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A Chair from the Dump
In 1966 with a master’s degree in hand, I begin working for Phelps Dodge Corporation, which is referred to as “PD”. PD’s Western Office is located at the edge of Douglas, Arizona, where the firm’s facilities consist of a copper smelter and office buildings next to the smelter’s slag dumps. The offices are a 19th Century brick building with some adjoining sheds and a carriage house from the days of horse drawn wagons. The building’s second floor is PD’s geologic department. The offices occupy large high-ceiling rooms with well-worn floors and plaster walls, colored a yellowish patina from decades of dense cigar and cigarette smoke, which forms a dense gray haze throughout the office. The office décor is an eclectic mix of very old abused furniture.
The PD office “complex” is surrounded, on all sides, by some rather unpleasant neighbors. These include the smelter and slag pile, the town’s municipal dump, the town’s open sewerage ponds, and a junkyard. Depending upon wind direction, you breathe either choking-sulfur-laden smelter smoke, raw sewerage, or the rotten smell of the dump. On a good day, an east wind brings the pleasant smell of oil and old discarded machinery.
On my first day, the chief geologist decides my office is in the library with Dr. Robert Stewart, an older geologist and another new employee. The library is an octagonal-shaped room with a ten-foot ceiling and walls lined with empty bookshelves, except for the exterior wall that has a window. Large sections of plaster have fallen off this exterior wall, leaving patches of red bricks. Mortar has fallen from between some bricks; thus both outside air and occasionally water enters the room. The library contains PD’s entire technical library, consisting of four old mining books. The newest book was written in 1907, which I recall because that is the year my father was born. These four books soon become part of a daily office ritual. The chief geologist enters the library every morning at 7:30 AM. He does not speak to us, but takes one of the four books off the shelf and opens it. The chosen book always opens to the exact page he pretends to read for about 30 seconds. He then closes the book, puts it back on the shelf, and leaves the library. Bob then says, “We can start work now, we have been clocked in.”
On that first day, I wore a suit and tie, not knowing that field clothes are standard office attire. The chief geologist escorts me to my new office in the library. There I observe the library’s furniture consists of two gray metal war-surplus desks, and one chair. I ask, “Where is my chair?” “Go down to the carriage house and you will find an old man named Julio. Tell Julio you need a chair.” I find Julio sitting at an old wooden desk, in the carriage house’s dirty musty horse barn. After introducing myself, I ask, “Julio, I was told to see you about getting a chair for my desk.” “I don’t have any chairs, we will have to walk around and see if we can find one.”
Together, Julio and I search all the buildings for nearly an hour, but no spare chair can be found. Finally Julio says, “I do not know what to do. Yesterday, I take some trash to the dump and I see an old chair over there. Maybe you should walk over to the dump and look for that chair.” So there I am, a recent college graduate on the first day at work; walking down a dirt road to the town’s dump, to find an office chair (you can’t make stuff like this up, you had to live it). Douglas has the typical municipal dump of the pre-environmental movement era. Decades of garbage, refuse, and toxic substances are piled into a high mound over a vast open area. Nothing is buried or covered with dirt; everything is just thrown there year after year. Over the decades, a dump ecosystem evolves. A large population of flies, maggots, cockroaches, seagulls, mice, rats, and other vermin call the dump home. In my dusty suit and once shiny new shoes, I gingerly climb over piles of trash and slimy, stinking, vermin-covered garbage.
Eventually, I see “The Chair”. It was once someone’s kitchen chair, a very old tall straight-backed wooden chair. The chair originally had a cane bottom, but that was replaced by a piece of nailed-on plywood. At one point, some tension wire was added to hold the legs quasi-rigid. The chair’s last coat of paint was “battleship gray”; so its style and color will match PD’s elegant office décor. I pick up an old rag to wipe slime, grime, and vermin off the chair, before carrying it back to the office. For my entire employment at PD, that chair from the dump, with its subtle pungent odor, will be “my” office chair. When I left PD, the chair, which was technically my property, is left behind. I knew PD never threw anything away and would give it a good home with decades more use. It would not surprise me in the least to enter a PD office today and still see that chair in use by PD’s newest geologist.
- Eugene V. Ciancanelli
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