Summer 1996 - North Chelmsford, MA:

“Oh, like Eli Whitney,” I said.26

A smile came across Andrew’s face as he pointed to the carding machine.

“Yes, exactly.”

Andrew hired me on the spot to run the warehouse and purchasing department of a filter company that operated in a turn of the twentieth century mill in Lowell, MA.27

Our mill was right on the Merrimack River and all of the complicated history of mill workers, labor strikes, child labor laws, boarding houses, mill girls and the industrial revolution took place right here from the 1820s through the 1920s.

1996 was a long way from the storied textile mill heyday and yet I felt honored to be part of that legacy. Working in an old mill was cool but I was reminded daily that it was, still, just a job.

"You know how to operate a forklift, right?” Andrew asks me.

“I’ve never done it before.”

“It’s not that hard. Sometimes the brakes aren’t great. The handbrake is right here.”

He tossed me the keys. End of training. It took me the rest of the day to unload 80 bales of cotton/poly fiber off a tractor trailer. One by one, pick up a bale, back up, spin around, load onto a pallet in the elevator, run to the third floor, unload it with a hand truck across the mill, put an empty pallet in the elevator, send it down, go back downstairs and start over again.

Each bale weighed between 500 and 700 lbs. My first day as a mill worker and I ruin my t-shirt with sweat. I took it off and threw it in the trash when I got home.

* * *

In the front of the building there were abandoned train tracks that came right up to an equally abandoned loading dock overgrown by decades of greenery. I'd park my Subaru, hop up a few steps and head into what had once been the weigh-in room to the side of the abandoned loading dock – complete with a massive in-floor scale with a gigantic dial. I’d jump on this scale and watch the needle do a tiny, nearly unmeasurable jump. To the left was the old freight elevator with the two-foot-high, thick, broken cable all slumped over like a tangled mass of metal spaghetti.

I worked on the third floor where the winding machine, carding machines, balers and then all the filter winding machines were located. A stapled-up wall of opaque plastic sheeting was all that separated the warehouse from the workers making the filters. In the summer we sweat it out as the building was built like a gigantic pizza oven and in the winter, it would get so cold that my morning pee often melted the thin layer of ice that formed in the warehouse toilet.28

Much of the floor of the warehouse was covered in thick wool grease that had hardened over the last century into a hard black coating on the floors. It made for an uneven surface that was difficult to roll the fork truck over and made stacks of boxes very unsteady.

I don’t know why this hardened wool grease bugged me so much. It annoyed me how it made the long wooden planks look disgusting and nasty and I would use my downtime to try to beautify the warehouse. I had a