30, Thursday January 2025 At The Close of Shift

 

Dear Joe,

   Here I am at the toy factory, stealing from the company again near shift's end. It's the stroke of 11:00 p.m. and I'm sitting on a cushioned stool, my legs propped up on a work bench straight out from me, my ankles padded by one of those long-sleeved painters coats that you and I wore when we mopped out the Roseau County Courthouse basement during Roseau's great flood of June 2002. 

Joe and I, among others, helped clean flood water debris from the basement of the then-new Roseau County Courthouse in June of 2002. I donated this digital image and it now hangs in the courthouse foyer.

   His crew having all departed for home a half hour earlier, a foreman walking through the doorway near where I sat was shocked as hell to suddenly see me. His eyes locked on mine like a cat on a rat. 

   "You sleepin?" he asked me.

   "Nope," I said in reply, "Just catchin' up on my evenin's notes. I ain't sleepin' yet."

   Knowing I was at shift's end too, he said nothing more and walked into his office of an old dimly-lit paneled room with two big wooden desks that were reportedly salvaged from the Pine Needle Inn; a historical landmark that once haunted the prime flood-prone real estate now known as the Roseau Liquor Store  -- which by the way, was the only building in all of Roseau that was not inundated by flood waters from which not even the houses of God were spared. Praise be and thank the Lord! 

 

   Now where was I?

   FYI Joe, I have changed or hereby altered the increasing uncomfortable position of my legs to those resembling those of a frog lazily floating upon the water, knees bent outward, heels inward. Gas escapes me momentarily. I chuckle. I reek. Alas, my crude gestures offend no one except myself, and you, my sensitive reader. Please accept my apologies. 

      I have vacated the aforementioned department astride my electric bright orange golf cart and sit beneath a vast array of bright florescent lights above a wildly expansive floor space. Parked inconspicuously aside a tall stack of Part No. 220312, I've determined it's a good place to occasionally note character sketches of the three or four hundred assembly line workers within my line of view.

 

   One is a young woman of deeply-tanned complexion and tight cornrows combed back against her head in a tight sheen. Her florescent orange earplugs protrude from her ears below the black bow of her goggle-like safety glasses that lay across her cheeks and nose like they were painted on, as so appears the contours of her halter top. An unruly wisp of hair falls in front of her eyes and she flips it back in sort of a glistening perspiration-drenched way, an gesture that's so industrially sensual that I'm sure the overly-large young man across the assembly line from her has a difficult time completely ignoring. Her navel pays peek-a-boo with him. He works dutifully on, as does she, the assembly line between them going one way, and the monorail high above them moving the opposite. Nodding her head, she keeps time in beat to loud music coming from a nearby boom-box; her skin lightening and darkening in the whirling shadows of ceiling fans and spring-loaded tool-laden ergo-arms, at shoulder height, that she pulls toward her, uses, then releases, utilizing muscle-memory and auto-pilot; she dances to the music in her head.

 

   Within the parameters of annoying buzzers and the steam calliope of tonal alerts dulled through foam rubber ear plugs that I embed deeply into both my ears in an attempt to escape industrial noise such as air being exhausted through voluminous gigantic tubular cylinders that inflate and deflate the breath of the building; the sound of hundreds of air guns and wrenches; of parts and welding jigs opening and closing with pneumatic clamps; the beep-beep of forklift horns, irritating backup alarms and yellow or red revolving lights; the drop and clatter of steel against concrete; hammering steel against steel;, the incredulously loud volume of punk rock, hip-hop, pop, heavy-metal, country/western and rock’n roll music all over the assembly areas; the noise  of grinding; the slap of wooden pallets against the floor; the rumble of a forklift driving into a semi-trailer and the rumble of it backing out with a load of material on its forks, its backup alarm beeping—the clang of the forks striking the incline of the steel dock-plate—and the wheezing of its load side-to-side as it drives away down the aisle growing fainter and fainter amid the din of industrial noise—my earplugs are a little better than nothing. 

 

I envy her, her escape.