The Coals, Waiting To Become Ash
Yesterday the United States Gypsum Corporation (or USG) announced the January 31st 2011 closing of its mine and plant in Empire, Nevada. Residents of the Empire – the last company town in the west – will have until June 20th 2011 to leave their homes, at which time the mine, plant, and entire town will be “idled.” One hundred employees and their families will have to leave the area to search for work and housing.
Those are the bare facts of the story. The reality is, of course, far less sterile and far more terrible. What is actually going to happen is that my community is going to die – and, as I predicted in the introduction to An Unforgiving Land, a way of life is going to pass forever from the earth, largely un-mourned save by the few of us that have lived it.
Empire Nevada has been in existence since the 1920s. Many of the people who work for USG there are second or third generation miners and factory workers. I personally have a friend that worked for the company for 42 years. It’s a very small but relatively pleasant place whose roads are lined with shade trees and slightly ramshackle duplexes. It has a community center, a small airport, a swimming pool, a golf course, and two churches (Protestant and Catholic), all backstopping the enormous edifice of concrete and steel that is the board plant. All of this is set back a half mile from the road. The first thing most people see when they approach the town, however, is the Empire Store on 447: the only store in northern Washoe County.
But within a matter of weeks the massive chimneys of that factory, which I have watched billow steam since I first came out here fifteen years ago, will go completely still for the first time in 90 years, and the lights of Empire will wink out one by one until they are no more. All of my friends that live there will be gone, scattered outward into a busy, hostile, and strange world in a slow Diaspora of rural, white, and working-class people who are in many cases unaccustomed to the sheer volume of crap that is 21st century urban life. A way of life – and not the worst one I’ve seen in my 40 years, either – will cease to exist outside of footnotes on Wikipedia and the odd story told to children raised somewhere else.
I suppose I should be angry with the USG Corporation. They would make easy villains, especially to someone who distrusts and dislikes urban America as much as myself. They’re based in Chicago, are a Fortune 500 company, have an annual revenue of 4.61 Billion, and operate 21 gypsum board plants and 14 gypsum mines in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But, as someone who has operated a business, I find it hard to hate a company for simply trying to survive. A quick glance at the facts show that USG’s been in and out of bankruptcy for years, mostly as the result of a hostile takeover attempt in 1987 and continuing asbestos legislation. It’s stock prices have gone up and down – though mostly down - in an unhealthy manner, and it’s now competing unsuccessfully with cheap imported sheetrock from our BFF (Or is that our master?) China. Simply put: the company as a whole is either not profitable or barely so, and this is a corner they’ve decided to cut in their struggle to meet the conditions of their “Joint Plan of Reorganization,” as their most recent bankruptcy is called.
It’s simple, unpleasant math, administered as is usual in Nevada by faceless men on the other side of a continent.
Of course, the whole “idle” thing is garbage. The factory will never actually reopen, and the town will never repopulate. How could it? Within two years this entire region will be dead, and there will be nothing to attract potential workers to it. USG will wait a year for everything to die down, and then a salvage company will come in and strip everything out of the town right down to the copper piping in the walls. Within 20 years Empire will be little more than foundations, a huge, crumbling industrial structure, a couple of very elderly people who’ve been somehow forgotten about in their little decaying houses, and dying trees.
And, in all likelihood, Gerlach will be a variation on this same, melancholy theme.
Those of you who are familiar with the area know that Gerlach and Empire – technically referred to as the Gerlach-Empire Area – are really the same town. Empire is by-and-large the “neighborhood” with the families, churches, and people who work. Gerlach is the place with the hippies, bars, and retirees. Together they have a population of roughly 400, counting the people who live in the scattering of farms and ranches nearby: just enough people to have 75 school-age children between them and support a restaurant, a store, two gas stations, and three bars.
Now, much as the death of a Siamese twin quickly slays her sister, Gerlach is going to die, because a community without children is dead. 68 of our school-age children are going to have to leave, leaving a total of seven. That’s right: seven. Of the 30 employees of our school system, no more than two or three will be allowed to stay, and those only to teach kindergarten through eighth grade. All older children will have to be home schooled – an outcome which Washoe County has dreamed of for years in its never-ending, epic quest to defund its northern territory.
Oh, I know some of you reading this work for the county, and probably don’t like me saying this sort of thing. And most of you are nice people and mean well enough. But in the interest of complete honesty (And what’s the point of a blog – essentially, a public diary - if it isn’t honesty?), during a recent meeting about the closing of our medical clinic, I had some loud, unpleasant, and unfriendly things to say to county representatives. You know the type: the smiling, condescending facemen and power-helmet-women that governments and corporations send out when they have to actually interact with the local rednecks. The kind of people that, when they get back into their white cars with the symbol on the doors, talk about what an ugly place this is and how all the people are old and how they hate driving all the way up here.
These same people have contacted recently about changing what I had to say “for the final record” of the meeting. So let me say this: I only regret that I didn’t say more, harsher things to you, because Washoe County is the enemy of everyone who lives north of the Pyramid Lake Reservation.
Need proof? Let’s review some facts:
1) We had our own law enforcement under a constable system. Washoe County took that away and replaced it with their deputies. (No offense to our two local deputies: this isn’t directed at you personally.)
2) We had our own judge. Washoe County took that away and replaced it with nothing.
3) Washoe County tried to shut our senior center down over a $13,000 budget shortfall, while at the same time approving 1.5 million for an “open area” for the homeless to camp in downtown Reno. (Because, apparently, they’re more deserving than Gerlach’s elderly.)
4) Washoe County failed to warn us or offer to make up the budget shortfall of $160,000 when Nevada Heath Centers decided to shut down our clinic, while fully knowing they were about to get an additional 3.2 million in tax revenue from our area in 2011 with no outlay, due to the natural gas pipeline being built out here.
(I guess now we know why, don’t we? You knew something we didn’t: namely, that a ghost town doesn’t need a doctor.)
5) Washoe County has always wanted to shut down fully or in part our schools, and has never made any secret of this. After all, we don’t want valuable resources being spent on a few scraggily hillbillies in the north when there are real, civilized people down in Reno, now do we? And now they are going to get to do what they have always wanted to do: collect property and sales taxes from us and give us little or nothing in return.
So Merry Christmas Washoe County! I hope that property values continue to plummet, the Ruby Pipeline Corporation gets a property tax exemption from the Feds, and you go bankrupt anyhow.
I understand that in Judaism there is a weeklong period of mourning when a beloved family member dies called shiva. Not being Jewish I’ve never done this, but it strikes me as a good custom. So in the spirit of sitting Shiva for a loved one, I promise as an author to morn Empire using words, as fickle and fleeting as they are. It is the least I can do under the circumstances.
I will remember you as best as I am able with my often-poisonous pen. I promise.
As a father and a husband I have no idea what I’m going to do as Empire dies, pulling Gerlach down into the grave with it. It’s not economic. As long as the post office doesn’t close and UPS and FedEx don’t cancel their routs, we can go on being exactly the same amount of poor and in debt as always. But most of my wife’s friends are going to leave, leaving her with little in the way of a social life. The store will almost undoubtedly close, depriving her of her few little, but highly deserved, spontaneous comforts. The children who would have been my daughter’s friends are going to be gone, and I know that Washoe County will fight hard to give my child as little support as possible. I can expect to spend the next 15 years suing them to get the minimum that federal law requires for her.
Come to think of it, all of my carefully laid plans for the precious, wing-plucked angel I call “daughter” are now royally fucked. She will now not be raised around children she can be friends with for the rest of her life, and she will not be educated exclusively by men and women who are friends of mine. For all I know there will be no other children her age for her to play with at all.
All of these things fill me with impotent rage. But whom can I point the stark finger of accusation at? Who can I make myself feel better by hating? The Chinese for making cheap drywall and (rather cleverly) buying up my nation’s debt? That’s too big of a topic socially and economically for me to even wrap my head around. USG? That’s like hating the ocean for being wet. Corporations are not - and cannot be - charities. Washoe County? That’s like being angry at the vultures for eating a dead rabbit off the road, even when you’re a rabbit. You’re beloved mate was dead anyhow, and it’s simply the vulture’s nature to dine on corpses.
So nobody, really. Nobody to blame. Maybe things just die sometimes: pets, people, towns. Even 100-year-old ways of life. Sometimes the life of a thing is like a campfire you build on a cold night. It’s starts out promisingly with sparks and little flames. Then it roars into its prime, giving off more light and heat than anyone could reasonably expect. Eventually it dies down into coals, which can smolder on for what seems like an eternity. But in the end there is nothing but ash blowing away into the wind.
We who will remain are but the coals, waiting to become ash.
Those are the bare facts of the story. The reality is, of course, far less sterile and far more terrible. What is actually going to happen is that my community is going to die – and, as I predicted in the introduction to An Unforgiving Land, a way of life is going to pass forever from the earth, largely un-mourned save by the few of us that have lived it.
Empire Nevada has been in existence since the 1920s. Many of the people who work for USG there are second or third generation miners and factory workers. I personally have a friend that worked for the company for 42 years. It’s a very small but relatively pleasant place whose roads are lined with shade trees and slightly ramshackle duplexes. It has a community center, a small airport, a swimming pool, a golf course, and two churches (Protestant and Catholic), all backstopping the enormous edifice of concrete and steel that is the board plant. All of this is set back a half mile from the road. The first thing most people see when they approach the town, however, is the Empire Store on 447: the only store in northern Washoe County.
But within a matter of weeks the massive chimneys of that factory, which I have watched billow steam since I first came out here fifteen years ago, will go completely still for the first time in 90 years, and the lights of Empire will wink out one by one until they are no more. All of my friends that live there will be gone, scattered outward into a busy, hostile, and strange world in a slow Diaspora of rural, white, and working-class people who are in many cases unaccustomed to the sheer volume of crap that is 21st century urban life. A way of life – and not the worst one I’ve seen in my 40 years, either – will cease to exist outside of footnotes on Wikipedia and the odd story told to children raised somewhere else.
I suppose I should be angry with the USG Corporation. They would make easy villains, especially to someone who distrusts and dislikes urban America as much as myself. They’re based in Chicago, are a Fortune 500 company, have an annual revenue of 4.61 Billion, and operate 21 gypsum board plants and 14 gypsum mines in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But, as someone who has operated a business, I find it hard to hate a company for simply trying to survive. A quick glance at the facts show that USG’s been in and out of bankruptcy for years, mostly as the result of a hostile takeover attempt in 1987 and continuing asbestos legislation. It’s stock prices have gone up and down – though mostly down - in an unhealthy manner, and it’s now competing unsuccessfully with cheap imported sheetrock from our BFF (Or is that our master?) China. Simply put: the company as a whole is either not profitable or barely so, and this is a corner they’ve decided to cut in their struggle to meet the conditions of their “Joint Plan of Reorganization,” as their most recent bankruptcy is called.
It’s simple, unpleasant math, administered as is usual in Nevada by faceless men on the other side of a continent.
Of course, the whole “idle” thing is garbage. The factory will never actually reopen, and the town will never repopulate. How could it? Within two years this entire region will be dead, and there will be nothing to attract potential workers to it. USG will wait a year for everything to die down, and then a salvage company will come in and strip everything out of the town right down to the copper piping in the walls. Within 20 years Empire will be little more than foundations, a huge, crumbling industrial structure, a couple of very elderly people who’ve been somehow forgotten about in their little decaying houses, and dying trees.
And, in all likelihood, Gerlach will be a variation on this same, melancholy theme.
Those of you who are familiar with the area know that Gerlach and Empire – technically referred to as the Gerlach-Empire Area – are really the same town. Empire is by-and-large the “neighborhood” with the families, churches, and people who work. Gerlach is the place with the hippies, bars, and retirees. Together they have a population of roughly 400, counting the people who live in the scattering of farms and ranches nearby: just enough people to have 75 school-age children between them and support a restaurant, a store, two gas stations, and three bars.
Now, much as the death of a Siamese twin quickly slays her sister, Gerlach is going to die, because a community without children is dead. 68 of our school-age children are going to have to leave, leaving a total of seven. That’s right: seven. Of the 30 employees of our school system, no more than two or three will be allowed to stay, and those only to teach kindergarten through eighth grade. All older children will have to be home schooled – an outcome which Washoe County has dreamed of for years in its never-ending, epic quest to defund its northern territory.
Oh, I know some of you reading this work for the county, and probably don’t like me saying this sort of thing. And most of you are nice people and mean well enough. But in the interest of complete honesty (And what’s the point of a blog – essentially, a public diary - if it isn’t honesty?), during a recent meeting about the closing of our medical clinic, I had some loud, unpleasant, and unfriendly things to say to county representatives. You know the type: the smiling, condescending facemen and power-helmet-women that governments and corporations send out when they have to actually interact with the local rednecks. The kind of people that, when they get back into their white cars with the symbol on the doors, talk about what an ugly place this is and how all the people are old and how they hate driving all the way up here.
These same people have contacted recently about changing what I had to say “for the final record” of the meeting. So let me say this: I only regret that I didn’t say more, harsher things to you, because Washoe County is the enemy of everyone who lives north of the Pyramid Lake Reservation.
Need proof? Let’s review some facts:
1) We had our own law enforcement under a constable system. Washoe County took that away and replaced it with their deputies. (No offense to our two local deputies: this isn’t directed at you personally.)
2) We had our own judge. Washoe County took that away and replaced it with nothing.
3) Washoe County tried to shut our senior center down over a $13,000 budget shortfall, while at the same time approving 1.5 million for an “open area” for the homeless to camp in downtown Reno. (Because, apparently, they’re more deserving than Gerlach’s elderly.)
4) Washoe County failed to warn us or offer to make up the budget shortfall of $160,000 when Nevada Heath Centers decided to shut down our clinic, while fully knowing they were about to get an additional 3.2 million in tax revenue from our area in 2011 with no outlay, due to the natural gas pipeline being built out here.
(I guess now we know why, don’t we? You knew something we didn’t: namely, that a ghost town doesn’t need a doctor.)
5) Washoe County has always wanted to shut down fully or in part our schools, and has never made any secret of this. After all, we don’t want valuable resources being spent on a few scraggily hillbillies in the north when there are real, civilized people down in Reno, now do we? And now they are going to get to do what they have always wanted to do: collect property and sales taxes from us and give us little or nothing in return.
So Merry Christmas Washoe County! I hope that property values continue to plummet, the Ruby Pipeline Corporation gets a property tax exemption from the Feds, and you go bankrupt anyhow.
I understand that in Judaism there is a weeklong period of mourning when a beloved family member dies called shiva. Not being Jewish I’ve never done this, but it strikes me as a good custom. So in the spirit of sitting Shiva for a loved one, I promise as an author to morn Empire using words, as fickle and fleeting as they are. It is the least I can do under the circumstances.
I will remember you as best as I am able with my often-poisonous pen. I promise.
As a father and a husband I have no idea what I’m going to do as Empire dies, pulling Gerlach down into the grave with it. It’s not economic. As long as the post office doesn’t close and UPS and FedEx don’t cancel their routs, we can go on being exactly the same amount of poor and in debt as always. But most of my wife’s friends are going to leave, leaving her with little in the way of a social life. The store will almost undoubtedly close, depriving her of her few little, but highly deserved, spontaneous comforts. The children who would have been my daughter’s friends are going to be gone, and I know that Washoe County will fight hard to give my child as little support as possible. I can expect to spend the next 15 years suing them to get the minimum that federal law requires for her.
Come to think of it, all of my carefully laid plans for the precious, wing-plucked angel I call “daughter” are now royally fucked. She will now not be raised around children she can be friends with for the rest of her life, and she will not be educated exclusively by men and women who are friends of mine. For all I know there will be no other children her age for her to play with at all.
All of these things fill me with impotent rage. But whom can I point the stark finger of accusation at? Who can I make myself feel better by hating? The Chinese for making cheap drywall and (rather cleverly) buying up my nation’s debt? That’s too big of a topic socially and economically for me to even wrap my head around. USG? That’s like hating the ocean for being wet. Corporations are not - and cannot be - charities. Washoe County? That’s like being angry at the vultures for eating a dead rabbit off the road, even when you’re a rabbit. You’re beloved mate was dead anyhow, and it’s simply the vulture’s nature to dine on corpses.
So nobody, really. Nobody to blame. Maybe things just die sometimes: pets, people, towns. Even 100-year-old ways of life. Sometimes the life of a thing is like a campfire you build on a cold night. It’s starts out promisingly with sparks and little flames. Then it roars into its prime, giving off more light and heat than anyone could reasonably expect. Eventually it dies down into coals, which can smolder on for what seems like an eternity. But in the end there is nothing but ash blowing away into the wind.
We who will remain are but the coals, waiting to become ash.
posted by Jason Walters | 6:49 PM
4 Comments:
I am going to miss Empire. And it was like you were predicting Empire's and Gerlach's demise. Who would know that it would happen so soon. I didnt even think it would happen in my lifetime. It was just 2 years ago that i was graduating from Gerlach High.
So pessimistic and mostly true. Now lets find some opportunities to save at least part of what we have here before all of it blows away in the wind. Yes there are some good opportunities out there that await us. We just have to find them or make them.
sad. i liked that empire store. i canit believe the school will go from 75 to 7 students overnight. wow. yeah alot of things change in america because of china, but its also because of money. all those factory jobs in the midwest that went to china are never coming back. the ceos are ruining america. i think gerlach will survive though. dont know how, but at least it has burning man. live in oakland and they say the unemployment rate is 20% but that doesnt count people that never had or will have a job. I think its mr elike 50%. At one time Oakland was a very happening place. A lot of people were employed by the auto factories and the shore men jobs. And then they all left and everyone is very poor. Sometimes thats the double edge sword of a big corporation. But Gerlach though doesnt have a big corporation which could work out in a lot of differnet ways.
sad. i liked that empire store. i canit believe the school will go from 75 to 7 students overnight. wow. yeah alot of things change in america because of china, but its also because of money. all those factory jobs in the midwest that went to china are never coming back. the ceos are ruining america. i think gerlach will survive though. dont know how, but at least it has burning man. live in oakland and they say the unemployment rate is 20% but that doesnt count people that never had or will have a job. I think its mr elike 50%. At one time Oakland was a very happening place. A lot of people were employed by the auto factories and the shore men jobs. And then they all left and everyone is very poor. Somoetimes thats the double edge sword of a big corporation.
Billy
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