“Admittedly, it is strange.”

I asked her, if people can get to the North Sea coast in three hours, and can book flights to Crete and the Canary Islands for 150 euros, then why would they would come here, with the chemical refineries out on the horizon? Her gaze bounced off the table, the brochures, and settled on mine.

“We don’t know. Over forty tourism studies were conducted by area universities and institutions, and the answer is we don’t know.”

“You don’t know who your audience is?”

“That is correct.”

I admired her honesty, but had to ask, “Would you come here?”

“I’m from here. My father was a miner. You came here.”

“I came to research how this all might not succeed.”

“It is challenging, I admit.”

She clarified that a whole development scheme was at stake. National and European Union funds had kicked off the project, had paid for re-engineering shorelines and ensuring no landslides would occur under expensive shore front homes to come. Private funds should have been — should be — close to follow. The whole lake, from artificial horizon to sandy beach, had become aimed at attracting further investment in shore front homes. Those homes would anchor a more stable and luxurious tourism economy. “So how’s that going?” I asked.

The landscape of a living mine, with its violence and cataclysm, risk and reward, is anything but ordinary. In fact, it is exciting and novel and dangerous.

“There is, unfortunately, no central institution that leads efforts to make the area successful. Investors from Holland left, quickly. Too bureaucratic for them, their money. And, okay, with no central organization.” I thought, if the Dutch are bailing out on a project involving water and massive landscape re-engineering, shouldn’t people be worried? “Investors from China and Japan said the same thing. It is too difficult for investors.”

Billions of euros had been spent on remediation, building, and studies. She could not find the exact number. I did not want the exact number, to be quite honest. I was scared for her to learn the exact number. “What will come of all this, then? What if the water doesn’t rise to the marina and beaches?”

“We’re being patient.”

“Patience runs out.”

“I see my job as ensuring the lake stays accessible to the public, and letting people know that the mining history was, and is important.” She settled her hands, having no more brochures to give me. “There is a little choo-choo along the lake shore, you know.” She handed me yet another brochure, this time for a driving tour around the lake. There was the blue moon rover, Herr Hossfeld, and their offer to “Drive you out of the past and into the future.”

The landscape of a living mine, with its violence and cataclysm, risk and reward, is anything but ordinary. In fact, it is exciting and novel and dangerous. Anything can happen from explosions, environmental protests, fossil discoveries. The idea of this lake, by contrast, with boxy waterfront homes, parking lots, and bike rentals, dies in miasmic predictability. It seems limited to the well-trodden rut of vacation themed romantic comedies, or at its edgiest, the delineated naughtiness of American beer commercials. Except, maybe the promise being sold here is not to be exciting or novel, but to be predictable, family-friendly and wealth-friendly: it will be opposite a mine, in other words.

As I left her office, a friend called and suggested he would stop on his way north to have a look around the area with me. We decided to drive to the nearby Goseck circle before dark, and we loaded up and raced there through fields of drying rapeseed. It wasn’t more than ten miles away, but in that time the air cooled and thunderheads gathered. These were magical moments to arrive at a Neolithic double-henge made of raw pine trunks mounted vertically into the ground.

The circle came fully into view; I saw that this 7,000 year-old wonder was being reconstructed once again so that people can come and ponder the weird first moments when hunter-gatherers became settled farmers compiling knowledge about equinoxes, the sun and stars. What was it like to settle and establish futures linked to just one place? Based on our use of land and resources, I’m not sure we fully grasp that idea even now. The Hostage Valley comes to seem like one close call among many. Imagine if the coal had spread under 180, or 1,800 square miles, instead of eighteen. If other coal districts are any measure, people with machines would still be gouging the earth, farther and farther, moving anything that got in their way.

Reenter Hoss, pointing out across the water at a portion of the peninsula’s bare dirt landscape that looks exactly like a well-made marble cake. “Dead Earth,” he says. “That’s it there, with the whorls of coal dust.” The question just begs clarification, and someone asks before I can. “It’s not toxic, just dead. It will sit until it grows naturally,” Hoss answers.

“How long has it sat?” I ask.

“Since 1982.”

“That’s a pretty long time.”

He tips his head off and juts out his lower lip, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “It is an experiment.” He calls it the UFO landing site because some of the chocolaty coal swirls wind into one circular node, not unlike a weird landing site from outer space, though the whole idea feels like a euphemism, a little personal psychic softening of the very notion of Dead Earth, something he had contributed greatly toward creating.