Hoss was qualified to drive all manner and size of excavator and did so for thirty-seven years. “The bigger, the better.” He begins telling me about the bucket lifter and excavators brought from Leipzig and as far away as Russia. “They were huge, took two men to start. You’d go up a set of stairs, then over catwalks to a control room with a leather chair in the middle. A leather chair,” he repeats. “There was basically nothing else in this room. It had two joysticks. Those controls did so much.” Hoss’s inventory of SRs and ES models and cubic meters per hour powers on with the slow and unstoppable torque of an excavator and I loose him. We all listen to him talk for a while, a long while as the twinkle in his eyes comes alive. Hoss is indeed that guy whose vocation and values and historical moment aligned. He can look at an enormous barren pile of dirt and feel pride for having helped create it. He looks up after a minute and says, “I don’t know what it was I wanted to say now.” Someone says it is fine, that we enjoyed listening all the same.

What is worse, English is the language of indignant environmentalism; America the home of both parochial Arcadianism and the crime of mountain top removal.

In contrast to Dead Earth is the vineyard. We stop for a tasting. At the moment it is not much of anything except a ridiculously steep hill planted in overjoyed grape vines. Far below, a heard of organic beef cattle sleep in the shadeless paddock. Hoss has been talking with the vintner and cattle man about feed. There seems to be some disagreement. The cattleman says that he has to drive through the snow to feed them every two days in winter, otherwise they will smell the feed of the local swine mills and break the electric fence and go off on their own. “Keep them happy,” he says, “or else.” I see a lesson in this.

Hoss pulls me aside. He is telling me about an unusual technique of mining conducted here for a period of three years. Right under our feet. “It was incredibly dangerous,” he said, “but much more cost effective than pit mining here. We had stacked up too much overburden atop this coal.” They cut under the hill with excavators and went some hundreds of yards laterally under the hill without shoring or bracing the ceiling. “People came from Poland, Czechoslovakia, all over, just to see what we were doing.” Gently, I asked why. “Because it was amazing, what we did.” When the seam was exhausted they just let the hill collapse. “It was a life’s work. It was amazing.”

I ask Hoss what chances he gives the lake. “100%,” he says, repeating himself a few times. “It has to.” I call him out finally on this, his favorite rhetorical imperative. “Why does it have to work? I doesn’t have to work at all. And it isn’t. Right?”

“You have to imagine.” He looked out over the hole he had created and at the water about which he seemed so magnanimously confident. “Wine.” He gestured at our feet. He listed activities as if to convince me through some glorious, spectral gestalt. “Nature preserve. Sun. Boats. Swimming. People will love this. Give it time.”

“Was it a mistake promising 2010 exactly?”

“2011, then.”

“Do you think people will come abroad to stay here?”

“We don’t need all that. But sure. Give it time.”

When I went about researching and interviewing around this topic, I thought, This is the age of Dubai and Three Gorges; even now in Germany whole villages are being razed, their residents resettled for the Garzweiler and Hambacher mines. Why write such a piece? What is worse, English is the language of indignant environmentalism; America the home of both parochial Arcadianism and the crime of mountain top removal. The Hostage Valley not only exemplifies banal twentieth-century extraction projects of a somewhat more common immensity than Three Gorges, it also suggests projects that try to liberate and redeem a place from what was at times an awful history. Germany is roughly the size of Montana, but with eighty-two instead of only one million people. As Hoss would himself say, they have to reuse the land, and it has to work. Limits, in other words, have not only been recognized but actively exploited. Given that this area is not Germany’s richest, those who find their own vacation options limited will certainly develop a relationship to the Hostage Valley. But whether or not a great deal of income is generated for local businesses is, in this light, almost beside the fact. An environmental catastrophe has been recognized and systematically redressed. Habitat is and continues to be rehabilitated for fish and waterfowl. Foresight and the always complex and often ineffective mechanisms of government, regulation and private investment got this far. Why not further?

We round the lake on our way to the Harbor Days celebration, the one-time climax of my planned visit to a filled and flourishing Hostage Valley Lake. By now it is raining pretty hard and there are very few people in sight. At least the heat has broken. The tour group agrees to retire to a local bar for supper and beer, but I have to be going. In the large blue box, they deliver me directly to the door of the Braunsbedra train station. Twenty abandoned tracks, once dedicated to coal trains running on standing times around the clock, stretch out to a scrubby tree line. The station itself is like no other I have seen in Germany. It is in severe disrepair, crumbling in fact, with no clock, no ticket machine. Some youth, nameless to me as the first person to put a spade tip into coal 300 years ago, has spray painted ZUKUMFT on the back of the crumbling train station. The word for future is “Zukunft,” with an “n”. “Zukumft” is not a word and it never will be. Though anyone who comes to see this, anyone who understands Germany’s often particular provincial ways, will know what he meant. Six out of seven letters isn’t too bad.