I started out on a description of the Michael King question, but seem to have been pushed towards a story about the good ol’ days in the Mount. I’d like to talk about how King and others have established a pattern for self-identification but just can’t seem to shake the idea of a great big fire.
You see, we visited a cousin of mine who happens to live up in Ōtaki yesterday and the first thing he mentioned was the marvellous and toxic air in the neighbourhood. It was of course a glorious day of blue sky sans cloud, with all the poison having wafted over the way towards the Wairarapa. Much like the USA does to Canada it would seem.
Damn that must have been a big fire. Plastic not only burns toxic, it also burns hot. As any kid with too much curiosity, a large supply of pegs and a magnifying glass will tell you, very hot.
Anyhow, way back in ’87 I was trying to raise money for my student exchange year by working in the local milk factory and was charged with all kinds of crap jobs. You know the kind of stuff, handling huge bins of broken glass, getting constantly cut, using caustic soda to clean the floors and machinery, getting chemical burns, having to chuck out all the bad milk, getting poisoned, all the usuals.
Did you know that when milk gets really old it kind of separates, then goes grey, and eventually turns into a kind of clear liquid with this bunch of weird black/grey plug of gunk at the top of the bottle? Takes weeks for an experiment like that to pan out according to specifications.
The most fun job was of course driving the fork-lift-tractor. This involved bumping into things frequently and at speed. It also involved sticking the forks into things and breaking them. It involved almost falling off the seat and going under the wheels at least once. It never involved lifting someone’s car up onto a giant stack of milk crates, but should have.
Ok, fire. The most boring job was the weekly setting fire to all the rubbish. This was of course the days before all that namby-pamby PC nonsense of green responsibility and global warming, so we used to just stack all the crap out in the corner of the yard and torch it. I was encouraged to set a fire at the windward end, and really get that sucker burning, so as to save time and money.
The roster system was pretty standard for those days, and even though I was 16 I was on the old ‘three days off, six days on’ rotation. This meant that one time I came back from the days off to this freaking massive stack of rubbish. For some reason there had been a bit of a purge of old milk crates, the stack hadn’t been burnt, and wasn’t due again until the day before my next day off.
Damn that stack was big by the time it got to the end of the week.
I went in to see the foreman and he goes, “Whaddya want Tibby?”
“Boss, that stack out back is pretty huge ay? Should I still burn it?”
“Ay? Stop ya fuckin’ whinging boy. Get out there and do ya job.”
“Yeah, nah, she’s a pretty big stack ay. You sure?”
“Just get on with it for fucks sake will ya, we’re busy here.”
“Yeah…. But I’m gonna start the fire downwind, so it doesn’t get too big, ay?”
“Whatever mate, ya just do your job, and I’ll do mine”
Good old Unions. That last phrase pretty much sums it all up really.
I lit the fire at the downwind end and stood back. It was summer. It was a mountain of paper, plastic, rubber and assorted rubbish at least 2m high, maybe 10 or 15m long, and maybe 5m wide. BIG does not begin to describe the flames.
I went back to see the foreman saying, “Fire’s lit Boss, but she’s going to be a big one, ay.”
“What the fuck… look boy, why are ya still here? Shouldn’t ya be knocking off?”
“But Boss, she’s a BIG fire. See? You can see the smoke through that window up there.”
“Ay? Look, piss off will ya, factory to run mate, factory to run.”
“But Boss, should I at least stay out there with a hose of something, just in case it gets a bit stroppy?”
“Christssakes… look, piss off will ya? See ya in a few days.”
Did I mention it was February in the Bay of Plenty? The fire grew very large indeed in my absence. It jumped over a concrete path to a patch of dried grass and spread quickly, almost setting fire to a pumping station. It almost got my beloved tractor. It spread into the long grass of a neighbouring paddock and pretty quickly got into the timber yards of the local Mitre Ten Placemakers, which were only saved by the timely intervention of a number of Firemen.
Hell, it burned from there all the way to the offices of the senior management, from where it burned all the way back down to the Foreman, and by all accounts singed him pretty badly.
Took me two days to find out why no-one was talking to me after the break.