Papertown Strong
I know something about structures that continue to dictate terms long after they’ve stopped producing what they promised. It doesn’t happen with a decision, it happens in increments.
The rust bleeds down corrugated metal. The conveyer belts stand frozen and littered with debris. The lungs no longer exhale steam and sulfur into the sky. A chain link fence stands as a barrier that we’ve long forgotten. Moving around it was never a choice. Quietly, the river that gave the structure its power still moves in the background. Refusing to remember. There are no men with hard hats and lunch pails punching the clock. The parking lot grows sumac now. The whistle no longer blows. What was once the lifeblood of the community is now an empty trellis to entertain the kudzu.
Every road in town still knows how to find the mill. The lunch counters still open at dawn, though no one is coming off third shift anymore. It rises over the town, standing tall like a Christmas tree that’s still up in the middle of March. Uncomfortable at first, but it fades. We still refer to it as a paper town, even though paper stopped leaving that mill years ago.
We live around it. Argue about what should be done with it. Some want apartments. Some want a warehouse. Some want a park. Some want jobs. Some want the whole thing torn down. Most just want someone else to decide. In the meantime, the kudzu has put forth its own proposal. Men still swap stories about what it was like on the inside. They lived in the belly of the beast, watching the world around live and die. They can tell you which machine took a finger, which foreman was an asshole, which winter the river froze, and which shift paid for a daughter’s braces. Their memories are more detailed than the town records.
The tourists passing through don’t realize that the town is a paperless paper town. They’ll grab a latte from Papertown Coffee and drive past the mill. Perhaps someone in the car will ask if maybe the mill is closed today. Another will ask if it’s a holiday. Someone consults a calendar. It isn’t. As they drive the road that wraps around the parameter tightly, where mounds of wood chips used to sit, they’ll notice something strange. Broken windows. Heaps of scrapped materials. Decay. Before they can name what feels off about the place, they’re discussing lunch, trailheads, and where to buy souvenirs.
The town isn’t afraid of losing the work. Those jobs already left. If the mill is torn down, what else goes with it? A monument? Local mythology? Proof of suffering? Will men still trade stories about boiler rooms, fires, and near death experiences. When the smell of sulfur doesn’t reach I-40 and demand an answer, do folks passing through know we are there? Do the wives feel disoriented with a warm body that stays in their bed past the 3am alarm? Does the Christmas parade know the route without the smoke stacks sending signals?
When the floods came, the river climbed the banks and carried refrigerators down Main Street. It filled basements with mud and left people cooking on camp stoves. In the weeks that followed, one phrase appeared on every sign, every T-shirt, every church marquee:
Papertown Strong.
A slogan, a prayer, a dare.
The language of people who learned that a mechanism could absorb their pain. A sentiment of people who always had the mill not as a source of economy, but as a source of survival.
I know something about structures that continue to dictate terms long after they’ve stopped producing what they promised. It doesn’t happen with a decision, it happens in increments. A broken window. Kudzu. An empty parking lot. The sort of changes that seem temporary until you realize they’ve become the landscape.
It began the way it always does. Something unsettling. A diagnosis, the collapse of a relationship, the shock of a decision. At first it’s innocent. “I don’t have an appetite.” And “Stress makes it difficult to eat.” A few months later what was initiated in circumstance fades into something sustained by ritual.
At first it is a temporary workaround. A bypass. A way to keep the machinery running through a difficult season. Suddenly, things ran efficiently. There were less things to worry about. Financially, things became simple. The list was robust at the start: eggs, apples, lettuce, string cheese, pistachios, chicken, beans, rice, hummus. A Mediterranean diet!
Slowly, food felt less safe. Rice left first. Then hummus. Beans were next. Apples took a back seat, but they became a treat. Eventually, nothing felt better than something. The dull gnawing of my stomach. The lightheaded feeling after a three mile hike. The emotional numbing. The heightened focus. The euphoric realization that I had this one thing to myself.
Then I remember: every road knows how to find the mill. Entire days became structured around what I would and would not eat. I stopped reaching out to friends. I declined dinner invitations. I became a creative avoider. And I knew I should stop.
The thing is, if I stopped what was I afraid would go with it? Clarity? Simplification? Or was it something deeper? What identity was I trying to white knuckle?
I chuckled as I wrote that last sentence. I wrote it in past tense. As if I have evolved and healed. As if I invited the bulldozers and demolition crews in. That’s not true.
In the morning I wake up and shower, and start to get dressed. “My underwear have stretched.”
“These pants need to be washed and maybe they’ll shrink.”
“My watch band is on the last hole.”
But I don’t confront the real thing. It’s not that I don’t know how to let go of a thing that is no longer serving me. It’s that I have no idea how to tell when something has stopped serving me.