One night in March of 1983, I had dinner on the stove and was building a fire when the phone rang. It was the foreman Charlie from the ARCO Refinery at Cherry Point, Washington. I was living in Bellingham then, about thirty miles away, and supporting myself by painting houses and working the occasional shutdown at the refinery. The gig economy is nothing new. I was also a part time student taking the prerequisites at the local university for nursing school. I had a new girlfriend whoโs still with me over forty years later. And I was the lead singer in a rock band called The Inflatable Dates. We played in the Bellingham bars to much acclaim. Thatโs why youโve never heard of us.
You never know the parts of your life that are the good parts until theyโre long gone. Then you look back and remember how happy you were, despite the relative poverty.
I usually worked two or three ARCO shutdowns a year for several weeks each. A shutdown was when they close a part of the refinery to repair and clean equipment. They hire a bunch of temp workers to supplement their permanent operating crews, but with no right to join the union and no benefits or security of a full time job.
I knew another shutdown was coming up, so I had been expecting Charlieโs call. He wanted me to report for work at noon the next day. The job was hard, dangerous, and dirty, but the pay was $10.65 an hour, more than three times the minimum wage in 1983. But I still asked Charlie for a raise. In the past, heโd partnered me with a journeyman mechanic, so Iโd been doing a helperโs job but getting paid as a laborer. Charlie hemmed and hawed and told me he appreciated all I did for him, but he said the company was on his ass, and heโd had to bust down some mechanics to helpers and some helpers to laborers, and heโd love to help me out, but he just couldnโt. I knew it was bullshit, but I wasnโt gonna turn down $10.65 an hour just because I couldnโt get $11.50.
So, a little before noon the next day I was hurtling down the freeway in my 1971 Dodge Dart Swinger with that famous slant-6 engine purring away. It was a gorgeous day in the Pacific Northwest: a cool temp, dark blue sky dotted with cumulous clouds, and the sun shining. Any day the sun shines in the Northwest is a beautiful day.
In a few minutes I was north of Ferndale on Grandview Road, called that because of the incredible view of the Cascade Range from there, including 10,786 foot Mt. Baker with its glaciers glistening in the sun. Mt. Baker was named after the white guy who first saw it from Captain George Vancouverโs expedition to explore Puget Sound in 1792. Two hundred years later, I knew better. Itโs ancient real name, according to the Nooksack and Lummi, is Kulshan: translated as Great White Watcher, or Shining White Mountain, or even Thunderstruck and Burning because it was a volcano, a lot better description than the surname of a junior lieutenant in the Royal Navy who happened to glance over the gunwales one day.
But finally, at the end of that road, the refinery looms up like something from a dystopian future, a hellscape of pipes, tanks, and towers, with a flare stack flaming against the blue sky. Still, I admit thereโs something aesthetically pleasing about the way a refinery looks, as if every technological structure and modern invention were smashed together into industrial Cubism, as if the refinery had exploded out of the earth like some ship hidden underground by aliens eons ago. If we didnโt have refineries, I suspect some artist would create one.
The refinery sits right next to a marsh where deer graze. Iโve been on top of one of those distillation towers, gazing in rapture at Kulshan and at the marsh, suddenly shocked out of my reverie when a coworker starts blathering about what kind of rifle and what kind of ammo heโd use to take out that buck. Can you just enjoy the fuckinโ mountain and the marsh without craving to kill something? I demanded. In my head, of course.
As I pull into the parking lot, I tuck my hair down inside my collar. My girlfriend created my punk haircut. It was a buzz cut all over except for a Manchurian topknot that turns into a queue braided down my back. It looks pretty strange to management and all those redneck county boys who work at the refinery, but it goes well with my rock โnโ roll band. I bought new coveralls and work gloves and a blue chambray shirt. Iโm wearing my black high-top steel-toed boots, the same boots that I wear when I perform with the Dates. I polish them for performing, but this is a different context altogether. Out here theyโre just gonna get gunked up, trashed, probably ruined. When I work shutdowns, I try to blend in, and sometimes my friends donโt recognize me. My girlfriend laughed at the way I looked this morning when I got dressed for work.
Like Charlie told me, my name is on a list at the gate and Iโm told to go to the lunchroom for orientation. Itโs lunch time so everybody is there. I find a couple of friends whoโd already started work and sit and talk to them to pick up on the gossip.
The big news is that the guy who usually gives out the hard hats and badges on your first day is three, four months away from retiring, and he suddenly discovered heโs got a fist-sized tumor next to his spine, Old Herb. We never called him Old Herb to his face, but thatโs the way everybody referred to him. Nice guy, but now Old Herbโs gone, getting his chemo or radiation or whatnot. I wonder if spending forty years in a refinery might have something to do with his cancer. They also fill me in on who was called back and who wasnโt, and how itโs impossible to figure out how they decide whoโs gonna be rehired and whoโs not gonna be rehired: โLook at that guy over there โ heโs a fuck-up, I canโt believe they called him back,โ and so on.
So, after lunch everybody gets up and leaves except us fifteen new rehires who are left sitting there with nothing to do from 12:30 to 1:30 just waiting for Charlie to come out of his office where heโs probably busy telling somebody else he appreciates their work but canโt give them a raise. So naturally enough, the bullshit gets deep quick. Tales are swapped about the last time we worked together, and everything is exaggerated and blown up to be funny. Until finally, at 1:30, Charlie walks out of his office and passes out rule books and tells us all to read them, which we do, and then Charlie reads to us out loud the same stuff we just read. He spends a lot of time going over all the things you can be fired for, the most important of which is the rule that you canโt smoke anywhere except in the lunch room or a few designated areas. After all, if you smoke in the wrong place you can blow the refinery, and Ferndale, Washington, right off the map.
Then Charlie rolls his eyes as he explains the new OSHA rule that requires us to use earplugs in certain high noise areas. He gives us a set of earplugs and he wants everybody to practice putting them in their ears, so we do. But now we have trouble hearing Charlie whoโs soft spoken. He comes up close to me, I guess to make an example of me, and he says, โYours ainโt far enough in your ears.โ I say, โWhat?โ And Charlie repeats it louder. Everybody laughs.
This reading the rules and practicing with earplugs takes about an hour, and Charlie finishes with us right at 2:30 when itโs time for our required fifteen minute break. โTake fifteen,โ Charlie says, and so we do, continuing to do what weโve been doing for the last two hours: we just sit there. But now weโre free to bullshit some more. Iโm sitting with Juan and T.C. and they start talking about what theyโve done since the last time we all saw each other, which is basically nothing, really, nothing that would interest anybody, just hot air. I donโt mention the Inflatable Dates or my new girlfriend or my anatomy and physiology class. In fact, I donโt say much of anything. I donโt really want these guys to know anything about me. Then Juan and T.C. start talking about what theyโre gonna do with all this money when they get it, and then move on to the bars theyโre drinking at now. In this context, the big discussion centers around whether there are, as T.C. put it, โacres and acres of pussyโ available at this one bar versus the other.
Now, Juan is a stand-up guy, but T.C. is an idiot and a piece of shit. Heโs a middle-aged guy that no woman in her right mind would have anything to do with who, literally, only talks about โpussy.โ He wears what looks like a government-issued comb-over wig that sits on top of his bald pate. I have no idea why he even bothers to wear a wig under his hard hat, like any of us could give a crap that heโs bald. And he has a mustache that eerily resembles Adolf Hitlerโs. He has no filters and no idea who he might be offending. At one point in this conversation, without a clue about who heโs talking to, he says to Juan, whoโs from Mexico, โIโm going down to Mexico to git me a senorita and drag her up here to live with me until she learns how to say no in English.โ I have to admire T.C.โs creativity for managing to work racism, sexism, and rape all into the same sentence. Neither Juan nor I tell T.C. that โnoโ is the same in both languages. Thankfully, the conversation turns back to Old Herb and how heโs dying.
Our break has now lasted thirty minutes when Charlie reappears with three crew bosses to make work assignments. โYou, you, you, and you go with him.โ And so we go over to a warehouse and our crew boss puts two of us on forklifts, not me, and gives me and Juan a couple of spud wrenches, a closed end and an open end, and says โPut these valves on this pipe.โ So we work for maybe thirty minutes, making it as elaborate as possible to draw out the work. And just before weโre done he comes back, and he says, โIf you have time, take this flange off of this one.โ Time is all we have. So we do, taking another five minutes after heโs gone. I guess altogether, I work maybe thirty-five minutes. And the rest of the time, the remaining hour till quitting time, I walk over to the toolroom and check out a pair of channel-locks and a tape measure which I stick in my pocket.
And then I come back and stand around the rest of the time, trying to stay out of the way of any bosses that might walk through. Itโs a real irony, a paradox, working for a company like this. During a shutdown, the company is losing all kinds of money cause theyโre not making gas and the heads in the corporate suite are exploding. And despite the fact that these things are supposedly โplanned,โ theyโre completely disorganized on the ground level. The bosses never seem to know what needs to be done and crews are left standing around waiting for orders.
Weโd often have an easy day doing little to nothing, and then suddenly before shift change, the bosses would get their shit together and discover something that needed doing IMMEDIATELY and ask everybody to work an extra shift. In fact, itโs pretty common to work sixteen hours for days on end. We all loved this, because we were getting time and a half for the extra eight hours, and during those swing shifts most of the bosses were gone. At dinner, theyโd bring in shitty pepperoni pizza or Hungry Man Salisbury steak TV dinners for all of us, God save you if youโre a vegetarian. If youโre only working a few of these shutdowns a year, that overtime is the gravy.
So, on the one hand, they never give you enough work to do. And on the other hand, they get mad at you if you look like youโre not working.
It leaves us grunts in a bind. What you have to do is learn how to stand around and bullshit with the guys youโre working with, but always have in your mind something you can do that looks like work in case somebody walks up that might get mad at you for not doing anything. Left in this situation, we all make our plans. If thereโs a push broom available, some guy will call dibs on it cause a guy making $10.65 an hour can look busy with a broom anywhere.
When the crew boss leaves us that afternoon, the last thing he says is, โIโm gonna go find us some more work. While Iโm gone, look busy,โ cause he doesnโt want to get chewed out for his guys standing around either. Juan finds a push broom. I scope out a big box of six inch bolts on a pallet nearby. I take the nuts off two of them and throw the nuts back in the box, and I put the two bolts in my pocket. Everything in a refinery is held together with bolts, so itโs not unusual to have to look for a bolt or a nut the right size. Then we all go back to talking.
Sure enough, a few minutes later, one of the big bosses, second in command, comes walking through the warehouse. As he turns the corner into the warehouse, Juan starts pushing that broom and says under his breath, โHere comes the Man.โ
Now, you canโt just suddenly jump up in a panic and do something. You have to make it look very purposeful and controlled. And to be convincing, you have to ignore the presence of the boss as if youโd be doing this whether heโs around or not. Truthfully, itโs an acting job, and the boss is your audience.
We all saunter into action in four different directions. Juan is on his broom already, and the other two guys head back to their forklifts and start moving pallets around unnecessarily. Without a glance at the boss, whoโs fifty yards away, I enact my plan. I walk slowly towards the big box of bolts while fumbling in my coverall pocket for the two I had retrieved. I pull them out, and start rummaging around in the box on my knees looking for nuts that might fit them. Just as the boss passes by, I โfindโ the nuts and leisurely screw them onto the bolts. None of us even acknowledges him until he says โHello guys,โ and then we act surprised to see him. He passes harmlessly out the other warehouse door and we go back to talking.
Our crew boss never returns. A few minutes later, our short orientation day ends. On the way home, Kulshan lives up to its name as the sun in the west glints and flashes off the glacier. The magnificent Great White Watcher watches as I drive home.
*
The next day I โm assigned to work with Russell. Russell is really worried. Heโs middle-aged, which seems ancient to me, so he has a house and a family, and heโs worried about getting enough work on this shutdown. His eyes are filled with a combination of fear and shame as he tells me he expected Charlie to call him a month ago, but he didnโt, and when he did call last week, he busted him down from mechanic to helper. Like me, Russell has no option but to come back. So maybe Charlie was telling the truth, at least part of it. This money means a lot to me. I can make it several months after the shutdown on what I earn. But I canโt imagine being dependent on this part time shit to raise a family. And I canโt imagine being Russellโs age and still being a refinery jock. The rumor is this shutdown may last a couple months, but I donโt believe it. Iโll be happy to get three weeks.
At lunch, Old Herb is the topic again today at my table. He was so well liked that people are concerned that heโs dying without getting to enjoy retirement. One of the guys says his old man is eighty-six and just got diagnosed with cancer too. Another guy says his old man died from cancer recently. They both drop these statements matter-of-factly, like it doesnโt bother them. But it clearly does. Iโm right in between them: Dad has been diagnosed awhile now with multiple myeloma. I donโt know it yet, of course, but in two years heโll be dead. I try to project the same stoic face as the other two guys, but I can feel my voice trembling a little as I tell them. So, I quickly segue to a story about Old Herb who was my crew boss last shutdown.
Every refinery has a flare stack. Thatโs the tall thin stack you see with a flame burning at the top. Itโs a controlled fire that burns off waste gases, mainly methane, produced by the distillation of crude oil into gasoline. So, a flare stack with a strong bright flame licking the sky is a good thing, itโs a burn-off safety valve.
But a flare stack can also be dangerous. The chemistry is complicated to explain, but under the right conditions, it can even explode. A sudden surge of production or a control valve malfunction can overwhelm the flare stack with waste gases. If this happens, the flame increases in height until it topples down the sides of the stack all the way to the ground, creating a ground fire at the base. A fire in a refinery, remember, is not a good thing. All refinery workers, permanent or temporary, understand the dangers of the flare stack. So, this is the story I told about Old Herb and the flare stack.
Old Herb was my crew boss last shutdown. He was a gruff sombitch, but he was great to work for and he liked a good joke. And heโd protect us from shitty jobs, yโall know that. He always made sure we all had the protective equipment we needed. And heโd tell us to slow down and make a job last till he could find us more work. He protected us. In more ways than one.
So, anyway, one night weโre working overtime. Weโd just finished those shitty Hungry Man dinners, and we was over by the flare stack working underneath it. All of a sudden, Whoosh! The place just lights up all around us like a bonfire. At first, I didnโt know what the fuck had happened, but we look up, and thereโs that muthafuckinโ flame rolling down the sides of that flare stack, right there beside us! It was licking the ground!
Now, our truck was sitting right there at the bottom near the stack. Old Herb started yelling, โEVERYBODY IN THE TRUCK NOW!!! NOW!!! So weโve gotta run towards the goddamned flames to git in the truck. Old Herbโs getting in the driver side and heโs yelling, โIn the back! In the back!โ
DUDE! We dove head first over the sides into the back of that pickup, about a half dozen of us. Never let the tailgate down. And Old Herb gunned that thing on that washboard dirt road away from the refinery out toward the west fence. We couldnโt get out cause thereโs no gate out there, but he got us hundreds of yards away from that flare stack. Then heโs on the radio reporting, like they didnโt already know it. It starts to die down a little and the flameโs coming back up top and Old Herb tells us heโs going back to check on things and to stay put till he comes back for us with the truck. And he says, โIf it gets worse again, climb over that fence and git as much distance away as you can.โ About thirty minutes later he comes back for us. That dude had balls. And Old Herb let us chill most of the rest of that shift.
The guys at my lunch table are duly impressed with my Old Herb story and jump in with stories of their own. At least weโre honoring him with stories instead of just commiserating about his prognosis.
*
The next week, our crew boss pulls two of us to clean debris out of a huge metal pipe. The pipe runs horizontally about 200 feet above the ground with hangers every few feet attaching it to a steel girder in the ceiling. We climb the stairs to a catwalk to get to the access port of the pipe. Itโs hundreds of feet long, and the inside diameter is somewhere between three and four feet. I have no idea what normally runs through it, but itโs still really hot in there. And we have to wear respirator masks which makes it worse.
Me and my buddy Jack are told to take turns crawling in to vacuum up the debris that collects at each joint of the pipe. One guy acts as a safety man at the pipe access port, while the other guy crawls on his hands and knees in the pipe with a vacuum hose and a headlamp. Iโm not sure what the safety guy is supposed to do: maybe go get help when a combination of a fear of heights and a fear of tight spaces give you a heart attack? I actually feel better crawling in the pipe than sitting exposed on the catwalk hundreds of feet above the floor. So I volunteer to go in first. At least on the inside I can just pretend the pipe is on the ground. If my weight ever made this pipe break, itโs goodbye and goodnight. We work through most of the pipe until the vacuum hose wonโt stretch any farther. This job sucks. But not as bad as the next one.
*
It’s a few days later, and my crew and another crew are assembled next to a large dump truck filled with very small nickel pellets. Weโre all given shovels, gloves, and paper face masks and told to don the gloves and masks. One supervisor asks if any of us have asthma and nobody does. Then weโre told that weโll be shoveling the nickel into lined fifty gallon drums which will be sealed and transported by fork lift for storage. They tell us to be careful not to spill any nickel on the ground.
In a refinery, nickel is used as a catalyst to remove sulfur from crude oil, among other uses. But hereโs the thing about nickel: itโs highly toxic through skin contact or inhalation. At the time, I know none of this, and we begin shoveling. Pretty quickly itโs clear why weโre all wearing masks. As we shovel the pellets and pour each shovelful into the drums, nickel dust rises up all around us.
We work maybe thirty minutes filling a few drums. Itโs hard sweaty work โ the nickel is heavy due to its high density โ but we have a long way to go to empty the truck. Thereโs only so much room in the back of the truck so we shovel in shifts.
A couple of young guys from the Safety Department show up. Theyโre wearing chemical resistant coveralls over their clothes, goggles over their eyes, and respirators over their mouth and nose connected to small oxygen tanks on their backs. Theyโre also carrying some monitoring gadgets with a sensor connected to a meter, and they immediately start waving the sensor around outside the truck. They look like astronauts on a strange planet. Then they study their meter results and take notes. Whatโs bizarre is that they say nothing to any of us. Now theyโre huddling yards away and talking to each other.
The supervisor indicates we can jump down and take five while new guys take our places. I take off my mask and walk over to one of the Safety guys. โHey, man, whatโs with all the precautions?โ I jauntily ask. His job requires a college degree. Heโs young, probably an engineer, entrusted with our safety, and as I will find out, either stupid, or negligent, or indifferent.
He says, โWell, nickel dust is toxic if you inhale it.โ Iโm gobsmacked. I thought our flimsy little paper masks were for dust, not for toxic dust.
โSo, why do you guys have respirators and goggles but those of us shoveling the nickel have paper masks?โ I ask sarcastically. A couple of the other guys Iโm working with wander over to listen.
He says, โWell, we tested the nickel dust in the air and it doesnโt rise to the Permissible Exposure Limit allowed by OSHA.โ
I say, โYeah, but we worked thirty minutes before you guys even arrived to check the level, and you guys arrived loaded for bear just in case! And you never got up in the truck and checked right where we were working. Itโs a lot dustier up there than outside the truck where youโre playing with your dicks.โ My voice is raised, and the supervisor is glancing nervously towards us.
Iโm pissed. Permissible Exposure Limit? Weโre at the mercy of the bosses and the Safety Department, and they have no mercy.
โWell, all I can tell you is, according to our readings, youโre not in any danger.โ He calmly bullshits me with a straight face. But he knows they fucked up by arriving late.
How would any of us grunts know that in 1983 OSHA required respirators with air, goggles, and chemical resistant suits, gloves, and boots for exposure to nickel and nickel dust? There is no Google to instantly check these things. We just have to trust them.
And mad or not, trust them we do, for $10.65 an hour. After our break, we relieve the other guys, back and forth like that, until the truck is empty. The Safety guys were long gone. I keep thinking about Old Herb and his cancer. And I keep thinking about my old man and his cancer, and how heโd spent his life in a chemical plant too.
*
A few days later, our crew boss is asking for a volunteer. A crane is ready to lift parts needed for a repair job to the top of a distillation tower. He needs a man up on top to guide the craneโs load in safely. And he needs him there quickly. Those rented cranes are expensive. So, he doesnโt want the man to take the time to climb all the stairs and ladders and catwalks to get up there, an unnerving process in itself, especially if heights bother you. Instead, he wants the volunteer to stand on the hook and hold onto the cable while the crane operator hoists him to the top! He knows how dangerous this is, thatโs why heโs asking for a volunteer instead of assigning a man. Hell, he wouldnโt ride up there himself.
There are five or six of us grunts standing there listening to this insane idea. All of us are now looking at the ground, as if something is fascinating down there, instead of looking at this idiot crew boss. Usually, I have no problem volunteering for jobs. If you volunteer, Charlie is more likely to call you back for the next shutdown. But this is way beyond my comfort level, way too dangerous. I make the mistake of looking up at the crew boss and see him looking back at me, and I hear him say, โHow โbout you, Davis? You willing to volunteer?โ Thereโs just a touch of snark in his voice, like heโs daring me.
I stand there a few moments trying to come to a decision. I see the crane operator has already lowered the hook to the ground, ready for boarding. I can feel the guys next to me relax a little in anticipation that Iโll volunteer and take them off the hook, no pun intended. I think about my $10.65 an hour job with no health insurance, and I canโt help but wonder, How much profit did ARCO make last year, anyway? I didnโt know. Today, I can just Google it: it was a billion and a half.
And then my mind drifts back to the job. I remember running from the flare stack, and crawling in that pipe, and shoveling those nickel pellets. I think about the poor guys next to me, some of whom probably have kids at home and need this money more than me. That makes me think about Russell and his mortgage and his wife and little kids. I think about my new girlfriend that I am slowly falling in love with, who, unknown to me then, will share her life with me for the next forty odd years, as long as Iโm around to enjoy it. And then I think about Dadโs cancer, his life likely cut short.
For just a brief second, I glance to my left, to the east, and through the tangled tanks and towers I can just glimpse a small piece of ancient white Kulshan reflecting sunlight back at me, watching me.
I turn back to the crew boss and look him in the eye, and with a little shake of my head and a smile and a chuckle I hope will save me from being fired, I say, โFrankly, you guys donโt pay me enough to ride that hook up there.โ His expression hardens a little, but he doesnโt fire me. โAnybody else wanna volunteer?โ he barks. Finally, one of the guys with more balls than me, or maybe more to lose if he doesnโt volunteer, steps forward. We all watch him ride up safely. At the top, he yells and pumps his fist in exhilaration like he just finished a roller coaster ride.