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Lochdam Lake — known to the townsfolk simply as the Mirror — lies in the valley directly south of Lochdam, and the last of the town's people are gathered along its shore. Poisoned by a century of runoff from the mine and the old munitions plant, its surface has lain so still, and so dead, for so long that it reflects nothing but the sky.
The lake was once far larger and full of life. When the Camber Dam tamed the river in 1907, the water fell still, and the waste that trickled down from the mine had nowhere left to go — it gathered in the depths. By the 1930s the fish were fewer and tasted wrong; swimmers came home with rashes on their skin and a burning in their eyes; and where the mine creek met the lake, the water had taken on an orange stain. Fishing and bathing were forbidden.
The war made it worse. From 1942 the ammunition plant added its own poisons — spent explosive, copper dust, lead — and the trees along the shore withered while the animals drew higher into the hills. By the end of that decade the lake had become a dead water: its surface blank and so unnaturally still that it no longer reflected anything but the sky. When the university's chemists finally tested it, the heavy metals were found to be far above anything a town should live beside.
Seventy years on, the chemicals still sit in the southern lake. A thick belt of reeds has grown along the banks, where nothing stirs beneath the surface. In the worst years the fish that were pulled up came with curved spines, skin sores, and missing eyes — and then, in time, they came up no more. Even now the occasional deer or bird is born wrong, the inheritance of grandparents that stayed when the water was at its most poisonous.
The lake's oldest legend is older than its poison. Between 1885 and 1890, before the dam, seven men drowned in the river that ran through Blue Rock — all walking home late from the mine, found with their lungs full of river water. People began to say that an old man rose from the water on dark nights and dragged them under with a hook, and they called him the Watermann. When Edgar Camber built his dam in 1907 and the river shrank to a trickle, the drownings stopped. But the oldest in town still believe the Watermann is down there yet, waiting for the water to rise. It is not the only thing the lake is said to have swallowed: in 1899 the dead of a train wreck high in the mountains were carried down the river and into these same waters.
Lochdam Town · Camber House · Vanguard Mine