Note: We've been studying and discussing personal essays the last couple months at Write On. Last night we had our first Writing Workout session, where we each spent some time on first drafts of essays. I have always wanted to do an essay or maybe even a book on the different work environments I've experienced. I want to ground these experiences in the history of the business or industry, as way to expand the relevance. This is a start of a segmented essay about my time spent at a local factory.
Illinois Route 2 runs north to south hugging the Rock River in central northern Illinois from its origin in Sterling then running northeast to Dixon and Oregon and Byron to Rockford before shooting straight north to the Wisconsin border. Between Sterling and Dixon is a four-lane, 12-mile stretch, featuring a golf course, crop land, a community college, a trailer park, and a smattering of houses and subdivisions. I meet this stretch each morning just south of Dixon at the crest of hill where the speed limit descends from 65 to 40 and finally 30 within city limits.
One morning recently, while on the way to my current gig in my orange Jeep Renegade with some rock and roll song blaring, the mangled remains of a deer appeared in the median, likely struck the previous night by some vehicle still cruising near the high end of the speed limits. There were probably excited calls made by the driver, to family, maybe to the police, or a wrecker, to their insurance agent. Maybe the car was drivable. Maybe not. Life for that person was temporarily complicated.
Life for that deer was smacked from its body. Its limbs were strewn like the discarded toys of some toddler atop a torso twisted like a broken slinky. Its blood splattered, turning the blacktop into some sort of bleak tapestry.
And I thought of two deer from almost twenty years earlier. A doe and her fawn, wandering across the back of the parking lot at National Manufacturing at one in the morning. Their sleek bodies propped on those twig legs. The mother leading, her head swiveling back every few moments to make sure her offspring was following close enough.
I was on break – from college for the summer and from work as part of the third shift replenishing crew for the shipping department of the hardware manufacturer. There were five or six of us on the crew, including my best friend, Jake. We were sitting on the tailgates of our pickup trucks, like a country song, eating snacks and maybe mumbling about things that no longer matter.
I was nineteen, filled with angst and hormones and caffeine, watching the most basic of instincts enacted across the lot. Animals moving under the orange glare of parking lot lights, when most humans were asleep. Searching for food, for water, for shelter. A mother watching over her child. A child tethered to its parent, grasping tightly while reaching away. I don’t remember anything else that was running between my ears. I just knew I’d remember that moment. A man at rest watching the natural movements of nature.
After passing the destroyed body of the deer twenty years later, I wondered if that animal was a descendant of those two. It’s not even 10 miles as the crow flies from National parking lot along Route 30 east of Rock Falls to that place on Route 2 south of Dixon. Certainly, deer herds travel that far, and they are territorial enough, that it’s possible that the deer which met such a violent end shared a strand or two of DNA with the two from that serene memory of mine.
It’s a twenty-plus year gap between these episodes of creation and destruction. Twenty years and half of a lifetime.
***
National Manufacturing was born in October of 1901, when three men bought a two-story wagon factory in Sterling. By the end of the month they had named their business, one that would remain in the area known as the Sauk Valley for 110 years.
In 1901, the United States was comprised of about 76 million people, and the world’s population was 1.6 billion. The country was reeling from the assassination of President William McKinley in September. He was the third president killed in office since the end of the Civil War, and with his death, the secret service was born and Teddy Roosevelt assumed power.
Workers across the country were fighting for better pay. Women wanted to vote. And nobody knew that in the forty years to follow there would be two world wars sandwiched around a crippling economic depression.
***
I wasn’t even a week out of high school when I shuffled bleary-eyed at 6 AM for my first shift as part of the 100th anniversary paint crew in the Summer of 2000. I likely wore jeans, some T-shirt, and a pair of steel-toed work boots.
Jake’s mom worked in the accounting department at National, and that’s how we landed the gig, which paid pretty well for a couple of eighteen-year-old kids. Never hurts to know someone. It’s probably why we were also assigned together to paint the waste treatment tanks first at the Sterling plant and then the Rock Falls plant. Sterling and Rock Falls are twin cities separated by the Rock River and during the 1900s became one of the major steel producers in the country. That’s over now, of course, gone the way of two-story wagon factories, thriving family-owned businesses, and William McKinley.
The waste treatment plant in Sterling was separated from the production plant by a row of parking and a lane to get in and out. The treatment plant was located along a river.
We clocked in just inside the production plant and met our first supervisor there. His name was Chris, a middle-aged man who carried a Chicago Tribune under his arm and a frown on his face. He led us toward the treatment plant, stopping at a bench just outside of the building where two men were sitting. The interaction was brief, and I can’t picture what either man looked like, but I remember what happened.
One man stood up, dangling something from his hand. A snack maybe. Or perhaps a cigarette, and he introduced the man next to him in this way.
“This is the resident fag,” he said. Then he threw whatever was in his hand several feet away, and told the man to go get it. The other man did, his shoulders slumped as he slinked toward it like a trained dog. “Just look at him.”
Chris rolled his eyes, and we kept moving.
The waste treatment building was a metal shed with huge green tanks with metal stairs and cat walks running between them. Chris continued past them, between two tanks on the ground level that led to his office, which consisted of a desk with a light and a window that looked over the river. He dropped into his seat, handing each of us a section of the newspaper.
“We don’t do anything out here until after 9.”
Within ten minutes, we witnessed pretty much everything we
were told not to do by Human Resources at our orientation.
