In the middle of October, 2006, the Grade Seven students at Brewer Middle School took a field trip to a building that they had seen from a distance for most of their lives, but had never visited up close. The tour guides were various city officials and the future developers of the old paper mill. It was raining quite hard and the students were poorly equipped with flashlight, which added to the overall effect of the visit. What follows are the essays, as written, by roughly half of the students. The essays are presented as written by the students, hoping to preserve their turns of phrase, their usages and their idiosyncrasies as writers.

Eric Arnold
As we filed out of the bus, feeling like an army of explorers with the excitement of navigating the old skeleton of one of Brewers largest job providers, we walked in line, listening to the gravel crunching under our shoes as we survived the mill.  It was hard to imagine that this monstrous contraption could at one time be a fully functional paper mill.  The guides led us to the gaping entrance, looking completely immersed in being a shut up, and dysfunctional building.  The entrance that we used was broken apart, with a rusting steel ramp leading the way, almost trying to act as a red carpet.

The interior was a mess, broken boxes littered the floor, electric conducts with broken wires that ran from ceiling to floor that once carried hundreds of volts of electricity were now rusting. As we passed walls with crumbling concrete, my idea of refurbishing the mill slowly diminished. As we passed through the 336,000 square feet of rooms, we saw the empty gaping hole that once held a paper machine.  It was hard to imagine that such a huge animal could be removed with such swiftness.  As I peered into the hole, I saw huge chunks of iron laced concrete, exposed PVC pipes snaking out of the broken ceiling, spewing water at their severed ends.  As we made our way down the narrow stairs to the fallout shelter, shadows lurked upon shadows, voices were oily slick, and water covered the flooded, grotesque floor. I wondered what the fallout shelter would be.  A play room?  A dance floor?  A shopping mall? What could it be? We started to move out of the basement when everything suddenly went quiet. Was that a ghost? No, just a contraption of my imagination. We headed back up the metal stairs and left that part of the mill. As we got outside it was raining again. The clouds looked like a large iris. A large eye crying? 

The class and reporters headed into the next and last building, the power plant. My eyes adjusted to the dark interior. Water lay in puddles, which were distributed all over the floor. In the distance, I saw the vague outlines of heavy electric machinery. Twisted hulks of wires looked like slim long shadows, ready to pounce. Everyone gathered around a metal cart, for which a man stood, giving a presentation about what will happen to the mill, he also wanted to know what we thought should happen to the mill. After his speech we filed out of the room in a loose formation, and headed for the buses. As I walked, I looked back at the mill wondering how much money it brought to the region, how much it would cost to transform it into a mall, an apartment complex, or a park. I also wondered how many chemicals had been dumped into the area behind the mill. How much would it cost to clean the area up and how many jobs would the future mall bring if it was built. Slowly, we walked into the bus and found are seats. Would this be a burden to the city of Brewer, or a success?

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