A WORLD OF PAPER

by Pia Ehrhardt
 
  

One year, I shot 187 days of video over nine months. One of my clients -- an international paper company -- wanted to tell their story. The estimates I’d submitted had been approved. I talked it over with my husband, and he said he’d take care of our son, not to worry. I’d never been gone from them for more than two nights, but there was a lot of money to be made.

I hit the road with my camera crew. We visited paper mills in Maine and upstate New York, Mississippi and Mobile. We walked up and down the rows of knee-high seedlings in nurseries and shot in pine forests as quiet as cathedrals. We went to converting facilities where ten-ton rolls of paper become reams, Burger King bags, Campbell’s soup labels. And we went to Europe for 20 days and shot in 7 countries and 13 facilities.

We interviewed seventy-four papermakers. We’d go to their homes when we could, or talk to them on their fishing boats so they’d be more relaxed. We moved quickly, run-and-gun style. We wanted them to forget there was a camera on, a key light in their face, that they were sitting in a chair talking to me about their employer.

 

James, my cameraman, is soft spoken and considerate. His kind eye for the small, offbeat details would characterize the work. He looked for moments that felt real rather than staged, never forced a setting.

Van was my audio man. Good with directions and money. He’d find a place to hide the mike -- behind a placket, taped to the chest under a T-shirt -- all the time talking to them quietly to put them at ease. And he dealt patiently with all kinds of aggravating noises that couldn’t be removed, like air conditioning compressors, fluorescent lighting, floors vibrating from the paper machine.

Ethan was the third man, the grip. He set up lights, helped James with the camera, unpacked and packed up equipment, and kept track of the tape stock, labeling what had been shot, where, who had been interviewed. He has a quick sense of humor, and we counted on him to make us laugh.
 
 

When you interview a man who’s worked for thirty years on the same paper machine, he will tell you every day’s a challenge. He will tell you no two are the same. He will know the date and day of the week when he started, and he’ll have an up-to-the-moment countdown of when he will retire. He will speak about the machine with a kind of intimacy usually reserved for women. These operators know where everything is, they do their own repairs, and they trouble-shoot when a sheet is tearing, or the mixture that goes into the head box is bad, or when the worst happens -- a felt breaks and everything slams to a stop. When a machine goes down, the start-up can take days, and production falls off schedule. The loss of money to the company is detailed hourly on the bulletin boards that are posted on the floor. Everyone inside these facilities knows the production goals, who the customer is, how much paper they’re making, when it’s needed, so it’s in everyone’s interest to keep the machine on line. I learned quickly from talking to these papermakers how condescending it is to think manufacturing work is mindless, robotic. If you stand on the floor long enough, you see small things are constantly changing.

The last batch of shooting we had to do was in Europe. The trip would take twenty days, but I only made it through fourteen.

We were in beautiful cities: Cologne, Dublin, Lyons, London, Amsterdam, but our time in each was short enough to frustrate us. We wanted to be tourists, and on day six, I think we would’ve refunded the money just to stay put and sightsee. James and Van missed their wives.

I’d set my alarm for midnight to call my son after school, and I could hear the house functioning without me, like the hole I’d left when the trip first started was filling in. When I talked to my husband it was short, perfunctory. Every day had too much and too little to recount. You had to be there, one of the crew.

Ethan looked different, handsome, in the context of these famous cities. He collected beer coasters for me from every restaurant we went to in Europe. I kept them in my purse and looked at them back at the hotel. I wanted more coasters. 

One night, after dinner at a brasserie in Lyons, I called his room, but there was no answer. He and Van were in a bar, they told me, the next morning at breakfast, talking to a table of girls from Cleveland.

I was jealous. I also felt unmoored, lonely, foolish, available. Four days later, in Amsterdam, I caught a KLM flight home.

My husband and son met me at the airport. I wanted to catch up. I rushed through two dozen questions. They looked rattled, invaded. I felt like a houseguest clunking through someone else’s rooms. I shut up and observed them and tried to fit back in to this different house they’d made for themselves that was clean and organized and calm -- a place I liked more than the one I’d left.

The crew returned with hundreds of tapes that I would have to edit for the next sixty days. I sat in the dark and shuttled through footage. We sent rough cuts to the suits and they loved the work. But I had questions: Did those papermakers really have a choice not to talk to me? And why make so much? What a waste. Plastic bags take up less space. Glass is recyclable. Clear-cutting is like harvesting a crop that takes 20 years to grow, they’d say, but tell me again where the displaced wildlife goes for habitat? I felt sick for the times when we stood in the woods and I asked James to crop the stumps out of frame.

James and Van and I still work together but only a dozen days a year, and we don’t take jobs that require travel. They both have new babies. Ethan is engaged. Away from those historic backdrops, we are awkward and can’t get back to normal. I gave the coasters to my niece who’s in college. 

I fit in again at home. When the weather’s nice, I sit on my porch and drink tea. Birds fly around the yard, changing branches. Woodpeckers peck. The loblolly pines are so tall and thin a resting hawk can make one sway.