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.
