Shredded Bats

Did you ever wonder where wood chips come from?

College is expensive.  At some point in 2004 I was faced with the millennial's dilemma and realized that as great as my summer job at the local pool was it just didn't earn me enough money to offset some of the cost of school and living expenses during the year.  I needed to find something more profitable than the $7.50/hr that I had been making.  This is how I came to work as a temp. 

LC Staffing was located in a small and slightly abused building just between the edge of town and Evergreen, the unincorporated town outside of town.  The paperwork asked what sort of work I was looking for so I asked the receptionist which jobs made the most.  She told me it was manual labor so that's what I chose.  I was then assigned a staff member who did the formal interview.  We sat in a cramped back office cubicle with no light as she went through my questionnaire and I reiterated my desire to earn as much money that summer as I could.
"You want to do labor?"
"Yes."
"You can lift 100 pounds?  Really?"
"Yeah, definitely."
"wow.  you must be strong."
At the time I wasn't really familiar with the tone of voice used by people who think you're lying to them.

She found me a one week job in landscaping on a dude ranch just south of Whitefish.  What I didn't know is that when people say that you're going to do landscaping they usually mean that you're going to pick weeds.  It paid more than my lifeguarding gig but not as much as moving furniture or working construction like many of the other temp workers did.   When I got there I was surprised to see a former high school classmate getting out of her car in work clothes and gloves.  Tiffany had pulled the same landscaping card I had and we were set to work grooming the lawn and tending the gardens.  It wasn't a bad way to spend a week.  The weather was nice, the supervisor was friendly but not creepy and the company was good but I was still hoping for a longer gig that paid more.

After several more landscaping jobs, a stint at a deli and a horrifying 5 hours as a bus girl in a restaurant it dawned on me that I was never going to get sent out to work construction.  When my assigned staff member at LC Staffing told me that she was trying to get me jobs that 'weren't too hard' what she meant was that she didn't think girls should do that kind of work.  It's hard to put your finger on why you know that kind of thing when you're in that situation but between that, the jobs I was assigned and the rumblings among other temps that women weren't wanted on particular jobs even though you legally couldn't say so it became clear that gender was the overriding issue preventing me from earning the kind of money I wanted to be able to earn.

Before I had much of a chance to contemplate what might be reasonably done about that sort of thing another opportunity presented itself.  One of the members of my parents church was a person of some degree of importance at our local lumber mill.  He mentioned that they too hired through LC Staffing and that perhaps I should see whether they were needing additional summer labor at the moment.  When I asked, my assigned staff member abruptly handed me off to another staff member who sat me in front of a training video, gave me directions to the mill and and told me to report in at 5:30am the next day.

We were more or less surrounded.

It's worth noting at this point the degree of influence Plum Creek has on the local economy back at home.  They are the largest private landowner in the United States with about 6.8 million acres, nearly 900,000 of which are in northwestern Montana.  A job at the mill was a good blue collar job with lots of hours and decent benefits in a town where about 75% of my graduating class did not go to college and the other options were the aluminum plant, a boom and bust manufacturer of semiconductor washers and not much else.  When I was in the fifth grade we got to go to the FORESTRY EXPO! Which was an educational event on forestry topics for local fifth grade students.  Among other things, I remember a very cool demonstration of logging techniques and forest management put on by Plum Creek.  They made the case for logging in a community that in many ways depended on it.  Many of my friends parents worked there (and still do).  It wasn't exactly a hard sell.

I was to report to the C shift of the re-manufacturing (REMAN) division at the Evergreen mill.  I didn't know what the meant, but I did know I'd be making over $10/hr so it seemed like an improvement over pulling weeds.  Everyone I talked to told me I'd probably be pulling plywood off the chain.  I didn't know what that meant either.

The next morning in the pre-dawn darkness I drove into the lumberyard and parked my dad's tiny '86 Honda Accord somewhere between a forklift and the requisite lineup of Ford F-150 pickups.  The sweet smell of sawdust greeted me as I walked into a mostly empty break room and asked for Jerry*.  What greeted me was a manic gorilla of a man addicted to steroids and just shy of his 35th birthday.  This was my shift manager.  They later told me that Jerry used to sometimes pick up the vending machines and shake them to dislodge free snacks - peanuts in particular -  but then management got wise and nailed down the vending machines.  I determined that it would probably be better to be on Jerry's good side.

From there I learned that REMAN had nothing to do with plywood.  We were actually the third largest producer of finger jointed 2x3, 2x4 and 2x6 in the world.  A finger joint looks like this:

When 2x4's are made without jointing, the machines run the entire tree through a machine made for that purpose.  Some of those long 2x4's come out unusable as a single piece of wood.  The way to make those 2x4's usable is to chop them into smaller pieces that fit the grade and then glue those pieces back together into 116 1/8th inch long slices.  That's what we were doing.

The trouble is that someone has to decide which long 2x4's are usable and which aren't.  We had a machine for that, but sometimes it's 'eye' couldn't decide and that's where I came in.  My job was to sort through the undecided pieces of wood.  If one end of the 2x4 was bad, I used my chop saw to cut it off.  If a long end of the 2x4 was bad then I used my rip saw to turn it into a 2x3.  Bad pieces went to the wood chipper and good pieces went to get jointed and glued together.  I manually sorted about 5,000 pounds of lumber a night and went through a pair of gloves every week.  It was the bitch job, it was mine and it made me about $8,000 a summer.

Terms:
See the bark on both sides of this piece of timber?  That's called wane.  You can't nail into wane and it has to be removed if it takes up more than half the nailing edge of your lumber in order to be stud grade wood.  Knots that are larger than half the width or edge of your wood are also below stud grade and must be removed or sent to the chipper bin. Wane that covers the short end needs to go too. 






The constant roar of the machinery meant that conversation was not possible on the floor and in any case my station was not close enough to anyone else to talk so I mostly got to know my co-workers in the break room or not at all.  There were 11 of us on shift and one other woman so by the second summer it was really like having 9 older brothers and one very tired aunt.  They adored me, and in what seemed like not enough time I was as much a part of their family as anyone.

One day I was pulled from my usual work to do what was essentially quality control on a long line of identical pieces of wood running by a conveyor belt.  I was to be the second eye in addition to the machine and flip anything bad to the person at the chop saw.  At first watching the belt made me dizzy, then gave me a little headache and before I knew it I had full on motion sickness.  Vomit came roaring out of my throat and so I turned and yakked in the first thing I saw - the belt to the chipper bin.  The guys came over to pound me on the back and laugh at me.  "You shouldda seen when Bobby done it!"  In fact it soon became clear that at some point, each of them in turn had vomited into the chipper bin.  It was a bond we shared.

Evidently at some point in the not too distant past someone had died in the chipper.  No one knew how exactly, but the guy had disappeared on shift and when someone stumbled to the horrible conclusion that the chipper could have been to blame pieces of him were in fact discovered there.  Now the room had a camera.  The chipper operated without human assistance most of the time but occasionally a long piece of 2x8 would jam it and someone needed to go in there and either pull it out or shake it enough to make it go in.  The camera was there to see if there was a jam and possibly for safety reasons too.  The only other woman on shift watched the video as she operated the 'seeing eye' machine.

It was also true that bats sometimes roosted in the wood pallets that waited outside to be processed.  So naturally when one of those bats was caught, the guys thought it would be really fun to rattle the chain of their colleague watching the camera and to do so they stapled the bat to a piece of 2x8, waved it in front of her camera so she would be sure to see it and threw the whole thing into the chipper.  They thought this was hilarious and in telling the story to me I thought it was funny too.  So many months in their company had changed my sense of humor somewhat, but when I attempted to retell the story to my other friends all I saw on their faces was horror.  Not funny at all.  Some aspects of the mill didn't translate back to the rest of my life and some of my life didn't really translate to the mill either.

By Rainbow they mean rainbow trout.  Not gay people.

"Hey, you wanna go out to the Rainbow tonight?"
"I'm not 21 yet."
"Don't matter.  Neither is Bobby!"

The Rainbow was and probably still is the trashiest of dive bars.  Its reputation preceded it so even if I had some desire to go out drinking with the boys and witness one of the many brawls they so often spoke of, fear of the venue alone probably would have kept me away.  They didn't seem to mind.

Back at work Jerry crowned me employee of the month and crowed that I was "the best motherfucking rip saw operator [he] ever had!"
"but you're not a motherfucker, right?" asked another co-worker, eyeing me.  It was 2:30 in the morning and I was alone at night in the warehouse with 9 of the guys.  It didn't seem like a great time to make a stand for normalizing gay life so I sat there in my brother's Marine Corps camo pants and work boots with what little hair I had hidden under a bandanna and shook my head 'no.'  I suppose it was true strictly speaking.  I had never fucked anyone's mother.

As the summer came to a close so did my time there.  They often hired college students to work the busy season so the guys knew that I was easy come, easy go.  Nevertheless they encouraged me to come back and put in some hours over Christmas  or maybe even graduate from school and come back to work full time as many of them had.  On my last day my shift manager pulled me up into his office, shook my hand and let me know that if I ever needed anything he was only a phone call away.  They were there if I needed them because we were family now.  I thanked him, left the building, pulled away in my dad's little car and never saw any of them again.