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Newlyweds, July and August, 1964 |
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Graveyard shift, as the French would say, “porte bien son nom”: working it could get pretty spooky. Especially when the task at hand was to collect a sample from the raw mills, at two in the morning.
Let me describe the raw mills. These numbers won’t be accurate, but they’ll give you an idea. The huge shed contained about a dozen hollow cast-iron cylinders, each maybe ten feet in diameter by thirty or forty feet long, arrayed in parallel, and mounted with one end (the input) slightly higher than the other (the output), each partly filled (maybe an eighth) with iron cannonballs. The idea was that you fed big chunks of rock in the top, with the mill rotating, and the balls beat the heck out of them as they migrated under gravity to the other end. Where they emerged with the consistency of sand. Finer if the mill was adjusted flatter; coarser if steeper. Imagine the racket. No, take my word for it: you can’t. It was noisier than anything you’ve ever encountered, even if you have six two-year-olds at your house. I never saw them all running at the same time, but it took only a couple to set up a tsunami of white noise that completely overwhelmed the senses and left one with an odd sense of disorientation. Management fitted us with earplugs that probably saved us from deafness, although rumor had it that raw-mill workers typically suffered hearing damage. So, as I said, it’s two a.m., and I need a raw-feed sample. On with the hard hat and earplugs, and off to the noisiest shed anywhere. While I wait at the rickety elevator that will take me up about forty feet to the conveyor belt, I have leisure to remember the many tales my co-workers used to tell about people being marooned, cut in half, and otherwise abused by this piece of equipment. The nearest light is the little, blinking red one that asserts that the elevator is indeed on its way, in its damnably deliberate fashion. The next nearest, a single bare bulb, is ’way up top, and its light filters down to the elevator landing bearing the moving and disconcerting shadows of the knobs on the outside of the rotating mills. Spooky. One might even say, panic-inducing. Just then, Francisco-the-Raw-Mill-Foreman, a very pleasant man, comes up behind me and lays an unanticipated hand on my shoulder. By the time I regain control, Francisco-the-Raw-Mill-Foreman lies on his back with me astride him, preparing to pound him to a very pleasant pulp! I’m awfully embarrassed, but Francisco forgives me. It apparently happened all the time. |
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