You see the smokestack from the highway and the smokestack is the tallest thing in the town and the tallest thing being a smokestack tells you what the town was built for. The town was built for burning. The smokestack is a chimney and the chimney is a tube and the tube carries the exhaust from the furnace to the sky and the carrying of the exhaust to the sky is the deal the factory made with the atmosphere. We burn down here. You absorb up there. The atmosphere accepted that deal for two hundred years and now the atmosphere is renegotiating and the renegotiation is the climate and the climate is the smokestack's bill coming due.

The Anaconda Smelter Stack in Montana stands five hundred and eighty five feet tall and the five hundred and eighty five feet is the tallest freestanding masonry structure in the world and it smelted copper. Copper for wires. Copper for the telegraph and the telephone and the electrical grid that lit every house in America. The Anaconda stack made the modern world possible and the making the modern world possible poisoned Anaconda Montana. The smelter closed in nineteen eighty and the closing left the stack standing with nothing to burn and the nothing to burn is the monument. The stack stands in a Superfund site. The soil around it is poison. The grass does not grow. The EPA fenced the stack because the stack is a tombstone for a town that died making copper for everyone else's wires. Five hundred and eighty five feet of brick and the brick remembers every ton of arsenic that went up through it.

The smokestacks at River Rouge in Dearborn Michigan fired for Ford Motor Company for eighty years and the eighty years of firing built cars and built the middle class and built the American Dream and poisoned the Rouge River. Charles Sheeler photographed River Rouge in nineteen twenty seven and the photographs made the smokestacks beautiful and the beautiful smokestacks were the American sublime. Diego Rivera painted the smokestacks in the Detroit Industry murals at the DIA in nineteen thirty three and Rivera made the smokestacks into gods and the gods demanded human sacrifice and the human sacrifice was the workers' lungs. Ford paid five dollars a day and the five dollars a day was revolutionary and the revolution had a smokestack and the smokestack had a cost and the cost was in the air.

In Donora Pennsylvania on October twenty seventh nineteen forty eight the smokestacks at the Donora Zinc Works and the American Steel and Wire plant released sulfur dioxide and the sulfur dioxide mixed with fog and the fog became poison and the poison killed twenty people in five days. Twenty people dead because the smokestacks kept burning into a temperature inversion and the temperature inversion trapped the exhaust in the valley and the valley became a gas chamber. Donora is the reason the Clean Air Act exists. Donora is the town that proved the smokestack was not just ugly but lethal. The smokestacks in Donora were doing what smokestacks do. The weather changed. The smokestack did not notice. Twenty people died because a smokestack cannot read the sky.

You drive past the old factory and the smokestack still stands and the still standing is the question. The smokestack with no smoke is the ruin and the ruin is the landscape of every Rust Belt city. Detroit has them. Pittsburgh has them. Gary has them. Cleveland has them. The smokestacks that built America and then America left and the leaving left the smokestacks standing like fingers pointing at the sky and the pointing at the sky is the accusation. We burned for you. We made your steel. We made your cars. We made your copper wire. And you moved the factory to a place where the burning is cheaper and the cheaper burning is someone else's smokestack now and someone else's smokestack is someone else's cancer and the cancer does not care whose sky it rises into. The smokestack. The city's tallest confession. Still standing. Still pointing. Still asking who pays.