Never the Same #76 End of an Era

An end of an era not only for Kirk, the drywall plant where he worked closed for good.

 

Cue: “End of the Line”  https://youtu.be/KIvME8CCpxA?si=QMrEiRrZh5JR8C_P

 

            There Kirk was, on the brink of a jobless existence. He had those couple weeks of laboring at the plant getting a lower wage, after that, unemployment remained his only future considering the economy and his prior history of mostly unsuccessful job seeking. The only thing Kirk dreaded were the requirements to search and apply for employment on a regular basis to be eligible for said unemployment money. Fat chance of anyone hiring him with the present rotten economy with over forty percent of eligible workers not finding work. Kirk, who had searched for jobs on only three different occasions definitely wasn’t very good at selling himself and advocating his employment attributes.  Though he did consider that, even though mechanically trained, his time working at the plant was more of a positive experience while his work at the dealership as a grease monkey (more or less) was less than stellar and rewarding. 

            And so, the end of a very long era had ended at the moderately sized drywall manufacturing plant. The factory was built in 1920 by the Bestwall Gypsum Products Company which ran it until Georgia-Pacific purchased it in 1965. Now, on that particular Friday afternoon the plant had gone quiet. Eerily silent. Most of the older workers who had hung on to the bitter end just milled around that afternoon waiting for the final whistle to blow. When it did, after punching out for the last time, the majority of them dragged their feet to their vehicles to drive home from the plant for the ultimate instance. A small group of workers, Kirk included, felt their pain of no work, no pay, but he wasn’t dragging out the door, and no one seemed to notice, no cared about the young man’s future plans. He would be back on Monday, and besides, he had a stock car to build.

            Unfazed, Kirk on that particular singular Friday returned to cutting and welding on his car. With the basic square frame of a roll cage made of pipe he knew that he still had a long way to go. The cage had the required eight-point contact with the frame, and despite this and being only spot welded a person could lean hard against it and collapse it.  Kirk wasn’t one to permanently weld anything prematurely and this applied to the cage until he was really sure that it was completely, 100 percent correct. Well, he and Jon double checked the position which made it triple checked by Kirk. This checking was against the engine position which was important, but Kirk was more concerned about how the body roof and pillars covered the cage which it did perfectly.

            On the following Monday, Kirk drove to work as he had every weekday for over a year. Not a bad weather day, cool and a few clouds, but he knew this day, and these two weeks were differently from ll the work days of the previously year. He pulled into the plant’s driveway and the appearance couldn’t be more night and day than last week. The front office parking lot had only two cars in it while the worker lot had three cars. Usually, Kirk had to jostle for a parking space but on this dissimilar day, he could park his pink van on the closest row near the corner. A young guy, maybe Kirk’s age strolled toward the entrance to the main plant.

            Kirk had to pause to take in his impression of a seemingly surreal situation. The plant seemed abandoned which it was. Like a ghost town, a cemetery?  No smoke rising, no steam spewing, no noise, no workers moving around, no trucks, no forklifts coming and going. Literally, the plant stood dead, quiet, silent.

            Getting out, Kirk scanned about taking it all in wondering what they were going to do for two weeks. He strolled to the entrance door, basically a corrugated sheet metal rectangle on hinges. He stepped inside feeling the residual warmth of the kilns that had been shut down three days prior on Friday. Robert the boss and that guy Kirk saw walk in were the only ones there. Kirk wasn’t one to introduce himself, but he said “mornin’” to the two. He punched his time card. The slotted panel was nearly empty except for six cards. He assumed that there’d be six workers.

            Robert spoke up, “Awfully quiet isn’t it? What a change from just a couple days ago”

            The guy said, “yeah, kinda’ weird in here ain’t it?”

            Kirk just nodded to them and turned around to face the kilns. He hoped and prayed that he wasn’t going have to be the one to clean them out. That was the first thing he had to do when he began working there. Kirk had been terrified crawling in the tiny door into the horrendously hot kiln. He never thought of himself being claustrophobic, but then again, he never had to test his reaction to extremely tight, hot and dark spaces. All he thought of at that time was that he’d be forgotten about in there, the door would be closed and they would turn the oil-fired furnaces on and he’d become an instant crispy critter. Embarrassingly to admit, he thought about the folk tale of Hansel and Gretel pushing the witch into the oven meant to cook them. To say the least, he didn’t want to go inside the kilns again!

            After the other four guys, which Kirk had seen in the plant but never spoke to, showed up and punched in, Robert addressed them telling them that he was going to assign jobs to them as pairs. Right off the bat, Robert told the newest two guys that they were going to clean out the kilns. Kirk breathed a sigh of relief. He couldn’t think of anything they might have to do as bad as that job. Would he be right?

            Much to his relief, Robert assigned Kirk and his new co-worker, Ron, the job of sweeping the warehouse seeing that’s where Kirk worked. The warehouse, the entire warehouse. Kirk groaned a little inside knowing the expanse and the condition of the floor. Robert added that they needed to put the unused dunnage in the dumpster along with cleaning up the end of the production line where they picked up the drywall as it came off the line. Kirk had a preconceived notion that this assignment would take them more than an entire day. Without a shared word, Kirk and Ron wandered over to the warehouse. Kirk knew they had brooms and shovels at the warehouse though when he worked there, they didn’t use them all that much when moving stacks of drywall around.

            A few words about dunnage. Dunnage is the label for any type of material used to hold objects, specifically cargo, off the transport deck or between layers of cargo. Most often dunnage goes under cargo during transportation whether via ground, sea or air. Pallets could be described as dunnage. In Kirk’s realm, particularly at the drywall plant, dunnage was made from drywall to support drywall off the floor and between stacks of twelve doubled drywall. Heavy stuff. Why mention this you ask? Kirk learned an art that he would never, ever use anywhere else. Stan the warehouse team leader showed Kirk how to make dunnage out of partial drywall sheets taken from damaged sheets.

            Using a wooden two by four board four feet long, which is the width of drywall, Kirk used a carpenter knife to scribe the drywall along the board. Flipping the board over and aligning the board with the scribe on the other side, he scribed again. Flipping the board over and over, which was a bit unwieldy, until six scribes were made. The last one being scribed on both sides and broken off. The fun part came from snapping the drywall at the scribes first one side than the other until he ended up with neat four inch wide and high four-foot-long dunnage. It was kind of tedious, but soon he made the scribes without the board while holding the drywall on edge. Quick and easy once he learned how. Like said earlier, a skill that couldn’t be used anywhere else!

            Anyway, Kirk and Ron “Ronny” got to work. Ronny seemed to need a little guidance upon entering the warehouse, he seemed overwhelmed by the sheer expanse of it. Kirk took in the quietness, the echoic effect, and that there were still plenty of stacks of wallboard along the walls, two deep in fact.  Kirk suggested they work from the far end of the south warehouse seeing it was furthest from the production line. Ron said he needed to “take a break” and get a wheelbarrow. Kirk didn’t exactly like the sound of that, but who was he to say anything? So Kirk got to sweeping like a madman while Ron departed. Kirk, as he swept, saw the streaks of chalk-like marks on the floor from broken wall boards along with the white tire prints of the forklift. He could almost smell the propane exhaust and growl of the forklift engine as it ran up and down the lengths of the warehouse.

            Kirk began wondering what happened to Ron when he didn’t return in fifteen minutes, then twenty minutes, and then twenty-five went by, then thirty minutes, not that he paid any attention to the time. Kirk started to boil under the collar. Ron eventually returned with the wheel barrow adding a bouncy gambol to his step.

            “What happened, did you get lost? Kirk asked, with an caustic edge to his voice while keeping his head down to his labors.

            Ron’s rejoinder is unprintable here in this family friendly story.

            Kirk, now combat sweeping with heavy vigor and pent-up anger, but of course, he noticed right away that Ron didn’t have a broom, so without Kirk’s instruction Ron figured out that he had to go all the way back down the length of the warehouse to get one, which, incidentally stood against the wall right where he came through from the main plant.       

            As Ron finally joined Kirk in sweeping there wasn’t much speaking between the young guys. Kirk thought he might blurt something out that he’d regret so he concentrated on his sweeping. There were pieces of dunnage lying between the stacks of wallboard, so Kirk pulled them out and threw them into the wheelbarrow and then swept out the gap between the stacks that was just wide enough to walk through.  He thought that his example might suggest to Ron to do the same who swept on the other side of the building, but no, Ron didn’t bite. Probably because Robert the boss complimented Kirk, he had the perter determination to do a really good job and if his partner, namely Ron, didn’t follow suit it would reflect poorly on Kirk.

            Wheeling the wheelbarrow over to where Ron slowly swept, Kirk pointed out the dunnage that Ron had bypassed.

            “Ummmm,” Kirk non-verbally got Ron’s attention. “Robert said we need to get rid of all this dunnage.”

            Ron stopped and leaned on his broom. “Does this work really matter? They gotta’ get all this board out of here and they’ll make a mess. So this is a total waste of time.”

            Kirk was taken aback and took a moment to straighten it out in his head. “Maybe,” he said, not knowing what to say for a few more moments. “Well, he wanted it done. Sooooo, we should do it like he wanted.” Kirk shrugged for his own edification.

            With a low-throated humph, Ron went back down his row of stacks, grabbed the dunnage and threw it in the wheelbarrow with such force the wheel barrow almost tipped over if he hadn’t grabbed it in time. They pressed on one guy obviously working harder than the other.

            After a break, then lunch and another afternoon break where Ron got lost again, they ended the day with the south warehouse nearly done. Kirk felt sore and calluses were beginning to form on his fingers. He felt that he had labored the hardest this one day than any other day he had worked at the plant. Maybe because he labored with lingering irritation. He thought they’d been done with the one if Ron had worked a little harder and didn’t disappear at times.  At the time clock, Robert took Kirk aside after the other men had departed.

            “How’d Ron work out for you, over in the warehouse?” Robert asked.

            “Well,” Kirk stalled. “Okay.”

            “I can tell what you’re not saying. I was a little afraid that Ron might not work too hard, but I thought maybe he’d be inspired by your work ethic.”

            Kirk didn’t want anyone to get into trouble. “We got most of the south warehouse done.”

            “I seen it, looks good. Tell you the truth, I couldn’t find many volunteers for these two weeks and finally settled on Ron. Would you rather work with someone else, tomorrow?”

            Kirk, a bit muddled and tired, wanted to say yes, but he said, “no, it was okay with Ron.” 

            “All right, but if you have other thoughts tomorrow, just let me know.”

            “Okay, I will.”

            That evening, Kirk really wanted to get some fabrication and welding done on his stock car, but he felt tired out from all the sweeping. He had never swept so much in one day and his shoulders ached and his grip hurt like calluses would soon appear despite him wearing work gloves. Nevertheless, he went out to the garage just to look at the bones of his car’s roll cage. Yeah, it was started, but there was so much more to do. Sometimes a guy just needs to dream about the final product, but Kirk had a hard time to see it with soreness and an achy head. Without picking up the measuring tape, torch, or welding lead, he called it a night to watch tv.

            The next day went better for Kirk working with Ron, so much in fact that he wondered if Robert had a ‘talk’ with Ron. On that second day of sweeping, they finished the south warehouse before lunch and got halfway through the north warehouse with all the dunnage disposed of in the dumpster. The words of Ron about being a waste of time the day prior reran in Kirk’s mind so much he began thinking that perhaps it truly was a waste. Nevertheless, they pressed on with a steady advance on getting done. With the end of the job approaching, Kirk had to remember that this place and position remained his most prestigious and fulfilling job he held in the plant after the previous three positions. Handling the finished drywall product and stacking it felt like an important operation even though at times it got a little boring. But the off times there was the cannons to fire off tennis balls down the length of the warehouse and other time killing activities. He went on to the next laborer job without thinking about it or looking back.

            Meanwhile that evening, the stock car project called to him after not touching it for a couple days. The garage felt cool when he went in to see if his motivation would kick in enough to attract him to get his butt in gear and work on it. Already having the basic frame to the roll cage Kirk decided to start on the side protection grid. These sides where doors would be on a passenger car (his car body was welded solidly) are the only areas where the roll cage resembles a cage. With the top horizontal pipe even with the body’s bottom window opening below that there pipes are six inches apart with a strengthener in the middle vertically which are short, only six inches apart. That top pipe could have simply remained straight, but Kirk being a wannabe sometime perfectionist, decided to put two bends in the side cage which only complicated the process. Well, yeah, it was the price he paid by complicating the operation to make the side bars hug the inside of the body closer. It wouldn’t have made much difference from the inside and no difference whatsoever on the outside, but Kirk would know sitting in there, he would know and it would trouble him to no end.

            Not too difficult, after measuring and cutting to length with a little extra, he put the shallow bends each six inches from the center line. He liked how it looked holding it up to the body. Saddle cuts were made carefully with the heat wrench (torch). He got one end close to fitting then the other with four trying tries. Can’t waste that pipe though it wouldn’t be as bad as messing up the main frame already done and spot-welded in that had much longer spans. Carefully checking the position with the body’s window sill a couple times making adjustments with a few light bumps of a hammer, he marked it with chalk. Yeah, it looked good and with a rattling buzz and bright flashes of the welding rod, he spotted the pipe in. Double-checking afterward just to make sure its position with the chalk marks that it hadn’t moved.  Easily enough he made the second and third side protection bars all in one night.

            Back at work with the warehouse and the production line clean up behind them, Robert got a hold of the two guys and sent them over to Kirk’s other once proud position, the rock handling conveyor and elevator. There they had to clear the rocks from along the dump hopper and the long, inclined rubber belted conveyor. Kirk was a bit perturbed about this job because he had prided himself on keeping the area cleaned up all the while seeing it was easy enough to do so while the equipment ran by just scooping and tossing it on the belt. He checked with Robert asking if he and Ron could run the conveyor and elevator to rid the area of debris rather than pushing a wheelbarrow up the steep incline. Robert agreed saying no one worked anywhere near there and a few more rocks in the hopper would not hurt a thing. Of course, Ron wanted to milk the job, dragging his feet, and not work too hard. As long as they got it done, Kirk thought about taking their leisurely time.

            After that, Robert wanted them to take the pornographic wallpaper off the walls inside the rock handler hut and paint it. During the past winter, Kirk had spent a lot of time in there away from cold and became rather immune to the many Playboy pictures that one of his predecessors had put up. First, upon entering, Ron had that sort of awestruck, glazed look on his face that fell into dismay when Kirk began ripping the pictures down, crumpling them up and tossing them into the trash can. Robert hadn’t given them much advice about repairing the walls so they just got the bright green paint that the other crews seemed to be painting everything, everywhere, all at once and applied a thick roller-applied coat. It took all of an hour while not really trying to hurry much.                 

            So that’s pretty much how it went for Kirk with his sidekick Ron during the final two weeks. They worked hard at times, but for the most part they didn’t really bust their butts on any of the tasks. Over the two weeks, Kirk got to spend time in all the areas he had worked in. They cleaned upstairs over the kilns that were barely warm unlike the oil-fired heat and odor Kirk had to deal with up there. Remember that he almost lost his life up there after taking shortcuts by leaving the floor trapdoors open and on one especially hard night where he didn’t get much sleep, he almost fell in but caught himself painfully by his knees and armpits. Even after all the time that had passed, he still cringed with the thought.

            During this time, Kirk felt he needed to keep working on his stock car evenings, getting the short vertical pieces of pipe welded in between the horizontal pipes. Thinking about all the welding and installing of the required gussets was enough to make him want to quit and take a break from it, but he didn’t. This was without considering precisely cutting all those triangular gussets that needed to fit the ninety-degree junctions and all the other off-angles as well. He tried his best not to let the harrowing thoughts of the labor slow him down. Besides, Jon still helped fabricate and weld on the weekends.

            Back at the Georgia-Pacific wallboard plant, everyone had to agree that the place never looked as good with all the cleaning and painting that they got done. No one ever said if the plant was on the real estate market or already sold. Robert had been asked those questions, but he remained rather tight lipped about it.

            For the end of an era for the plant and with it Kirk’s money source drying up never bothered Kirk until the last day, he realized he had a good go of it which funded his expensive hobby very well. To finish up on that last day, a nice unseasonable warm day, all six of the labor crew painted the front of the main building, green of course. Robert promised a beer blast after they finished so everyone worked well together being very motivated. Most of the guys manned rollers on extension poles while standing on extension ladders the wall being a couple stories in height. It was an expanse of corrugated metal for sure, but they worked hard and continuously. Kirk maybe shed a tear, not for the end of the plant’s era nor friendships he made with coworkers because he really didn’t make friends there. After his abandonment by his high school friends when he went to college and began racing, Kirk bitterly decided friendships were overrated and a waste of time.

            With the last square of metal wall painted sloppy drippy green, Kirk thought the paint job looked good especially stepping back about fifty feet. Anyway, Robert had them put all the paint trays and cans in the back of the one remaining white plant truck, but told Kirk and the others to carry their rollers up to the office building to be taken care of and where they’d have a few beers. The six of them trudged up the grade to the building with beer and treats firmly front and center on their minds. They moved to the side as Robert approached from behind in the truck. Without considering possible repercussions, Kirk held the wet green roller end out against the side of the truck as it drove by, leaving an undulating twelve-inch bright green stripe down the entire length of the white truck.

            “Oh boy, look at that!” One of the guys exclaimed.

            At the moment, Kirk could only imagine scrubbing the green paint off the truck or having his pay docked as Robert kept going to park at the office building.

            Nothing was mentioned about Kirk’s evil feat as they downed a bunch of cold brews. Nevertheless, Kirk’s time ended there with the end of the plant’s era. The plant never reopened and Kirk, well, he was Never the Same after his stint.