Bird and Son

I was expected up in Ed's office, so I marched upstairs. He came to his office door himself to show me in. Not a good sign. His office was large and well-appointed. There was a large oil painting of his father behind the big oaken desk and through the massive windows I got a birds-eye view of the entire plant.

"Jake, I have bad news," he said, "Bird and Son is closing its doors today."

I couldn't speak.

"We lost 20 million dollars last year," he said to me, "We can't do this anymore. The industry is changing. Cheap paper from down south has really got us behind the eight ball."

"How much of the plant will be affected?" I asked.

"All of it," he said quietly.

Twenty seven years I worked at that mill. I loved that place. When truckloads of product pulled out I felt proud -- all those products with our logo on them. We had been the industry standard for over 100 years. But no more. The rest was anti-climax. Ed stood on a large box in the warehouse. He was shaking as he explained the situation. No one said a word. All the machines that kept a factory alive were all still working and those were the only sounds now. I couldn't remember another time when I was in this factory without hearing the pounding of tools, the swearing of workmen, the sound of production. Now all I could hear was the death rattle of a dying factory.

I was the one assigned to shut it all down. The rollers were still taking up new paper. Meters on every wall monitored every stage. Just two hours ago it would have been a firing offense to interrupt operation and yet here I was pulling the switches to power it down. The pumps stopped. The rollers stopped. The big dryers and fans stopped. The only sound was of dripping water. Alarm lights were tripping all over the plant. The paper on the line was ruined. I cried like a baby.

That was twenty years ago. When the mill died, the town died too. There are still rows of empty and dusty storefronts lining the streets across from the mill ruins. Property values collapsed, housing was abandoned. A chain link fence rings the entire park. Looters have gone through the empty buildings many times. The parking lots are filled with piles of demolition waste and old tires. Homeless drunks live inside now. The walls are covered with graffiti.

Someday someone will torch the place. That’s what happens to old mills. No one sees the value of what they once were. There won’t be any books about how this place once provided a community with its livelihood. There’s no future for this place and no future for people like me either. Things are so different now. Plants are made of corrugated tin or cinderblock, thrown up in a few weeks, torn down on a whim. Companies come and companies go but the employees don’t appreciate how their life and their happiness can come from doing the work and not just the work, but in the life they make there, even on the bad days when the politics and the cheapness make it hard to come in. In the end, however, when they look back, they remember the friendships they made and the privilege of accomplishing something that mattered.