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The days of smoke and anger.
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The days of smoke and anger. |
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RSWells Member Elite
since 2001-06-17
Posts 2533
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It was walking indoors to outdoors, so cavernous was the foundry where locomotives were made. Its drear indecernable depths stayed unfocused in what can only be described as dark rust noncoloration. The immensity of its dusky dimensions given hazy focus by varying degrees of shaded towering poles, tubes, tracks,ladders and long massive mould moving roll lines leading from colossal furnaces. Ceilinged floodlights dappled at measured distances from 80 feet up to the floor below where rail cars trained through at one end filled with scrap metal to be placed in the furnaces which yawned open a la packman to scarf the steel shards, close its halved head and heat near hades in the intensity required to liquify its contents. Add the deafening din, incessant smoke, acrid smell, hard hatted, hard men in steel toed boots and clothes covered as everything else, in sweat and the byproduct of building big somethings from seemingly useless nothings and you look around for a red robed Dante taking notes. Hey, I just wanted a job. Bored from laying up in a mid sized college town where teachers were taught. The five to one ratio of women over men was getting old and besides it was summer, their daddys wouldn't be footing the bill for a few months for rent, food, beer and weed while I lay around lazy, lothario, lush, lusting one 19 year old after another. I found the wiry foreman/metalurgist Mr. Greene and he hired me because I was white. I knew soon enough that he ran against the grain of the union by giving me one of the most plumb jobs in the mill, that of crane operator. Two tracks ran overhead the length of the foundry where cabs with controls slid back and forth lowering hooks to assist in moving the heaviest of equipment, the huge magnets which moved the metal from open rail cars to furnace and lowered ladles for the tilting behemoths to gush the blinding rivers into. One moved swiftly before the cargo hardened to hold over the mould precisly so the asbestos clad floor workers could open the spigots guiding the pour into the moulds on the line. One drop onto the worker and you'd burn a hole right through him. It was a fifty foot steel ladder up to the crane wher Curly would teach me the job. Curly was one of 21 children and from his looks his parents were related before marriage. He educated me to the fact that everyone resented my placement ahead of their seniority in the crane. Sometimes a few hours went by when you weren't needed. Up and out of sight you were out of mind as well and read the paper or joined the two cranes together to B.S. with the other craneman or smoke a joint. A few days in I turned my head and heard a ghoulish laugh escape Curly. He had "accidently" allowed a thirty pound hook to slip off its load and hit the foreman Green in the head. I saw Green on his knees and then not at all, for weeks. The resentment built against me from the mostly minority union floor workers. In those days I took crap from no one and I only had to make two examples to set things straight. Some of the ladles were a bowled out ten feet deep. With buckets that full of molten metal some would dry and cake on the sides, hardening. The larger of the workers would climb in them and chip out the shards with hammer and chisel. We weren't supposed to but we'd lower our hooks where they'd affix them to chains around the metal and climb out. We'd then goose the strips from the sides of the ladle. Once, a huge black man 6'6" with hands like hams started cursing me while tying a chain around a stubborn strip. I didn't give him a chance to climb out as I started to tug up at the metal. The entire ladle started to rise off the ground and with the possibilty of being cleaved in two by the sudden ripping of the metal his eyes grew to comic proportions. I lowered him down and had no more trouble with him. Another time an Italian fella was cursing me and laughing at my expense with a Puerto Rican. I chewed on it for awhile and during a break noticed in the local paper an aritcle of interest. I slammed the paper on my hook and lowered it into the midst of three of the offending workers and watched as they peeled it off and read the byline "Pipe Falls From Crane Kills Two". I never had another problem in the mill. Hard places will eat you up if you dwell there. Hard men only know harder men in such surroundings and friendship is measured in trusting that those around you are tough enough to do the job. Green was not young nor large and he came back, who was I to wither? |
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| © Copyright 2001 Richard S. Wells jr. - All Rights Reserved | |||
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Janet Marie Member Laureate
since 2000-01-22
Posts 18554 |
amazing imagery and detail Richard, as well as taking the reader to a place and time few will ever experience. The immensity of it all is hard to fathom. very well done poet sir |
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