Ha, my girlfriend says I’d do a lot more writing if I didn’t play so many video games. I’m sure she’s right; but I do so love my games. But I promised you an update on my new job, and I’m overdue, so let’s do it.
My Google maps timeline used to have me all over the state of Indiana and the wider region, with occasional jaunts as far as Boston or New York. Now my places visited are only around Bloomington and up to Muncie and Marion, to visit family. Because, of course, I was a truck driver and now I work in a limestone mill; my little corner of the world.
There are several areas that I sometimes work but my main station is at “the splitter,” where limestone slabs of various thicknesses are split with a press into specific dimensions leaving a rough finish to the split edge. The press is housed in a “shed,” about 30’ square, walled on three sides and open in the front. In the winter a tarp can be dropped across the gap but for most of the year it remains open to the light and air. My back is to it most of the time but across the entry drive to the mill grows a stand of hardwoods, with a couple of pine trees thrown in. A bit of natural bedrock peeks out from the embankment on which they grow as well as the jumbled ends of broken and discarded cut stone covered with so much leaf and needle fall that they’ve become a part of the hill. We also store some of our finished product along this hill waiting to be put on a truck, what I used to do.
The stone comes down a conveyor from the press and I pick it up with a vacuum lift, a machine that grabs ahold of the stone by suction and allows me to lift it effortlessly. I then place the stone on a pallet along with other stones of the same dimensions. I sometimes work on as many as three or four different sizes at once, trying to maximize what we can get out of a slab. I send any waste stone down a different conveyor to empty into a steel box which is periodically emptied.
The stone feeds into the splitter via a gravity ramp that extends out the back of the building. Part of my job is to help guide the operator as he positions the raw slabs onto this ramp with a forklift. I then roll them down the ramp, sending one into the building and staging more outside for later. It’s an old ramp, some of the rollers stick and others are missing. It can be tricky coaxing the stone to its destination, particularly the thicker slabs, six inch or greater. I had a lot of trouble when I first started, but like everything; one learns. I once had a small piece that had broken off another slab fall through the opening where a roller was missing. Now I know to position such pieces at an angle to extend their length to bridge the gap.
Powered by gravity the end of the feed ramp is raised about a foot and a half off the ground. Add to this the fact that the splitter shed itself sits on top of a small hill and I have a pretty good view behind the building. To the west I can see across the “Bone Yard,” a flat desert of lime about a quarter of a mile wide, to a line of trees. In the summer my gaze stops there but now, with the trees bare, I can see the roofs of houses in the valley behind our property, and to southwest I can see the stoplight on highway 46 at Curry Pike and little toy cars and trucks moving east and west.
The Bone Yard is lined with stacks of odd stone that weren’t needed at one time but might come in handy later. I assume someone knows what’s out there. Beyond that, on the edge of the yard, are piles of waste stone and lime dust, waiting to be bulldozed over the side, extending the desert a little further. I’m told that we’re just about to the little stream that bounds the property. After that we’ll have to start piling the waste up, make a mountain of lime like the Bybee and 3D mills do.
The Bone Yard extends about three quarters of a mile to the south, but directly south of me the view is dominated by “the New Building.” It’s not new anymore but it’s still called that and in a complex where most of the structures are 80 to 100 years old it is new, having been built about 10 years ago. I sometimes work in the New Building, on the “pitch and drip” line. It’s an automated line that adds a chipped “rockface” to the front of treads and sills, and a condensation channel to sills. It uses a larger version of the vacuum lift to load the stone on one side, and another to pick the stone up again at the end to place onto a pallet. Sometimes pieces are too small to use the lift and must be fed and “caught” by hand. That’s true at the splitter too, on occasion.
The other place that I sometimes work is at the 36-inch saw. It does the same thing that the splitter does except that the surface of the stone is smooth, rather than rough. There are two “beds” on either side of the saw, mounted on rails. When one bed is finished being cut it is moved out from the saw shed and the other is moved in to begin sawing it. The saw sits under the tramway and an overhead crane loads raw slabs onto the beds and lifts the finished stone off them. That’s where I come in. As a “hooker” I help the crane operator to place the slabs on an empty bed and when one comes out I prepare the stone and then guide the operator, who sits in a doghouse up above, to lift the stone and “fly” it over to a pallet. The preparation entails removing waste, arranging the pieces into manageable groups and moving the boards that the cutting was done on so that the straps of the crane can be gotten under the edges of the stone to lift it.
One thing about working in a stone mill: you’re either working hard, or hardly working. There’s a lot of down time while you wait for processes to complete before you jump in to do your part. That’s especially true at the 36-inch saw. It can only go so fast through a piece of limestone and if it’s a big slab being cut into small pieces it can take a long time. Part of a hooker’s job is to keep the mill supplied with various items that are used regularly. We make many of our own pallets, sticks need to be cut to go under prepared pieces so that the crane straps can be gotten out, and homosote, cellulite board used to cushion the stone, needs to be cut into various sizes. There’s a table saw down by the 36 to do all of that. Still, there’s only so much of that one can do. I get a lot of reading in, which isn’t bad, but time goes quicker when the work is steady, and then I get to feeling like I’m being interrupted when it’s time to work again.
Most of the year the work is steady at the splitter. (Once I was unhappy sitting around at the 36 but when I went back up to the splitter I realized I was going to have to work again; never satisfied!) But now that it’s winter each slab needs to be warmed up before it can be run, or it doesn’t split well. I can get some more reading in.
It’s 50/50 in the New Building. If you’re on the line and there’s stone to run then it’s ok, but if you’re just an extra hand or there isn’t any stone cut it’s miserable. The foreman of the New Building takes a dim view of workers doing something for themselves on company time. He doesn’t care if what you’re doing is worthless or redundant, long as it’s not pleasurable. I should mention that doesn’t apply to him or Steve, the 64-inch saw operator, which is housed in the New Building. They spend a lot of time sitting at the picnic table joking around.
It’s understandable paying workers during down times. Like those guys on the road crew leaning on their shovels. They aren’t needed at the moment, but they will be needed shortly, and it can’t be done without them. I’m grateful that for the most part I can use that down time to my advantage. But what’s even better is that even if there’s legitimately nothing for me to do, they are willing to pay me just to be there, so that I can get my hours in. They don’t have to do that, and I appreciate it. The other day the splitter operator had to stay home with a sick child. The New Building was fully staffed and the 36 wasn’t running. I wasn’t asked to leave; I was put into the New Building as an extra hand. I asked if I could go home and was told OK. It’s too much work trying to find something to look busy at. I would have been practically in the way!
So that’s it in a nutshell. There’s a lot more, of course, both about the mill and about my part in it. I like it well enough, and I’m proud to be a part of the storied limestone industry. It’s just a line job but there are elements of craftsmanship involved; knowing the stone and how to make it behave or trimming it with a hammer and chisel when it doesn’t split right. I’m learning new things all the time.
I used to strap my loads down up by the splitter when I would pick up there at Hoadley, back when I was a driver. I remember watching the guy who had my job and thinking, “What a boring job!” There was a lot of “sour grapes” in that. Now that I’m in the job I see that there’s a lot more to it than I imagined, and when it comes down to it, I’m super glad that I’m not driving any longer. I can’t tell you how glad I am that that nightmare is over with.
Of course drivers are in demand right now and able to garner some high wages. I would have been stuck with Stone Belt in any case, as the job that I had there was the first and only driving job that I’ve ever seen that gave me a full weekend off. But even if I got another raise and there hadn’t been any personality conflicts I would still be better off where I am now. I was a little apprehensive when I got my first paycheck. It hadn’t been entirely clear what I’d be making, I just knew that it was an opportunity and I wanted to quit driving. It turned out that I was making two dollars more an hour than I had been at Stone Belt, and I’ve gotten a dollar fifty an hour raise since, plus two $1,000 bonuses. I couldn’t believe it; I got my first bonus when I’d only been there for three weeks. Thank my lucky stars! How many people get a raise when they do a career change?
The only thing that I want to add right now is to tell you about the bobcat. No, not the small utility vehicle, we have one of those. We have a real bobcat, a wild predator, that calls Hoadley home. It’s been seen several times, by several different people. I haven’t seen it there at work, but I unmistakably saw a bobcat attempt to cross the road on walnut street where it climbs the hill between Cascades Park and Griffy Lake. It turned around and dashed back into the woods when it saw me coming. That’s close enough that it could have been the same cat, but then again, we know that there are more of them in the area because our bobcat has kittens, and somebody must be the father. We’re not within city limits, but we’re not far out either. I think it’s great that something so wild could be living so close, beneath our very noses.
P.S. I'll add a picture of the Bone Yard soon.
