machines in the night

[solipsistnation]

I spent most of the time I worked at the cannery trying to avoid actually working.

When you're new at the cannery, this is pretty difficult. A new cannery employee starts off on what are called the "snippers," which is cool cannery employee's jargon for a series of giant rotating slatted cylinders through which incoming green beans are poured. The cylinders are inclined, and the slats are just wide enough that as the beans slide down toward the waiting pickers, the ends get caught and snipped off; hence, "snippers." There are twenty of them, and each is maybe six feet in diameter. Each deposits the snipped beans on a conveyor belt in front of the pickers, who pick rotten beans and things that aren't beans out of the unending river of green that flows along toward the choppers and eventual cans and freezers. I started off as one of those pickers, standing in front of a wide white conveyor belt wearing earplugs and a hairnet and picking things out of the beans for eight hours a day, every day, starting at 2:00 in the afternoon and going until 11:00 at night. Swing shift, all summer, at the cannery.

It's hard to shirk on the snippers, since supervisors wander a catwalk nearby, making sure everybody stands right up next to the belt\ and picks beans from the flow, using both hands, without stopping. Two fifteen-minutes breaks and a half-hour lunch break were standard. If you had to use the restroom REAL bad, or wanted a drink of water, the supervisor would step in and pick for you until you got back. Woe unto you if you took too long returning. The best thing that could happen to you at the snippers is that you'd be picked for another job somewhere else in the plant. The worst thing was that you wouldn't, and you'd be stuck there, in front of a belt, picking rotten beans and things that weren't beans out of the river of beans heading for the restaurants and tables of the Pacific Northwest.

I spent most of the three or four days I was on the snippers standing across from a Hispanic man-- probably a Mexican migrant worker-- who spoke no English. I stood there, head down, neck aching, back aching, switching from one leg to another in an attempt to keep them from going numb, shouting Dead Milkmen lyrics at the top of my lungs. I didn't start off with them entirely memorized, I had plenty of time there to rack my brain for forgotten lyrics, too, so by the time I escaped I had three albums entirely memorized, and I could sing (or shout) them in sequence, from beginning to end, entirely from memory. The Mexican guy smiled and nodded and eventually stopped making eye contact entirely.

Finally, I was tapped for Sanitation and gladly left behind the tedium of the snippers.

Sanitation was a welcome release. Sanitation meant training in chemicals and a neat sticker for my hard hat. Sanitation meant yellow rain slickers and high-pressure hoses and walking around and doing stuff. Best of all, it meant a lot of unsupervised time in remote corners of the plant.

The cannery in my home town was HUGE. It was the biggest building I'd ever seen until I went to Washington DC. It went beyond square footage and into acreage. It's the largest employer in my town, and it has to have space for all those people indoors, plus the machinery required to can and freeze and package the entire green bean output of Oregon each summer. That means it's huge.

Huge buildings have edges, and in the case of the cannery, those edges could be pretty far away from anyone else. Every day while working Sanitation, I would be led to a different distant edge and told to clean whatever I found there. Sometimes I'd have more than one day in a certain area, and once I was left in the same vast empty chamber for a week. It was distant and lonely, trapped inside my own head by the earplugs everyone had to wear in order not to go deaf.

One of those days out on the edges, alone, I was assigned to clean a bunch of scaffolds and belts. All of the cannery was set up using modular pipes and conveyor belts with attached electric motors. Everything seemed to be waterproof (or at least didn't short out when sprayed with water), and it was all covered with rotting vegetable dust. I had to hose it off with these pistol-grip hoses capable of delivering up to 500psi sprays. It was a blast, especially since most of the stuff that needed cleaning got clean pretty quickly, and nobody would check on me until the end of the shift, if then.

So, there I was, on the edges, without another person in sight, isolated behind machinery and belts and giant grinding things, and I realize that I'm not actually on the edge of the building. The building, in fact, went on as far as I could see. Pipes and belts and scaffolds led off into the distance, and far, far away-- maybe four hundred feet off-- I could faintly see a row of lights. It had to have been the far wall of the plant, and while I'd had to walk for nearly five minutes to get to where I was, it looked at least that far again to the far wall.

That's when I realized exactly how large the plant was.

During one of the days off in a nearly empty room, I decide to follow one of the belts and see where it led. I had already cleaned the machinery I was supposed to be hosing down, and it was just after lunch. I had three or four hours to go, so I decide to explore.

On one wall of this room, about ten feet up, the end of a belt protruded from the outside to where I was standing. Near it was a door. This seemed worth checking out, and if anyone asked, I could claim I thought I was supposed to be cleaning out there, too. So, out I went.

Outside was what I can only describe as an industrial folly.

The belt that led into the room came out of a smallish set of scaffolds and pipes-- maybe twenty feet on a side and fifteen feet or so tall. (This was pretty small compared to what was indoors.) This little cube of pipes was surrounded by a chainlink fence with nothing on the other side. No loading docks or places for trucks to drive up or anything like that. It was just a little maze of pipes and belts and motors, humming away to itself outside under a couple of lights. I walked around it-- there was nowhere for things to be put into it. No belts, no troughs or spillways or anything led into the little interconnected mechanism. Belts obviously were set up to spill into one another, and they ended up entering the main plant through the opening high up in the wall, but otherwise, it was an isolated chunk of plant, like a vestigial remnant of something that had once been important.

Imagine if the builder of the plant had finished up and realized he had a few motors and belts left over and had decided to hook them all together somewhere. Imagine that, each time a new addition was built onto the plant, he'd come back with anything that was left over from each project and added it to his sculpture. Because no one person can know the entire plant, everyone had just assumed it was somebody else's problem, and it had been left to grow, project after project, belt and pipe and motor after belt and pipe and motor, until it became a little microcosm unto itself, empty belts turning, spilling nothing onto other belts, which spilled nothing onto other belts in turn. Out on the edge of the plant, the roar of the machines was tolerable without earplugs, and I could pull them out and listen to just the sound of this cluster of motors and wheels on their own.

When I was 19, back from college for a summer, away from all my new-found friends and plunged back into the life I'd gone to such trouble to escape, I could think of nothing more lonely than this piece of machinery, organic and purposeless, fulfilling its meaningless functions under the yellow glow of the floodlights. It was always there, rubberized canvas passing through complex arrangements of pulleys. I sat and watched it, outdoors somewhere behind the plant, until it was time to head home.

I drove home the long way that night. The long way meant driving to the next town and back. I never drove the same road twice, but I certainly went far out of my way. Rather than taking five minutes to drive the few blocks to the house I grew up in, it took maybe half an hour. Longer if I meandered my way through the darkened streets, through the housing development on the edge of town where all the streets were named for classmates of mine, the children of the developer, past the high school and the grade school and the middle school. This was the last time I really looked at any of the institutions at which I once spent so much of my life. I've now been out of those schools for as long as I was in them. Another year or so and I'll have been out of school as long as I was it it, total.

That was the last summer I spent in Oregon. We used to joke that the cannery was the best incentive ever for a college education. These days, I bet there are a lot of college kids working there as close to year-round as they can. Dropping out doesn't really seem to have limited my options, either. I didn't know, then, that this was my future. I hardly even remember who I was. I was unsure, still nervous of women (my first girlfriend sure didn't help with that), and only knew that I had to get out of there. Home wasn't home any more. My room felt wrong, like it had belonged to somebody who I vaguely knew who had moved out just a little while before I got back.

There are a lot of images from that summer that have stayed with me. Once I walked through the spice storage room in the cannery. It was stacked six layers high with pallets of drums of spices. The scent stayed with me for hours, rich and mysterious. The spice room was filled with 55-gallon drums of sage and pepper and curry, drifts of spilled spices on the floor, and had the only locks I saw anywhere in the plant besides the chemical storage room. The chemical storage room, too, was stacked high with drums, but these were filled with cleaning chemicals. The floor was thick with glutinous muck. They issued us boots every day, and I was glad of it. Some of that stuff would dissolve rubber. The air here was tight and close, and it didn't feel right to breath too deeply. Too many eye-watering odors, sharp and dangerous. I rinsed my yellow rain gear well after walking through there.

One week I spent building boxes with another Hispanic kid who dressed far too well for plant work and who spoke no English. We swapped a few words-- "sponge and water" translates to "sponge y agua," I think. We were assigned to build cardboard boxes, each of which was the size of a pallet and each of which would hold a ton and a half of beans. We developed a system, worked together, and got so good at it that the next day they told us to slow down. The night shift didn't have anything to do, since we'd built enough boxes when we were there that they only ran out during day shift the next day. We spent the next couple of days working just as fast, but stopping and messing around when it looked like we were far enough ahead. We had long heavy cardboard tubes for reinforcing the boxes, and huge rubber bands for holding plastic bags inside them, and I used these to build a slingshot that could fire a broom a hundred feet.

Eventually they decided we were smartasses and moved us somewhere else. One night before that, though, he and I were kind of slowly building boxes and smirking at one another about being scolded for being too good at it, when one of the older plant supervisors, a man who reminded me of somebody else's grandfather, came and beckoned to us. He led us to an unused breakroom somewhere near a loading dock someplace deep in the plant. Here he had us wait on the loading dock. We waited, and after a couple of minutes he returned with a big watermelon and a knife. He grinned (we still all had earplugs in, so we didn't bother shouting at each other) and cut us each a couple of slices. He winked and wandered off again, leaving us to enjoy our unofficial break.

The thing that comes back to me the most, in the middle of the night usually, is that little set of lonely machines grinding away on their own somewhere out back. If they'd ever had a purpose, it had been forgotten, but nobody had come and turned them off or taken them down. With no purpose, they just ran and made noise, with nobody there to hear, their shadows long across the blacktop and the white of the belt tinted yellow from the floodlights.

I've had all this in my head for years now-- I worked in the cannery in the summer of 1991 or 1992. I hardly remember any more. It was only for two and a half months, and yet some of the things that happened there have influenced me more than any number of things that have happened since. I still have a love of meaningless machinery-- little devices that sit and wind and don't do anything useful, or screen savers, the most obvious example of meaningless human constructs-- especially the ones that simulate something or create some kind of generative art. It's something for computers to do while it's bored, while people aren't using them. They sit there, unwatched, performing vastly complicated operations in order to display something that is lost as soon as a person turns his or her attention once again to the screen and keyboard. Pieces of that summer come back to me at unexpected times. While playing Thief, the streets of the city hum with the voice of the cannery, taking me back to the chainlink fence and the empty conveyor belts; a glimpse of a photo of a machine online reminds me of the snippers; leaving work at night, the yellow floodlights in the parking lot are the same shade as the lights around the outside of the plant.

All of this is what I've been feeling lately. Lonely and purposeless, on the edges of things. And waiting. Waiting for the next stage of things to begin. I've felt like I'm on the verge of something for a long time now, and this might be the real edge of it, finally. I can feel myself beginning to cast off the fragments of my last life. Things that I thought I was are passing away, and I'm mourning them. Things that I think I will be haven't become clear enough yet for me to be able to tell what they are. I know what pieces I'm keeping, and I know what pieces I can finally admit that I don't need any more. It's the last look at those pieces that is taking me here, watching the bits that don't fit any more whirring along to themselves. They feed into the plant, but they don't actually carry anything. Maybe they were useful once, but now they're not. Time to move on from them. I've spent too much time maintaining the pieces I don't need any more.

Maybe that's it. It's the end of the summer, and time for autumn.