This book started as an exploration of my father’s and family’s life in a toxic landscape outside Niagara Falls but ended with my search for peace and meaning in my family’s life amid my father’s ghostly disappearance.

I grew up in Lewiston NY, a small village that sits on the Niagara River just ten minutes north of the awe-inspiring and thunderous natural wonder, Niagara Falls.

What was seen as an extraordinary landscape was at the same time seen as a bounteous commodity and a symbol of industrial exploitation. For two centuries the rush of the waterfalls have powered the turbines that provide ever-abundant inexpensive electricity to the United States and Canada. The city and surrounding region thrived as an industrial capital. However, this is no longer the case.

The city has become a ghost town full of radioactive waste dumps and abandoned factories.

One of these waste dumps is located right in my backyard.

Growing up my father, Stuart, would often drive me to school. In the back of our car would be his Geiger counter, an electronic instrument for detecting and measuring ionizing radiation. Every morning when we pulled into my school, the Geiger counter would pulse and click.

This was normal to me.

And it was normal to him.

My father also grew up in Lewiston and attended the same school which is situated in the middle of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW) zone. LOOW is a 7,567-acre site located in and around the towns of Lewiston and Porter, N.Y. 250,000 cubic yards of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project were dumped there between the years 1941-1944.

His childhood home is on Cain Road which is also in the LOOW zone. My father’s life, his existence, was entangled with this toxic landscape. He even made his living from it as a radiological control technician who monitored the radiation contamination in the LOOW zone.

My father’s dad was an iron worker who was exposed to asbestos and died from mesothelioma and diabetes, and his mom died from sarcoma.

They both passed away before my father was 19. The quick, traumatic loss of his parents impacted his life in ways I can’t fathom. I often wondered if it had to do with the toxic environment surrounding them.