Profile 2 - Parchment's abandoned factories (working title)

The factory’s abandoned. My friend and I park the car behind a bush and hop the fence. We walk fifteen feet to the first structure and climb in through a broken window; shards of glass lie on the ground, intermingling with the weeds and shrubs that force their way through slabs of broken concrete underneath our feet. It’s an overcast day; our eyes take a moment to adjust to the natural light. The room we entered smells like rain and insulation, maybe drywall. Trash litters the floor. There are work orders and safety manuals from 1995, grimy 7Up bottles and smashed bricks – what looks like asbestos ceiling tiles piled in a heap near a broken office chair, damp with must and mold. The hallway leading from the room is dark. At the other end there’s a brighter room – must have broken windows like this one. My friend snaps a few photos for his photography class and we move on. He thinks his professor will enjoy the photos he’s taken of Parchment, MI, of the empty industrial sector. He wants the photos to be eerie and quiet; he wants them to awe, to subdue the onlooker into silent disbelief.

Subsequent rooms reveal a variety of objects and images. There’s a wooden ceiling half caved-in near the factory’s south end; looks like there was a fire – ash and blackened wood lie on the floor and cake the walls. On the second floor, a small roof is supported by an intricate web of thin steel beams; light from windows overhead makes the rust look almost vibrant, on fire. A small tree grows outside a second story window, peeking in at us as from its perch atop a first floor roof. Then we find the locker room. Some of the lockers are open; a few have posters or newspaper clippings inside. Others are filled with centerfolds from old nudie-magazines. You can see the outline of her legs, her hips; her eyebrows are visible, and above that her dark hair pools in elegant waves across her right shoulder, but you can’t see her face. The poster must have gotten wet; a navy blue stain of faded magazine print masks her expression, takes her eyes. I can’t tell if she was pretty. The next locker features a newspaper article about the death of Eazy-E. Although the edges of the paper are browned and curling, you can still read the title: “Gangsta’ rapper with AIDS dies.” We leave the building and walk towards another abandoned factory several blocks away.

The buildings, offices, and warehouses in this part of the mill were more recently abandoned. I find a photo album sitting in a cubicle. It starts with pictures of a company picnic. There’s one shot of a woman in a yellow shirt with Urkel glasses standing next to a pig roast. Another with children playing outside; one child has a water balloon in his hand. He’s three or four years old in the picture – must be in his late teens now. As I move farther into the album, the pictures become more damaged; water and dust makes the photos look like someone’s colored in the rims with waxy crayons – oranges, yellows, reds, and purples. We make our way into a tall building framed by smokestacks. As I walk inside, I feel as though I’ve stepped into a Tim Burton film. The metal beams supporting the structure are dark and rusted. The center of the building is left open, looking up towards broken windows five stories overhead. Yellow stairway railings pop against the darkness; they climb from the floor to the ceiling, no breaks leading into other rooms or offices, just upwards into nothing. I am astounded; it's almost frightening - the magnitude of this particular building, the men who worked here, the machines. We leave through a pair of large bay doors. The hinges are rusted through, forcing the door to remain perpetually open – industrial rigamortis, I suppose.

A week later I have an interview with Curt Flowers, the city clerk of Parchment, MI. Curt is somewhere in his late fifties and is slightly paunchy. He’s bald with patches of gray hair lining his temples, has a trim white mustache, and sports a pair of thin framed glasses. As a young man, Curt worked in the paper mills that gave Parchment its name.

“I think everyone in town worked there at one time or another,” Curt chuckles to himself. He was in the lab for two years with quality control. As pulp was shipped to the factories to make paper, Curt would check them and make sure they were up to standard. I ask him how the mills shut down. “Labor is cheaper in the south" he replies casually ", and a lot of the equipment gets antiquated. Eventually, they decided it was just not an optional thing.”

Curt shows me several architectural sketches and designs that illustrate the city’s plan to build new neighborhoods and houses where the factories now stand. Sometime within the next five years, bulldozers and cranes will tear down these longstanding monuments of Parchment’s industrial past; for the first time in its 101 year history, the factories – withered husks though they may be – will be missing. As he speaks, I can’t help but feel Curt’s confliction. Like other citizens of Parchment, he has a strong empathetic connection to the city’s namesake. The mills are more than empty buildings.

“Suddenly, it was just quieter in town, there was always the hum of the mill there,” he smirks in fond remembrance. “I can remember laying in bed at night, cause I live just up there, a couple blocks up the hill, and if it’s summer and you had the windows open, I could hear the guys driving the mill trucks, and you could hear them “beep beep” at semis and stuff like that. Some people would say it’s noise, ‘It’s disturbing me,’ or ‘It’s bothering me,’ but now I wish I heard that again, because that would mean the place was up and running.”