Paper: The senses remember

With one last painting to go in the Astro-Plants series, I ran out of paper (the backyard wasp's nest wouldn't do) and had to hike out (2 bus transfers!) for a pristine 10-pack of Strathmore Gemini 140# Cold-Pressed 22" x 30" watercolour paper. The very description is mouth-watering. Back home, I savoured its weight and texture with a satisfaction that was almost physical. Well, no wonder. Paper and I go a long way back.

I spent most of my first eight years in a little paper mill town in the foothills of NY State's Adirondacks. In that simpler post-WW II era, it was a child's wonderland of endless summers roaming free and unaccompanied in fields and woods, and winters of deep snows and crystalline games. For adults, though, the horizons and pleasures must have seemed smaller. When our family had out-of-town guests, for example, the major entertainment was a tour of the mill, conducted by my father who was its Chief Engineer (shown here).

Of course, I would tag along -- ordinarily, the mill grounds were off-limits to kids. We'd go on a Sunday, when visitors wouldn't be in the way of the skeleton crew that kept things moving. In the timeless design of millworks, the building descended in steps along the slope of the falls. We'd enter at the street level of my dad's office and walk down deserted hallways to the wire-cage elevator that could carry a full shift of men to the depths -- a device open on both ends, which I found rather scary.

Scarier still (though I was an old hand at mill tours) was the clanging roar that literally shook the mill building -- the great metal rollers that (at tour's end) spewed out huge ripply expanses of newsprint, the mill's stock in trade. But it was an earlier stage in the process that's imprinted in my memory -- the pulp room, the place where sulphur hit wood chips in a great steaming mass.

Outdoors, the sulphur sat in a storeys-high yellow-green pile ("Why can't we play in it?"); indoors, its taste and smell pervaded the whole working part of the mill, and we'd be breathing it before the elevator hit bottom. (When we first came to Vancouver and I spotted the North Shore's conical sulphur pile, my heart skipped a beat). My father would hold us back a minute with a cautionary, "Careful now," and we would almost glide out onto the wet floor -- wet from the steam of the brewing pulp. Great vats of this greenish-yellow mash churned and burbled, producing a humidity that made your clothes stick.

Fast-forward to the mid-1980s, when I read a fascinating book that chronicled the reactions of American workers whose traditional industries were rapidly computerizing. One interviewed mill worker said (and yes, I remember it almost verbatim):

I've worked in the pulp room for 20 years, and my job is to keep the mash brewing with the right mix at the right rate and the right temperature. In my new job, I sit in this glass room looking out over the vats, and I look at these gauges and they're supposed to tell me. I used to work down there in the room, and you didn't even have to think about it. You smell it. You taste it. You feel it. The minute you walk in the room, you know if things are brewing up right. They say this new way is better, but I don't know.

I knew exactly what he meant.

Whether or not "the new way was better," the Gould Paper Company's days were already numbered. By the mid-1950s, my family and those of all my friends had moved on as the men (yes) found greener pastures in the post-war economic boom. The mill limped along, with different owners, until it folded in 2000. The town is still there, less vibrant I'm sure than my memories.

But for me, there are so many legacies from those days: Among them, a treasured friendship, an intense rapport with the natural world, and a thrill at the whiteness of paper.