The Giant’s Tale

I know what the end of the world sounds like, I was there.

By the turn of the millennium, the paper industry around Kalamazoo, Michigan was a wasteland of gigantic buildings, superfund sites, and rough neighborhoods. Even a small paper mill employs a few thousand people, and the area had lost seven of them in the past few decades. Every one of the “Seven Sisters” had died with a whisper. If it wasn’t for the university, the town would have dried up entirely. As it was, most of the area, and especially the smaller towns, were hanging by a thread. The city motto should be “Kalamazoo, a great place to be from!”

The mammoth GPI paper mill was less than a quarter mile from our workshop and had been sitting abandoned for years. Thanks to some local support we got permission to “Take anything but the paint” provided we could haul it out within a two-week window before the demolition crew began their work. We literally signed our lives away on release forms, and the security guard shook his head and smiled when he gave us a key. For half a month we backed up a twenty-foot long aging box truck with a questionable transmission, and sucked the marrow from the dying bones of industry to feed our little community makerspace.

We had a blast. For a team of young nerds and engineers this was like Mardi-Gras and Christmas combined. We explored every inch of the half-mile-long building and filled our truck dozens of times over with shelving, valves, Allen Bradley switchgear, metal stock, and tooling that dated back several wars. Most of it would have been worthless to the scrap companies, but to us it was treasure that would become parts for some of our most famous projects for the next fifteen years.

Anything of real value had already been stripped out. The giant machines had all been sold at auctions years ago. The meth-heads took most of what was left, stripping the wire from the walls. Every conduit was empty, pigtails only a few inches long left hanging out. Tens of thousands of dollars in copper, all to feed someone’s addiction.

The facility was a cavernous, post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s the kind of place they use for movie sets and photography shoots. There were jagged pipes and conduits, razor sharp and jutting out at odd angles. There were holes large enough to drop a city bus through that went down three floors, where gigantic paper machines once sat. The entire place was festooned with “ankle-breakers”, sets of four bolts, sticking up from the concrete floor where some control stand or grinder or something was once bolted down, waiting for the next person who didn’t pay very close attention where they stepped.

In a world where everyone has turned into a pussy, with people making careers out of being offended on the behalf of other people, and with lawyers having worked with insurance companies to take all of the good honest fun out of getting your hands dirty and doing something dangerous, this was heaven for a twenty-something country boy. My weirdo friends and I were having the time of our lives.

We wandered,shopped, and explored for a week before we noticed it. I was fifteen feet in the air, trying to unbolt an old electric fire alarm horn from a steel beam, and just by chance  happened to glance to my left. There, nestled in between a pair of I-beams, was what looked like three large 4-inch pipes. Only the ribbed texture gave it away. I rubbed a small spot, taking fifty years of paper dust and pigeon shit off with my thumb, and showing a beautiful, faded, red jacket underneath.

It wasn't a pipe; it was a cable. It was gigantic cable! It was copper cable. I followed its path and saw that it went up to the very top of the ceiling, across the roof struts of the main gallery, down the other side and vanished through the floor. The room that I was in was forty-feet high, and it was easily two-hundred feet across the gallery.

The only reason this was still there was because it was so well hidden, tucked away in the beams and camouflaged in the grunge. The meth-head scrappers were so caught up in the half-inch and other small EMT conduits they’d never thought to look for the main power feeds that supplied whole sections of the plant.

The problem was, how in the hell were we going to get it down? This stuff weighs about fifteen-pounds to the foot. It’s thicker than my arm, and comprised of three stranded cables, each over an inch thick, entwined in padding and insulation, and all wrapped in a metallic shell with a red plastic outer jacket. It’s tough, heavy, and worth several dollars a pound...

...that is if you can move it, if you can cut it, and if you can get it out of the ceiling without killing yourself.

I got on my radio and the whole team assembled. We all had a quiet freakout when the team realized the gravity of our discovery, and also how hard it would be to get it out of there. Certainly, this was a great place to have to push, pull, lift, and haul tons of materials at once. The problem was that none of the old material-handling equipment was there anymore, and we didn’t have any kind of power to use tools as it was. The building was a long dead carcass at this point, and we were the absolute last team that would be in there before giant machines turned the whole place into tidy piles of steel, concrete, stainless, and glass.

We needed a plan, and one that would work on human power. 

We all headed back to the lab and assembled every harness, rope, comealong, and sling we could find. I pulled out my climbing bags and non-industrial harnesses as well. The next morning we all met at the lab, and then headed over to “Site-T” as we had come to call it. Now, we had a whole new mission.

This old abandoned building was about to become fundraising for our little nonprofit and help us keep the heat on all winter.

We set to work with slings and come-alongs. A come-along (pronounced without the hyphen and in three smashed together syllables while holding a Vernor’s and smoking a Camel), is a lever-actuated ratchet and pawl winch. Smaller ones have a piece of aircraft cable that winds around a drum, and larger ones use a chain and cog mechanism that can let an average man rip a tree out of the ground. They’re small, portable, don’t require electricity or gasoline, and are incredibly powerful. They’re also dangerous as hell if you don’t know what you’re doing. If an attachment slips, if you overload one, or if anything lets go they can slingshot the tail and that piece of aircraft cable moving at Mach speed will slice you to the bone before you even know you’re bleeding.

Stupid hurts and scars carry lessons.

The cables ran in a metal tray for most of their length. The tray was steel, and looked like a ladder with flat rungs. Like everything else in the whole place, it was covered in eighty-years of paper dust that formed a hard, grey shell on everything. The parts up in the main gallery had an extra layer of pigeon shit, just for flavour.

It was slow work with hacksaws and flashlights. A single piece, about three-feet-long was about as much as you wanted to carry at one time if you had to walk any real distance. In most cases, it was about a 2-city-block walk back to the truck. So we worked in teams, some cutting, and most hauling. It was filthy, grueling, exhausting work that went on for days.

After getting all of the low-hanging fruit, it was time to get the main runs down from the ceiling. We’d cut the ends back at the switchgear cabinets free as high as we could reach while standing on the cabinets. But that still left about twenty feet of cables hanging from the ceiling. From there they ran all the way across the gallery and down the other side. They went through a hole in each floor with a bunch of other pipes and conduits. At the bottom they made a bend in the lowest floor, a sub-basement about seventy feet down from the top of the run up in the roof. The bottom run was suspended in a tray along the ceiling of the basement and ran through the maze of pipes that fed the old mill.

We’d gotten everything we could easily reach, and now it was time for the hard stuff.

With a hodgepodge of slings tied to everything we could reach that was solidly bolted down, we hooked up to just one of the three cables. The plan was to pull them out, one at a time, and let them just pile up on the floor. We’d cut it, haul it, and then pull the next one down. The only thing left holding the cables in place at this point was gravity, but there was a hell of a lot of gravity in one of these cables.

There was also, we learned quickly, a lot of stretch. 

We were spread out along the length of the run. A small group was working the winches in the basement, the rest were stationed in ones and twos strung from hell to breakfast. We all had our radios and were in communication, but for the most part it was a nearly silent process that involved a lot of standing around and smoking a cigarette while watching nothing much happen.

I was up in the ceiling, sitting on a pair of old steam pipes that ran parallel to the cable tray. I was at the top level, about ten feet from the last bend where they dropped down to terminate at the switchgear cabinets. My job was simple, report when it started to move. Once the end of the cable passed by me, my job was to inch along with it and give progress reports. We knew it would take hours to pull it out of there. I got comfortable and listened to the cable tick quietly as they slowly worked the ratchet a quarter-mile away from me.

The basement team worked slowly, a synchronized team all working their levers together in time. I could hear the sound of them ratcheting their come-alongs as it echoed up from the depths of the mill across the cavernous gallery where I sat.

The quiet of the mill was awesome. Every few seconds I would hear the cable tick off in the distance ahead of me. They were pulling on the far end, and ever so slowly they were putting more and more tension on the cable. By now it was easily several thousand pounds at the far end. It was fascinating to realise that something so big, so heavy, could actually stretch. Their end had already moved by a few feet, while mine sat perfectly still.

Then suddenly…..BRRRRRT! The cable moved about six inches and I nearly pissed myself. It was loud, damn loud, and I startled out of my daydreaming when the whole tray made the sound as the ribbed surface of the cable dragged over the rungs in the tray. A dozen pigeons took flight from the rafters and either went out the smashed windows near the ceiling or did laps around the gallery before picking a new spot to sit. It sent a shower of dust and birdshit raining down on the gallery, falling into the giant holes below and settling into the darkness. 

The radio cracked to life as everyone checked in. We were all fine, but we all had a healthy dose of fear. We knew we’d awoken a sleeping Giant, and we all had a serious respect for the dangerous combination of energy, weight, and heights we were working with. This was especially true for my dumb ass perched up in the rafters sitting only a few feet from the Giant’s tail.

The dust settled and the silence was again broken by the ratcheting off in the depths of the mill and the rhythmic ticking of the cable. Every thirty seconds or so the tension would release as the cable shifted with a BRRRRRRRT and moved along another six inches.

This was going to take a while.

I got comfortable, I enjoyed the view from my perch and passed the time smoking cigarettes and keeping track of the slow climb of the end of the cable. Over the next hour the pattern of the ticks and the BRRRRTs had stayed pretty constant and while progress was slow, it was consistent.

After an hour or two, the pattern started to change, and that got my attention. The cable went BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT for a solid ten seconds, which is a lifetime in that situation, and moved about two feet. 

My asshole did a fantastic impersonation of a rabbit’s nose.

This was a lot more than the six or eight inches we had been getting. I got on the radio and asked if everything was ok and everyone said they were fine. I told them about the development on my end, and everyone along the length had seen or heard it as it happened. We took this as good progress, and continued on.

Things started moving a lot faster now. We all woke up from our cable-pulling trance and focused. The Giant was stirring.

The cable started moving a few feet at a time, a few times a minute. The basement team kept pulling, and I could see the end just over the edge from the switchgear area. We’d moved the whole run almost twenty feet.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrth 

That was different…...the cable moved about ten feet and I saw the end flop up and over the turn at the switchgear area. It was maybe five feet from my perch. The whole cable moved, and then shifted gears and slowed down to a crawl before stopping. Before it had just stopped.

You couldn't get a pin up my ass with a jackhammer. I heard the radio say “Look alive! Shit’s moving!” and I replied to the team with “Everyone be ready to run and find a shady spot”.

A minute later, it did it again, BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrth and I watched the end drag on past me. I turned in my perch and debated following it along the pipes up here, or climbing down and watching from the slightly safer vantage point of the ground. See, up here, there was no way I could get out of the way. At least on the ground I could run. 

I was just off to the side of the pipes, standing on the unistrut racks over the switchgear cabinets with my head just under the cable tray when it happened.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

And that’s when the world exploded.

The cable didn’t slow down, it accelerated, quickly. The forces had reached their tipping point and there was a lot more gravity pulling down on the vertical run than there was friction from the long horizontal run. We had given it a gentle nudge of a few tons and once it had reached the tipping point, gravity took over. Several tons of cable was now in motion, turning potential into kinetic energy and building inertia. The fundamental forces of the universe were thrashing to come back into balance. It was like watching entropy have a bad acid trip.

I hugged the unistrut rack I was climbing on, being very aware of the vulnerability and openness of my current position and tried very hard not to piss down my leg. I mostly succeeded.

The sound was deafening. People always describe things like this as comparing them to a freight train. Fuck your freight train. I’ve stood next to a thousand freight trains over the years and none of them sounded even remotely like this. The ribbed conduit flew over the rungs in the cabletray and sounded like a thousand chainsaws competing in the Indy500 while being shelled with naval artillery. The loose end of the cable, now moving at highway speeds whipped into mounts and pipes and hangers and destroyed anything it touched, exploding into a rain of shrapnel and dust. The entire ceiling turned into a plume of birdshit and paper dust, and the building shook to its foundations as the cable made the corner from the rafters to the drop and flew from its vertical run to just land limp on the concrete floor in a gigantic pile.

The silence was even more deafening than the armageddon I had just experienced. The echos took half a minute to die out in the bowels of the old mill.

The radio went apeshit as a dozen people all tried to see how many of us had died. God had smiled on us, though some of us would have to change our shorts, nobody had so much as a scratch. A couple members of the team didn’t stop running until they were on the other end of the building, one even ran all the way outside and it was still falling after they made it out there.

It felt like we had slayed a Giant.  We all gathered at the Giant’s pile on the floor of the main gallery. There was a smaller pile in the basement, but the cable had bent and hung up here and dropped the majority of itself in a tangle. We were thankful for that, it saved having to haul it up a few flights of stairs. We all took a minute to just breathe, have a smoke, and let the adrenaline pass. None of us were expecting such an experience, but there wasn’t a person standing there who didn’t have a smile on their face.

We headed out for a couple hours, to get a quick shower, change our clothes, and grab something to eat. But every single one of us was back at the lab, ready to go shortly after. We went back to the old mill and repeated the experience, twice, by morning.

It took us days to get the piles cut to portable pieces. We got smart though, and learned we could haul them up to the door in fifty-foot lengths by dragging them as a team. Then we’d cut them up near the truck and just load them on.

The scrap value from all that cable paid the rent, kept the lights on, and fed the team for quite a while. The experience of nearly dying in the rafters of a paper mill though, that was priceless.

I enjoy being happy in dangerous ways, and I can now say, I know what the end of the world sounds like.