We're a thousand feet above the ground in a four-seat Cessna. The engine strains as the pilot banks steeply so the photographer can shoot straight down at the ground. Seneca Lake, a blue band just ahead on the horizon, becomes nearly vertical.

I'm crunched in the back seat, where my seatbelt keeps me from sliding into my fellow passenger. He's Glenn Cooke, executive director of the Seneca County Industrial Development Agency. The aerial photos will be used for the county's industrial marketing. Right now, we're over the Seneca Army Depot, which looms large in the Agency's eye, since they're becoming the new owners. The photographer has his window open, and between the rushing air and the droning engine, we yell to be heard.

"Down there!" shouts Cooke, pointing. "There's a small herd.­ They stand out like sore thumbs." ­

And beautiful thumbs: pure white deer, the Depot's highest-profile residents. They browse in the late-afternoon sun, casting laser-sharp shadows as long as giraffes across the smooth, mowed fields. They're part of the Depot's past, present, and likely its future.

But there's more to the Depot than an army of 300 or so white deer. We're high enough to see the entire 17 square miles --- the size of the Town of Irondequoit --- and low enough to catch details. Mile after mile of single-lane paved roads crisscross the site. Along these roads are evenly-spaced concrete munitions igloos, each about the size of a small Cape Cod-style house. I count 300 rail cars --- over 3 miles of train --- sitting idle on several sidings.

As I try to absorb all the features and nuances of this mostly uninhabited expanse, I think of others who might enjoy this aerial tour: geographers, cross-country skiers, equestrians, Scout troops, hunters, and the 44 passengers on a bus tour I took of this Depot just two weeks earlier.

I'd been lucky to get a bus ticket, because they sold out --- 1800 tickets, 40 tours --- as fast as courtside seats to a March Madness game.

Our yellow school bus was full. As the driver shifted through the gears, our tour guide, Dennis Money, gave us a little background on the Depot.

Here's what I've gleaned from Money and other sources:

In 1941, the US government decided that with World War II raging in Europe, the country needed strategic places to store munitions, since we could be attacked by a foreign power. "Strategic," in this case, meant "remote" --- rural countryside lying 10 miles south of Geneva, midway between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes, in the Town of Romulus.

The government exercised eminent domain, ousting landowners --- mostly farmers --- and giving them just weeks to vacate. Area resident Bob Sorensen is now retired from the Seneca County Highway Department but still works part-time at Wal-Mart in Geneva. He was a young boy in 1941, but he remembers it well.

"My grandmother had to leave her house," he recalls. "She wasn't too happy about it. There were cases where adult children had to come in and talk their parents out of their homes and off their land. Then the Army came in. They ran a steel cable through each house, fastened a steel train rail to one end of it, and hooked the other end to a bulldozer. They ripped the steel rail sideways through the house, which leveled it. Then they burned it. They wouldn't burn a standing house."

He pauses: "There were a lot of unhappy people around here."

The bulk of the Depot was built in 45 days. World War II created a spirit of patriotism and a valiant work ethic. Folks were brought in by bus and train from nearby Geneva, Waterloo, Seneca Falls, and points beyond: 8,000 of them. Crews worked around the clock, seven days a week.

The 17-square-mile tract was enclosed by 24 miles of fence; 124 miles of roadways were surveyed and laid; more than 500 munitions igloos were built along these roads, as were myriad administration buildings, military housing, train depots, and more than a dozen miles of railroad tracks.

When the Depot was completed, the Army went about the business of storing, testing, and distributing munitions.

Stephen Absolom, who lives in nearby Waterloo, is still employed by the Army as the base engineer and environmental coordinator for the Depot as it transitions to new ownership. "At the peak of the Depot's operations, there were 1500 each of military and civilian employees," he says --- this in a county whose entire population is only 34,000, the size of the Town of Brighton.

Absolom was previously chief of engineering and maintenance and director of public works for the Army-operated Depot. "It was a good place to work," he says, "a nice place to raise children and have a family."

White deer were spotted in the Depot during World War II. The commanding officer sent down word that they were to be protected. If anyone shot a white deer, they would be re-assigned to Greenland. These were not albino deer, but deer resulting from a manifestation of the recessive gene for white coloration --- apparently carried by one or more of the brown deer originally confined. Over time, the white deer increased in number. Being fenced in forced them to interbreed and remain on the Depot grounds.

Our tour busload was mostly middle-aged and older; they hailed from as close as just outside the Depot fence --- on East Lake Road --- Canandaigua, and Rochester, and as far away as Washington State.

"I was a kid when they built it and thought it would be fun to see what's in here," said Jackie Roberts, who lives within sight of the Depot on Seneca Lake. "I remember seeing the planes leave fully loaded [with munitions] on Sunday mornings. Always on Sunday mornings. You could tell they were loaded down by how hard they were working to gain altitude."

"I had two brothers in World War II," said Roberts, "so it was heart-wrenching to watch these planes leaving --- you know --- loaded for war."

Bus-tour guide Dennis Money wanted us to see the white deer. Money is executive director of Seneca White Deer, Inc., a small but gung-ho not-for-profit organization pushing for the creation of a Conservation Park and Cold War Touring Museum as the primary use for roughly two-thirds of the Depot's acreage. His group organized the tours, with permission from the Seneca County Industrial Development Agency, to promote the deer and garner public support for their cause.

What might future paying visitors to a Conservation Park and Cold War Touring Museum see?

Apart from the portion that has been developed, they'd see a ghost town. Not of the old west, but of 20th-century war. Instead of blowing tumbleweed, they'd see stationary military fencing, eerie concrete igloos, steel rails, track-side loading platforms, concrete machine-gun turrets, and special-use buildings that can only be described using erratic arm movements.

The 7500-acre conservation area of the Depot slowly passed our tour bus. Punctuating fields and trees were rust, bubbled paint, and decay. Grass grew up out of cracks in the pavement. All of it spoke to the bigness and cost of war, the science fiction-like power of government, and the spiritual vacuum of desertion.

In contrast, beautiful deer - white and brown - and wild turkey peered naively back at us from the side roads we crossed. Money said the tour just before us saw a coyote. (A later tour saw two bucks locking antlers in a fight.)

Depot plant life is rich, creating habitats ranging from open fields to expanses of secondary-growth (wild raspberries, sumac, and hawthorn), to extensive wooded areas of mature softwoods, hardwoods, and evergreens. A 60-acre pond supports four resident pairs of osprey, who subsist solely on fish. Two of their nests could be seen sitting not in trees, but atop utility poles enmeshed with electrical wires.

The bigness of it all was poignantly offset when our bus came upon a tiny cemetery from the village of Kendaia that existed here for over a hundred years pre-Depot. Old as its tilted and weather-worn headstones are, they are still pre-dated by the Iroquois Indians who once lived here, whence came the name Kendaia.

Now the Depot is closed, the Army is gone, and there exists once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in the form of all this available space.

As I got off the tour bus, I could see I wasn't the only one who was impressed by the immense tract of land, but at the same time, almost overwhelmed. All those acres, fences, and igloos, and those miles of service roads and rails to somewhere --- or nowhere?

Opportunity? Or information overload?

Tour bus passenger Jackie Roberts, whom I'd chatted with earlier said, "I never thought about the future of the Depot until I took the tour. The Touring Museum idea would be interesting --- if that would get the Depot back on the tax rolls. It's been off for so long."

Retired nurse Barb Wells is close to the Depot in more ways than one. Her home is adjacent to it, and she's a board member of Seneca White Deer. She's an NRA member and a hunter, and is active in local sportsmen's organizations. She acknowledges that Seneca White Deer has a lofty goal: wanting to preserve a minimum of 7500 acres, the so-called Conservation Area, for the deer.

"Everyone who took the tour was ecstatic," she said after we got off the bus. "But the Industrial Development Agency doesn't believe it's necessary to set aside land for the deer. They say they don't want to hinder the deer, yet they want more industry."

"We're not going to get the backing we need locally," she conceded, "so we're going to have to look for outside help at the state or federal level. To do that, we need to show we have public and legislative support."

Also on the tour was Joan Neville, who was visiting the area from Seattle. "A Cold War Touring Museum would be an honorable way to attest to the validity of war and the insanity of it," she said. She balked at her word "insanity" but said she couldn't come up with a better one. Then she added: "It would be nice to see a working farm --- maybe 1940's style --- like one of those displaced when they built the Depot."

Donna and Hugh Cunningham operate Yale Manor Bed & Breakfast, just down Yale Farm Road from the Depot. When I stopped in, there was a recently installed sign in their front yard that read: "Seneca County Business of the Month." Yale Manor is indeed doing quite a business. They host 800 guests a year, hailing from 36 states and a dozen countries, Donna said.

The white deer are an attraction for her guests, she said, and a herd concentrated in one area would be a nice idea. "But," she said, "it takes money and fencing --- which is also money --- and the White Deer people do not appear to have money or backing or a plan."

"Seneca County is far from wealthy," she said. "In my opinion, the best promise for future development, jobs, and an increased tax base falls to tourism --- already huge in the county --- and alternative fuel sources."

As director of economic development for Seneca County, Glenn Cooke also heads the Seneca County Industrial Development Agency. Back in his office, we face each other without Cessna seatbelts and talk about the Depot's future.

"We approached the Army in 1997 to convey the Depot to the IDA at no cost, "says Cooke. "Our original proposal, written by a consultant, was rejected by the Army as too optimistic." Cooke rewrote it, he said, emphasizing re-use activities, and it was approved in 1999.

The Army has since been conveying the Depot to the IDA, one piece at a time, dependent on environmental cleanup. Observers see total cleanup and transfer taking until 2012.

The purpose of the IDA --- and IDAs in general --- is to create jobs and enhance the economic stability and growth of the region. There's plenty of economic catching up to do in Seneca County. Over the last few years, the area has lost thousands of jobs, says Cooke, "1200 civilian jobs just at the Depot, plus Willard Psychiatric, Guaranteed Parts, Gould Pumps...."

The IDA is proceeding aggressively to overcome those problems. Remember that rural tract of land the Army chose in 1941 for its depot because of its remoteness? Here's the IDA's 21st-century spin on the same region: Seneca County is "within a day's drive of half the population of the US and Canada."

For this and other reasons, the "future" of the Depot is already here. Between the work of Cooke, the IDA, State Senator Michael Nozzolio, Assembly member Brian Kolb, and many others, there has been development success, involving many and varied enterprises.

The IDA sold off the officers' housing tract --- a separate waterfront parcel --- for $2 million to a Massachusetts company that buys and resells closed military properties.

"The homes have already been re-sold to people who have moved into them, relocating here from all over the country," says Cooke. These are all now on the tax rolls.

When he's describing activity on the Depot, Glenn rounds off parcels of land in hundreds of acres. This makes me cringe as I recall my own days on a municipal zoning board when property owners would lobby vehemently for land-use variances down to the 1-foot delineation. Here, however, one acre (43,000 square feet) is tossed around like one seat in an 11,000-seat arena.

Post-Army enterprises are already active on the Depot or are considering it for an operating site. They cover the gamut from human services to firing ranges, not-for-profit groups, heavy industrial, alternative fuels, and the county's public-transit operations.

Five Points Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for violent felons, is already situated on roughly a square mile at the south end of the Depot, creating 600 jobs.

Another parcel, including pre-existing Army buildings at the north end, was leased to KidsPeace for a residential treatment facility for young people, in 2000. KidsPeace invested $15 million in the property, but after four years decided to pull out. The property was transferred to the Rochester-based Hillside Family of Agencies. Hillside spokesperson John Barth said Hillside currently has 300 to 400 employees at the site, providing services to youth from across the state.

"A number of different groups have looked at the Depot," says Cooke. "Land trusts, landfills, a private game farm.... The Cayuga Indians asked to tour it with the possibility of it being part of a land settlement, but they weren't interested."

"They found the white deer amusing," he says.

Coming soon will be an ethanol plant, Empire Bio Fuels, a partnership of local farmers and outside investors, including British business maverick Richard Branson. This will not only generate product, revenue, and a tax base, but will offer area farmers a new outlet for their corn, used in the manufacture of ethanol. Empire Bio Fuels' procurement of 4500 acres of Depot land for growing fuel (willows) will heavily encroach on the Conservation area, to the chagrin of proponents of the proposed Conservation Park and Cold War Touring Museum.

An industrial equipment refurbishing company is up and running in a previously existing building, and a telecommunications company will be converting several of the more sophisticated munitions igloos for hot and cold storage of data for disaster recovery.

Those 300 rail cars we counted from the plane are each paying daily rent.

The National Guard, as well as police and fire organizations, will use a portion of the Depot for Homeland Security-related training.

The IDA's progress to date suggests that Depot-based enterprises could become the county's largest collective employer. In terms of creating employment opportunities, applying a child's logic to the process, the IDA and other leaders are generating about one new job per acre on the Depot. This suggests that without ever touching the 7500-acre conservation area of the 11,000-acre Depot, there is the potential for the creation 3500 jobs, or employment for more than 10 percent of the county's residents.

What about the white deer? "We will do anything and everything to keep the deer," says Cooke. "Nothing we've done or are proposing will in any way affect the deer. The deer thrived when the Army was here, with helicopters, shooting ranges, and explosions."

And the Seneca White Deer people?

Cooke dismisses them as under-funded and inexperienced hobbyists. "If they move in, the Army will stop maintaining the site," he says. "Then if they fail, where will we be? It's not feasible."

What if the White Deer people were funded? What if they or any group came up with the cash to buy the land outright?

"The IDA is looking for more than simply cash," says Cooke. "We're looking for a feasible plan. We're looking for something that will bring in investments, create jobs, a tax base, and be compatible with the property as it is now. We aren't turning over any land to anyone without a plan."

Most of the people who took the Seneca White Deer tour seemed to side with Money. They bought his group's bumper stickers and signed the petition asking that a substantial portion of the Depot be used solely as a White Deer and Cold War Touring Museum.

Money describes the vast Depot land and the white deer as a "national and world treasure." The creation of a White Deer and Cold War Touring Museum is an opportunity that "will never happen again on this planet," he says.

"With all the vacant land and buildings in Seneca County, why not recycle those areas first, versus destroying a world-class treasure?" says Money. "An ethanol plant is being built in Caledonia on 14 acres versus 400 acres at the Depot."

In 1994, as an environmentalist with RG&E, Money launched an initiative to re-introduce peregrine falcons in upstate New York. In 1995 he began a project to re-introduce river otters in the Finger Lakes. Both are smashing successes. They not only re-established falcons and otters, but brought together corporate, community, and governmental entities to work collaboratively. Money is now executive director of Genesee Waterways, an urban recreational boating and rowing center that has flourished under his leadership.

But Money's White Deer group has alienated itself from the decision-makers in Seneca County.

Dave Kaiser, Supervisor for the Town of Romulus (one-third of which is comprised of Depot land) doesn't embrace the Seneca White Deer group's philosophy or marketing strategies. Kaiser provides perhaps the best nutshell explanation on the past, present, and future of the Depot, the deer, and the region as a whole.

"The deer herd," says Kaiser, "is there only because of the Depot. Everyone loves the deer. Everyone's on the same page. The white deer group is a private entity. First of all, it should be municipal or public. Secondly, they're portraying the situation as being, ‘It's either our way or the deer will meet their end.'"

Kaiser is a fourth-generation Seneca County resident whose grandfather farmed land taken over by the depot. "The Army came in 1941, and homes were rolled off, burned, or bulldozed," he says. "Farms and livelihoods were lost. It was traumatic."

"Then the Depot became part of the community," says Kaiser. "This is where people who live here worked. When it closed after all those years, it was another traumatic experience. Again, livelihoods were lost. People had to relocate.

"We're now in a transitional time. Between local government, the IDA, Senator Mike Nozzolio, and Assemblyman Brian Kolb, we are working to bring in the right mix of enterprises in order to avoid a third horrific experience."

In 2007, 66 years after the Army invaded Seneca County, the Depot land sits ripe and ready for anything. The opportunity is not unlike that of someone being presented a gigantic model railroad layout with carte blanche to arrange the buildings, people, and landscape anyway he likes. In this case, he also needs to consider the creation of jobs and tax revenue.

Hopefully, in the process, the white deer --- the only known herd of its kind in the world --- will play a bigger role than casual scenery.