My day started on Monks Mound, a place where the past rises from the earth like a memory refusing to be forgotten. Monks Mound is a temple of dirt, carefully sculpted by human hands a thousand years ago. It’s the largest pre-Columbian earthwork in North America, a remnant of Cahokia — a city that once rivaled medieval London in population and complexity. Standing atop Monks Mound, I tried to imagine the lives that played out below: ceremonies, trade, politics, families gathering around fires, their smoke curling upward like offerings to the sky. The mound is a testament to belief — a structure born not from machinery, but from countless pairs of hands, hauling earth basket by basket to build something monumental. It felt organic, rising naturally from the land, even though its creation had been anything but effortless.
The day ended on another mound — this one far younger and far less sacred. The Weldon Spring Disposal Cell may lack the poetry of Monks Mound, but it tells its own story — a grim counterpoint to the mound I had stood on that morning. Where Monks Mound spoke of community and culture, Weldon Spring whispered of contamination and consequence.
The Weldon Spring Site’s history is as jagged as the broken limestone that covers its surface. In World War II, this ground was home to a munitions plant — a place where TNT and DNT were manufactured with industrial urgency. Later, during the Cold War, the site pivoted to uranium processing — another kind of war effort, this time aimed at splitting the atom rather than unleashing explosions. Both eras left scars. Chemicals seeped into the soil, uranium dust lingered in the air, and the land itself seemed to recoil. When the plant finally closed, the site was left a toxic ruin — a wasteland of radioactive debris, poisoned groundwater, and abandoned buildings too dangerous to salvage. The only solution was burial — an engineered mound designed to entomb the site’s dangerous history beneath layers of rock, clay, and gravel.
The juxtaposition of these two mounds is striking. Monks Mound, for all its size and effort, was built for connection — a gathering place, a focal point for Cahokian life. Weldon Spring, by contrast, is a burial site — a place where humanity’s hubris was carefully packed beneath layers of stone, as if sealing away a dark secret. One was built to invite people upward; the other warns them away.
Yet both are monuments, in their own way. Monks Mound speaks to what people chose to elevate — their beliefs, their society, their place in the cosmos. Weldon Spring is a monument to what we failed to control — our industry, our ambition, and the toxic legacy we sometimes leave behind.
I found myself wondering how the builders of Monks Mound would have viewed the Weldon Spring mound. Would they have recognized the need to bury something so dangerous beneath layers of stone? Or would they have seen it as a failure to live in balance with the world?
Standing atop Weldon Spring at sunset, I looked back across the day and realized both sites shared something vital: they are reminders that what we build — and what we bury — tells the story of who we are. One mound stands as a testament to human aspiration; the other is a warning of the costs when that aspiration slips beyond our control.
The sun faded into the horizon, and I thought of Cahokia’s people, staring out across the floodplain from the top of Monks Mound, and of the engineers at Weldon Spring, carefully designing a mound to hold our mistakes. Both groups, in their own way, were trying to shape the earth — one to connect with the divine, the other to bury the fallout of our progress.