Big Dead Place by Nicholas Johnson

Author:Nicholas Johnson
Language: ru
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 2011-02-14T20:00:00+00:00

In mid-March we fired up the Grinder.

The Diamond Z Tub Grinder is a machine that eats wood from McMurdo’s scrap Woodpile, which grows so colossal as to have hills and valleys. Inside the spinning tub of the Grinder lives a legion of rotating hammers that make quick work of even the largest timbers. The chips thus produced fall onto a conveyor belt that moves them to a second conveyor belt, where they immediately clog in shifting mounds and must be stabbed at with picks and shovels while the conveyors spin and the Grinder spews plumes of dust onto workers like a wooden volcano.

It takes three or more days to grind the Woodpile, during which town trash retrieval halts and dumpsters bulge impatiently. A delay in grinding, from broken equipment or high winds, exacerbates the trash jam. Grinding infests clothes with wood dust, as if they were full of ticks.

Grinding is so violent and impressive that people from town find excuses to drive that way and idle their trucks on the road to watch for a few minutes. Chunks of plate metal the size of forearms and pieces of 4x4 covered with nails shoot from the Grinder, but usually in a great arc that allows for easy escape. When an irritable Waste supervisor grumbles to a work center about trash mixed in a Wood dumpster, at the heart of it lies the memory of fleeing for cover in a rain of shrapnel. Where the work center sees an unfortunate oversight, the Waste supervisor sees attempted murder.

Once fueled and started, the Grinder is in control. It must be closely monitored, and you should not turn your back to it. Friction from the hammers pummeling larger timbers sometimes causes fires, when the spray of wood dust and snow from the tub mixes with smoke. The tub must be kept full of wood; otherwise the Grinder becomes angry and starts throwing debris hundreds of yards—in one case a healthy chunk shattered the window of a loader—or vibrating violently because the hammers have nothing to pulverize. Once the power is cut, the hammers take five minutes to stop whirling. At lunchtime we would grind out the contents of the tub, disengage the hammers, and idle down the engine.

Typical lunch conversation in winter might include prison rape, gruesome tales of parasitic infection or, as when we arrived from the wood grinder one afternoon to sit at our regular table in the dim back room of the Galley, Roger Moore’s dubious qualifications as James Bond. This topic led Ben and Thom to a brief argument over the merits of Mission Impossible 2, but the Rec guy broke up the argument, as it was a rehash from yesterday’s lunch. Sometimes we would carry a theme, such as dead pets, throughout the lunch hour, with everyone at the table throwing personal stories into the kitty. If someone was on a roll, everyone else would just listen to his or her stories. Or we would spend the hour scarfing down

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