Over the course of the forty years or so since I graduated from High School, I've had the opportunity to try my hand at a number of trades, which is a very polite way of saying that I've had (and lost) a lot of jobs. Most have been unremarkable, mundane employments but one or two occupy special little niches in my memory. One of these was my tour of duty as a quality control inspector in a dynamite factory. Now, contrary to what you might be thinking, I didn't get to test the quality of the product by blowing things up, but instead was limited to weighing and inspecting individual sticks, checking for obvious manufacturing flaws. Others, more fortunate than I, got to blow things up. This is not to imply that my job didn't come with a certain amount of excitement. After all, I was still working in a facility where various arcane ingredients, including nitroglycerin, were mixed together to create a product nearly indispensable for the removal of unwanted things from your life, such as stumps, large rocks, annoying neighbors, troublesome rivals (in business or love), overbearing government agencies, or hands, arms and sundry other body parts. Yes, dynamite is wonderful stuff and its manufacture can truly be an adventure. Total non sequitur, but isn't it strange that the man who created the Nobel prizes, including the one for peace, made his fortune manufacturing high explosives?
I began my career at the powder plant during one of the early breaks in my quest for a college education—a quest that eventually spanned thirty four years. Dropping out of school meant an abrupt halt to my G.I. Bill checks and, being one of those wimpy people who can't go without eating for any appreciable length of time, I was strongly motivated to find work, and in that place and at that time, work meant the powder plant.
The "Boomy House," as it was referred to locally, wasn't actually a house, or even a factory in the conventional sense. It was a series of wooden frame buildings strung in two parallel lines up the side of a gently sloping hill, connected by a sort of narrow gauge railway. There were subtle little reminders that this was a dangerous business in the layout of the lines. The process of producing dynamite began at the top of the hill with the most dangerous step, in the mix house. This was where the nitro was added to the dry ingredients. This mixture was trucked down the line to the stuffing house where it was stuffed into paper tubes to form the sticks. These were taken to the next house where they were dipped in hot paraffin, weighed and inspected by yours truly, and packed into boxes. Next stop was the loading dock, where these fifty pound boxes were packed into semi-tractor trailers. Each little building was surrounded by an earthen dike or revetmemt, the purpose of which was to direct the force of an explosion upward in the unhappy event that one of the houses went "boomy." The railroad running up and down the hillside had wooden rails. In fact, where ever possible, wood was substituted for metal or anything else capable of producing a spark when struck. Employees were issued cotton uniforms—buttons, no zippers—safety shoes containing no nails, and plastic, rather than steel, toes. The first thing new hires were told and told and told and thereafter constantly reminded of by word of mouth and posters and signs in big letters on every available wall, was that possession of any spark producing device on the line was grounds for immediate termination and the union (the Teamsters, no less) would not lift a finger to save your job. This, of course, presented a problem and, in some cases, a challenge to those of us (about 75% at that time) who smoked. The only place on the whole site where you were allowed to light up was in the shower house at the bottom of the line. We were given two fifteen minute breaks and a thirty minute lunch break each shift, during which we had to run, through the woods in the dark, down the hill to the shower house, suck down as much nicotine as possible, in a small non ventilated room with fifty or sixty other guys doing the same, then run back up the hill before break was over. The first few minutes back in the packing house were really ugly. Imagine, if you can, a bunch of overweight, out of shape smokers, after a quarter mile run uphill, wheezing, coughing and hacking up God-only-knows what. Yes, moving right along, now. Some of the truly dedicated smokers—those with even more of a death wish than most—kept cigarettes and (gasp!) spark producing devices such as lighters and matches hidden in the woods near the building so they could sneak out for a smoke when no one was looking. Sounds incredible, doesn't it?
Wacko nicotine fiends weren't the only dangerous people around. There was one incredibly unwise gentleman who worked on the "jelly" line. Now "jelly" is a substance with a consistency similar to wet oatmeal which is used in heavy blasting such as mining or anything else that requires the removal of hills or mountains. It is wet because it is either forty or fifty percent nitro—it's hard to remember these details after thirty years or so. Anyway, suffice it to say, it doesn't require much to set this stuff off. The pressure always quoted was about forty psi or a good stomp of your foot. Remember the aforementioned unwise gentleman? It seems he was a semi-pro wrestler who, in his quest to maintain a suitably muscular physique, would take large handfuls of jelly and throw it against the wall of the stuffing house. Yes, immediate termination of employment and the union didn't say a damn thing.
There were other dangers associated with working at the boomy house that didn't involve getting blown up. I mentioned the railway connecting the houses. What I didn't mention was the motive power of the wooden cars with wooden wheels which ran upon it. Mules. Mules wearing rubber boots. One old trucker (for some unknown reason, the mule drivers were called truckers) told me that a mule would work faithfully for you for twenty years just to get one good chance to kick hell out of you. They also bit and passed enormous quantities of methane gas. Thank goodness for the ban on spark producing devices.
I only worked at the powder plant for a few months before I decided it wasn't the proper career choice for me. I made up some lame excuse when I gave my notice to Big Jim the foreman, but he knew why I was leaving. I was scared. There were too many stupid people on the hill, too many thunderstorms (damn, I forgot to tell you about the thunderstorms!), just too many different ways for things to go wrong. Jim looked at me for a moment then proceeded to tell me a story of a boy who had quit for the same reasons I wasn't giving him and two weeks later was killed when the log truck he was driving lost its brakes on a down hill curve. I thanked him for the inspirational story and quit anyway. That was in 1971 and I haven't once regretted the decision. So, Big Jim, if you're still out there, I'm still alive and well and avoiding log trucks like the plague.

Chuck Hocter earned a B.A. in Creative Writing at Central Missouri State University. He and his wife live in Centerview. (See his poems, this issue.)

Copyright © 2006. Do not reproduce without permission.

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