force, an ever-vigilant opponent of any threats to the Hudson riverfront, the structure Colarusso wants to build will be used for moorings, "where barges can be stacked and at the ready for an intensification of aggregate shipping". One hopes that there won't be too many barges or that Colarusso won't build a giant gravel-carrying conveyor belt from their new property down to the river, which St. Lawrence had wanted to do. 

 Although, in my dark heart I love watching a barge sloth-like making its way south, and I believe a giant conveyor belt elevated across southern Greenport and bringing stone down to the river would be sort of cool. Full disclosure, I'm a fan of the industrial landscape -- in moderation.  I would oppose a giant smokestack planted in front of Olana, Frederick Church's spectacular front yard, but the blunt leanness of a well-constructed small factory along the Hudson River parsing wide views of mountains and swatches of green foliage is America at its painterly best.  Every time we take our garbage and recycling to the town dump, we use a back road and pass Colarusso's old quarries, now mythic lakes deep as antiquity, gleaming and wreathed by pines along their craggy edges and tempting reckless young men to jump to their deaths.  The Colarusso gravel production site sits about a half mile down the road toward the dump from the last visible quarry.  It's a surprisingly compact operation for generating that much gravel.  There, occasionally, I see dump trucks or bulldozers ride up faces of dense mountains of stone, precariously balanced at the top.  Like a game of chutes and ladders, various conveyors, tracks, and tunnels carry the stone from these small mountains to a massive hopper, which loads it on the dump trucks underneath, one of which belongs to Paul.  

I can't ignore the processes that brutalize the land and poison the air above it, but we have to work with, while trying to reduce, the tensions created by their destruction and the civilization they have built. And I just can't help but view the functional movement of that gray stone and its creation, my driveway, as beautiful.