Free Weeds in Bloom by Robert Newton Peck Page B

was there and saw it all.
    The scar on his face was wet and shining, but inside Buck Dillard perhaps a deeper scar had healed.

Paper
    M ILLS .
    You name almost any kind of a mill and I can tell you, in detail, what working in such a place is like.
    If you ever go touring in Vermont or the Adirondacks and arrive at a certain town where most of the menfolks (and even some of the women) are missing fingers, you can wager you’re in a paper mill town. Now I can’t say for sure that a paper mill is the worst place on earth to work, but it has just got to be rotten close. Especially if it’s some old relic of a man-killer that should have been torn to the ground half a century ago.
    In a paper mill, there are massive machines, chemicals, steam, and the dispositions of some of the foremen, whose lives are every mite as miserable as those of us in the crews.
    A paper mill is noise, wet, heat, danger.
    Add to this the raw reality that there’s no chance to escape. For almost all of the men and women, it’s a way of life. And, to paraphrase the
Porgy and Bess
ballad, the living
ain’t
easy.
    Let’s presume that you are intelligent and, if so, you have an inquiring mind. Then you are in for an industrial treat to visit a papermaking mill, take the guided tour that almost any congenial management will offer, and walk through the place. One end to the other.
    Paper is basically two things. Wood and water.
    I know the papermaking process because, as a lad, I cut my teeth on a Warren Winder. Personally, I have filled every job you can name in an old-fashioned paper mill, from woodhook to freight gang. I have unloaded soda ash in the chemical mill and helped to handle the raw clay. They gave us respirators to cover our noses and mouths, but they weren’t worth a hoot. We inhaled the white dust with every breath. Slow death. Coal miners die from black lung. Our lungs were dying white.
    Ask any worker who’s survived a paper mill about lancing a digester in the chemical mill, the section of the mill that prepares raw wood pulp to become eventual paper. I worked digesters all summer one time. My work partner was a man whosename was Gates. In his day he had been an excellent athlete.
    In his day.
    By the time he turned thirty, he appeared middle-aged. At forty, old.
    Unloading soda ash or clay and stoking a digester (a cooker that reduces tiny pieces of wood to loose fibers) are not the worst mill jobs.
    The worst is the chipper room.
    Logs arrive, usually by railroad but often locally by truck, and are unloaded by woodhooks (a nickname for mill lumbermen) onto conveyor belts, and then into barkers. There are two kinds: a stream barker fires jets of water with incredible pressure to peel off the bark; a drum barker is a slowly rotating cylinder, ten or twelve feet in diameter, through which the loose logs are sent, pounded, and relieved of their hide.
    From there to a chipper room.
    One by one, the chipper-room operator must feed large logs (weighing sometimes hundreds of pounds) into the chipper blades, which are capable of reducing these spruce monsters into wood fragments the size of a poker chip.
    In seconds.
    The noise is intense.
    There’s only one noise comparable, that of a severe Florida hurricane.
    Chipper-room noise has a way of beating and pounding and hammering a man into submission, robbing him of awareness. Finally he tunes out, hearing only the chipper. In a few years he will hear nothing at all, not even the voices of his wife and his children.
    Paper mills shut down only on Sunday. During the six-day week, they run all day and all night. On shifts. If your relief man doesn’t show up (a lot don’t), you are, by union rule, obligated to remain on the job for a second shift.
    This is necessary. The mill has to run.
    But after hours and hours of deafening chipper-room noise, during which you actually do become deaf in self-defense, the extra shift leaves you an unfeeling, uncaring, unhearing mute. After work, the