Life After Smurfit-Stone
Story by Justin Franz, Published by NewWest.net, December 14, 2011
With hands worn from three decades of labor, Tim Steigers slides a small metal wedge out of an axle frame and turns toward his toolbox. Opening a drawer, he aligns the chunk of old steel – once the property of Smurfit-Stone Container – among the others of various sizes.
Steigers, 54, peers inside a frame, trying to figure out what to do next. Even with decades of craft experience, this is a complex riddle. Each casting and gear removed is met with another and another, like an endless Russian nesting doll.
He’s in the middle of a large garage at the University of Montana’s College of Technology, working slowly, making every move like an experienced chess player. Meanwhile, a group of college-aged students swarm around him, attacking projects with the goal of finishing early on this Friday afternoon.
Across from Steigers, two kids bang away at their axle, trying everything and anything to crack its spell. “I think there’s a better wrench for that,” Steigers says, smiling.
He is among the oldest students in the diesel mechanics class, which also includes with five other former employees of Smurfit-Stone, the plant that closed one year ago after a half-century of operations in Frenchtown, just west of Missoula.
Its shutdown was the latest – and largest – in a series of mill closures in western Montana related to a struggling forest products industry. In July 2008, Stimson Lumber Company shut down its mill in Bonner, leaving 100 people out of work. A year later, Plum Creek Timber Company shut down mills in Pablo and Evergreen, leaving 150 people out of work.
And on Dec. 14, 2009, Smurfit-Stone Container announced it would shut down its Frenchtown liner board mill before the end of the year, leaving 417 people jobless.
***
Steigers was born in Lewiston, Idaho, but he didn’t stay there long. In August 1957, Steigers’ father missed his son’s first birthday because he made the five-hour drive north for an interview at a new mill, which would later be bought by Smurfit-Stone. On Labor Day weekend, the family packed up its home in Idaho and headed north, where Steigers, his two brothers and one sister would grow up in the shadow of the mill and be “raised on pulp mill money,” he said. The massive mill would become one of the most recognizable landmarks west of Missoula along Interstate 90, its plumes of white smoke billowing into the sky for over 50 years.
Like many people in the area, Steigers and his two brothers followed their father to the mill, starting in September 1978. He became a laborer in the chemical reviving area and eventually a boiler operator. Although it was hard work, it was work he enjoyed. In the early 2000s, he got into an apprentice program to become a pipe fitter and maintainer, where he would spend most of his days repairing and improving the intricate system of steam pipes that crisscrossed the site.
Employing more than 1,000 people at one time, the mill had some of the highest paying jobs in the Missoula area, with an average annual wage above $70,000. That, along with good benefits, made the mill an attractive place for job seekers, including Roy Houseman.
Having spent six summers working in Alaska at a fish processing warehouse, the Great Falls native and 2003 UM graduate thought the mill would be a good fit for him. Starting in 2005, Houseman worked as a laborer and, soon after, became involved with the union – United Steel Workers Hellgate Local 885. A few years later, he was elected treasurer, then president.
One of the people who nominated him was Stiegers, who hoped a new union leader could bring stability to the place where he had worked for more than 30 years, the place he hoped to retire from, regardless of rumors.
“Some people said the mill is going to shut down in the future and I always thought that we have the raw materials here, we make a good product, we’re not going to shutdown,” Stiegers said.
***
The morning of Dec. 14, 2009, didn’t start out special – gray, cold and snowy. Housemen woke up at 7 a.m., as his cell phone vibrated nearby with the sixth call that morning.
“We’ve got a meeting at 8. It doesn’t sound good,” the union chairman said on the other end of the line.
Houseman instantly thought the worse. The Frenchtown mill had three paper machines, the newest built in 1981, the year Houseman was born. One had been shut down in the early 2000s and another a few years later. Both resulted in significant labor cuts, and now the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Houseman had little hope as he got in his truck and lit a cigarette for the drive in.
At about 8 a.m. he pulled into the parking lot, got out of his truck and walked into the main office.
He headed for the conference room, where other union officials were already waiting at a long wooden table that had been there since Champion ownership. It had been a staple for decades and as Houseman said “no one builds a table like that anymore.” The only blemishes on its polished finish were chips from a pen’s edge, nervously flicked by the union president when Smurfit-Stone management entered the room that day.
A dozen or so people gathered there, including executives who came from headquarters to make the announcement to local management and government officials.
“Today Smurfit-Stone has made a decision to close the facility,” management told union representatives, before sliding a piece of paper across the table with the formal announcement that mill operations would end on Dec. 31.
Houseman spoke up. He said they were making a poor decision, that they hadn’t offered an opportunity for a renegotiation. That they made a good product. But there was nothing he could have said that would have changed their minds.
On the other side of the building, Steigers and an apprentice walked into the break room near the workshop for a coffee break. Nearby a manager watched.
“Well, you’re not going to get to finish your apprenticeship,” he said. “They’re shutting the mill down.”
Steigers was stunned by the news, as word quickly spread throughout the mill. A few moments later a foreman came in and asked everyone to stay in the room for a few moments after break. It was there that he officially told them what they already knew.
Houseman spent the rest of the day walking the plant, talking to workers, many of whom knew the mill as their only employer.
“You realize that all the conversations you had and all the efforts you did to try and keep that place running was not enough,” Houseman said. “You still had to face a lot of people and tell them that they are going to have to change something that they’ve done for 20 to 30 years.”
Opinions ranged from acceptance to anger, with some thinking it was a move by the company to break the union. But work had to continue, Steigers said, even if now the only job was to keep the mill operational for the next two weeks. No more improvements would be made to equipment.
“If you wanted to work, you had to find something to do yourself,” Steigers said.
Many took this course of action, while some began to find ways to help themselves when the plant did close. At least one person started spending much of his time in the shop practicing welding. Steigers, however, kept after the numerous steam pipes. Even with the end near, he found pride in his work.
“A craftsman is a craftsman, you know, he wants to do a good job,” he said. “If you don’t do the best work you can do, how do you look at yourself in the mirror?”
Toward the end of the work day, Houseman headed back to his truck and drove into town to speak to the Missoula City Council; he was a new member, elected a few weeks earlier.
As he entered the council chambers – a spacious, rarely filled room – the city clerk announced various committee meetings before Mayor John Engen announced the time for public comment.
Although he had been able to keep his emotions in check throughout the day, the realization of what had happened began to hit him as he approached the podium.
“Hello, my name is Roy Houseman, president of United Steel Workers Local 885 and councilmen-elect in Ward Two. I’m coming to inform you guys today that a meeting was called between Smurfit-Stone and United Steel Workers… They are planning on closing the facility,” he said.
As he looked across the room, his voice began to tremble. “It’s been a long day… I’m sorry,” he said, holding tears back.
Trying to regain composure, he whispered a struggled plea of support and thanks before turning from the podium and leaving council chambers. In the bathroom, he threw water on his face and grabbed a towel before heading back to his truck. And back to the mill.
As the temperature dropped and snow whipped through the long canyons of the mill, Houseman set out on a trip he made dozens of times in the last two years. Leaving the main office, he headed for the core complex where the three massive paper machines were housed.
The air changed little as the cold and dead No. 1 and No. 2 paper machines sat lifeless. Houseman walked along dusty cement toward the light and the still-operating No. 3 machine.
Hundreds of feet long, the machine whined and spinned as thousands of feet of brown paper flew through its core. Steam, heat and humidity erupted from the massive lime green contraption that looked everything like a kid’s Erector Set dreams. Walkways and ladders climbed its complex exterior as workers scurried about in the eleventh hour.
“People did their job, they still went about it,” Houseman said. “They had a solidarity there that they would remember.”
***
The weeks following the announcement where mournful. With no more upgrades or projects, Steigers kept after the steam traps.
Two weeks later, he gathered his tools, hung his hat on the fence outside and left for the last time. A year later, the finality of that day is what he remembers most.
“You knew you weren’t going to see these people again that you had spent 30 of your years with,” he said. “They’re like family.”
The following months were filled with uncertainty, he said, having lost the “normalcy” that made up the last three decades.
“It was hard. It has to be one of the harder things I’ve done in life,” he said. “To lose a job to no fault of mine. No fault of anybody out there at the mill… How do you deal with that?”
The only structure in his life were the classes he took at the Lifelong Learning Center in Missoula, made available by the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act. The courses included ways to deal with the loss of a job and how to go back to college. He also tried to find a new job, but all of his applications were denied.
In May, he decided to go back to school to study diesel mechanics.
For Houseman, the decision had come earlier. Just days after the shutdown, he began to put the paperwork together to go back to UM, this time for a Master’s in public administration. Within a month he was back in class after being away from school for seven years.
Having more free time also meant he could focus on his new job as city councilman. But free time didn’t mean easy times and the months that followed were financially tough for him and his wife.
“I would love to be making $20 an hour and working 40 hours a week with a group of people who supported me,” he said. “To say that I would not want to work out there is wrong.”
The feeling’s the same for Steigers, who said even months after he left the mill, he still had dreams about it. In August when his girlfriend asked what he wanted for his birthday, he had only one answer.
“I just want my job back,” he said.
***
But Steigers and Houseman aren’t the only ones dealing with the decision made in a boardroom thousands of miles away.
Smurfit-Stone’s Frenchtown mill was one of the largest industrial employers in the state and in Frenchtown, it provided almost a quarter of the town’s tax base.
“When you look at the economics side, it’s like taking an arm off,” said Patrick Barkey, director of the UM Bureau of Buisness and Economic Research.
According to a press release from the bureau, released soon after the announcement, the closure will have lasting effects on the Missoula area. Besides the initial 417 jobs lost at the mill, the report estimated that in the years to follow, more than 1,000 jobs could be lost.
“Markets don’t shed any tears for a specific city,” Barkey said.
It was fact realized by Randy Cline, the school superintendent in Frenchtown, as soon as he heard the news.
According to Cline, Smurfit-Stone paid 22 percent of the school’s annual budget, or about $825,000. That amount will likely drop in 2010, since the company will pay fewer property taxes for the inoperable mill.
But money isn’t the only thing lacking in the school district, according to Cline. Since 1985 the school had consistently seen a 2-percent increase in students every year. In that time, it went from Class C to Class A, an unheard-of growth in Montana. But this year when the school reopened in the fall, it did so with 60 fewer students, most of them from families who moved away after the mill closed, said Cline.
The story is the same in the Frenchtown Rural Fire District, according to Chief John Bibler. Like the school, taxes from Smurfit-Stone made up more than 20 percent of the department’s budget. With more than 80 percent of the budget going to staff salaries, Bibler said that once the money from the mill does stop, layoffs will be a real possibility, forcing the department to rely more on volunteers. For now, Bibler focuses on making due with what they have.
“There’s been so many rumors about the mill in the last year – that it’s been sold or this and that – that if I spent all my time worrying about it, then I’d never get anything done,” he said.
According to Barkey, what’s happening in Frenchtown and Missoula is just another example of a struggling wood products industry in western Montana and the region. Whether the area economy can recover from the shutdown has yet to be seen.
“It depends a lot on the flexibility of the work force and attractiveness of business investment,” he said, adding that it will be some time before anyone knows the outcome.
“Ask me in a year and I’ll tell you what’s going on now,” he said.
***
As the clock ticks toward 3 p.m., students run around the College of Technology garage putting tools away and waiting for the professor to dismiss them.
Steigers isn’t one of them.
Sitting on a wooden crate, he stares at a computer terminal in the middle of the shop, navigating the Eaton website, looking for a parts list for the axle that he and his classmate are assigned to disassemble, explain and then reassemble.
Nearby, a few other former Smurfit-Stone employees continue to work while students rush for the long white sink to wash up and head home. Only when the teacher washes up and grabs his bag, do Steigers and the others start to head to the sink.
Stiegers likes the structure the classes have brought to his life and he has developed a strong connection with the other students.
“Like the workers at the mill, I’m (invested) with some of these students that I’m going to school with,” he says. “They’re already my friends.”
And for the first time in months, he’s having more good days than bad.
“There’s something to look forward to… it gives you some kind of hope,” he says.
The hope is for a good-paying job, to work another decade before retiring. But even with those prospects in mind, he still wishes he could go back to what he did for so long.
“I still can’t… I mean, I believe it, but I just don’t understand why I’m here yet, you know? I still feel like I should be out at the mill and the mill should be running,” he says. “I think that this is always going to be a sense of loss, it’s like losing someone in your family.”
It’s with these thoughts that he leaves school, gets in his car and drives out of the city, turning onto County Route 12, near the now-closed mill, on his way home. There are other roads that could take him, but he still drives past the mill – and the hundreds of hard hats still hanging on the fence – every day.
As he crests the hill just north of the mill, a school bus slows to a stop.
Watching the kids cross the road, Steigers eyes take in the gray buildings that once shot smoke and steam skyward, the buildings that were the cornerstone of a community and his life.
“I still don’t believe it,” he says.
With hands worn from three decades of labor, Tim Steigers slides a small metal wedge out of an axle frame and turns toward his toolbox. Opening a drawer, he aligns the chunk of old steel – once the property of Smurfit-Stone Container – among the others of various sizes.
Steigers, 54, peers inside a frame, trying to figure out what to do next. Even with decades of craft experience, this is a complex riddle. Each casting and gear removed is met with another and another, like an endless Russian nesting doll.
He’s in the middle of a large garage at the University of Montana’s College of Technology, working slowly, making every move like an experienced chess player. Meanwhile, a group of college-aged students swarm around him, attacking projects with the goal of finishing early on this Friday afternoon.
Across from Steigers, two kids bang away at their axle, trying everything and anything to crack its spell. “I think there’s a better wrench for that,” Steigers says, smiling.
He is among the oldest students in the diesel mechanics class, which also includes with five other former employees of Smurfit-Stone, the plant that closed one year ago after a half-century of operations in Frenchtown, just west of Missoula.
Its shutdown was the latest – and largest – in a series of mill closures in western Montana related to a struggling forest products industry. In July 2008, Stimson Lumber Company shut down its mill in Bonner, leaving 100 people out of work. A year later, Plum Creek Timber Company shut down mills in Pablo and Evergreen, leaving 150 people out of work.
And on Dec. 14, 2009, Smurfit-Stone Container announced it would shut down its Frenchtown liner board mill before the end of the year, leaving 417 people jobless.
***
Steigers was born in Lewiston, Idaho, but he didn’t stay there long. In August 1957, Steigers’ father missed his son’s first birthday because he made the five-hour drive north for an interview at a new mill, which would later be bought by Smurfit-Stone. On Labor Day weekend, the family packed up its home in Idaho and headed north, where Steigers, his two brothers and one sister would grow up in the shadow of the mill and be “raised on pulp mill money,” he said. The massive mill would become one of the most recognizable landmarks west of Missoula along Interstate 90, its plumes of white smoke billowing into the sky for over 50 years.
Like many people in the area, Steigers and his two brothers followed their father to the mill, starting in September 1978. He became a laborer in the chemical reviving area and eventually a boiler operator. Although it was hard work, it was work he enjoyed. In the early 2000s, he got into an apprentice program to become a pipe fitter and maintainer, where he would spend most of his days repairing and improving the intricate system of steam pipes that crisscrossed the site.
Employing more than 1,000 people at one time, the mill had some of the highest paying jobs in the Missoula area, with an average annual wage above $70,000. That, along with good benefits, made the mill an attractive place for job seekers, including Roy Houseman.
Having spent six summers working in Alaska at a fish processing warehouse, the Great Falls native and 2003 UM graduate thought the mill would be a good fit for him. Starting in 2005, Houseman worked as a laborer and, soon after, became involved with the union – United Steel Workers Hellgate Local 885. A few years later, he was elected treasurer, then president.
One of the people who nominated him was Stiegers, who hoped a new union leader could bring stability to the place where he had worked for more than 30 years, the place he hoped to retire from, regardless of rumors.
“Some people said the mill is going to shut down in the future and I always thought that we have the raw materials here, we make a good product, we’re not going to shutdown,” Stiegers said.
***
The morning of Dec. 14, 2009, didn’t start out special – gray, cold and snowy. Housemen woke up at 7 a.m., as his cell phone vibrated nearby with the sixth call that morning.
“We’ve got a meeting at 8. It doesn’t sound good,” the union chairman said on the other end of the line.
Houseman instantly thought the worse. The Frenchtown mill had three paper machines, the newest built in 1981, the year Houseman was born. One had been shut down in the early 2000s and another a few years later. Both resulted in significant labor cuts, and now the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Houseman had little hope as he got in his truck and lit a cigarette for the drive in.
At about 8 a.m. he pulled into the parking lot, got out of his truck and walked into the main office.
He headed for the conference room, where other union officials were already waiting at a long wooden table that had been there since Champion ownership. It had been a staple for decades and as Houseman said “no one builds a table like that anymore.” The only blemishes on its polished finish were chips from a pen’s edge, nervously flicked by the union president when Smurfit-Stone management entered the room that day.
A dozen or so people gathered there, including executives who came from headquarters to make the announcement to local management and government officials.
“Today Smurfit-Stone has made a decision to close the facility,” management told union representatives, before sliding a piece of paper across the table with the formal announcement that mill operations would end on Dec. 31.
Houseman spoke up. He said they were making a poor decision, that they hadn’t offered an opportunity for a renegotiation. That they made a good product. But there was nothing he could have said that would have changed their minds.
On the other side of the building, Steigers and an apprentice walked into the break room near the workshop for a coffee break. Nearby a manager watched.
“Well, you’re not going to get to finish your apprenticeship,” he said. “They’re shutting the mill down.”
Steigers was stunned by the news, as word quickly spread throughout the mill. A few moments later a foreman came in and asked everyone to stay in the room for a few moments after break. It was there that he officially told them what they already knew.
Houseman spent the rest of the day walking the plant, talking to workers, many of whom knew the mill as their only employer.
“You realize that all the conversations you had and all the efforts you did to try and keep that place running was not enough,” Houseman said. “You still had to face a lot of people and tell them that they are going to have to change something that they’ve done for 20 to 30 years.”
Opinions ranged from acceptance to anger, with some thinking it was a move by the company to break the union. But work had to continue, Steigers said, even if now the only job was to keep the mill operational for the next two weeks. No more improvements would be made to equipment.
“If you wanted to work, you had to find something to do yourself,” Steigers said.
Many took this course of action, while some began to find ways to help themselves when the plant did close. At least one person started spending much of his time in the shop practicing welding. Steigers, however, kept after the numerous steam pipes. Even with the end near, he found pride in his work.
“A craftsman is a craftsman, you know, he wants to do a good job,” he said. “If you don’t do the best work you can do, how do you look at yourself in the mirror?”
Toward the end of the work day, Houseman headed back to his truck and drove into town to speak to the Missoula City Council; he was a new member, elected a few weeks earlier.
As he entered the council chambers – a spacious, rarely filled room – the city clerk announced various committee meetings before Mayor John Engen announced the time for public comment.
Although he had been able to keep his emotions in check throughout the day, the realization of what had happened began to hit him as he approached the podium.
“Hello, my name is Roy Houseman, president of United Steel Workers Local 885 and councilmen-elect in Ward Two. I’m coming to inform you guys today that a meeting was called between Smurfit-Stone and United Steel Workers… They are planning on closing the facility,” he said.
As he looked across the room, his voice began to tremble. “It’s been a long day… I’m sorry,” he said, holding tears back.
Trying to regain composure, he whispered a struggled plea of support and thanks before turning from the podium and leaving council chambers. In the bathroom, he threw water on his face and grabbed a towel before heading back to his truck. And back to the mill.
As the temperature dropped and snow whipped through the long canyons of the mill, Houseman set out on a trip he made dozens of times in the last two years. Leaving the main office, he headed for the core complex where the three massive paper machines were housed.
The air changed little as the cold and dead No. 1 and No. 2 paper machines sat lifeless. Houseman walked along dusty cement toward the light and the still-operating No. 3 machine.
Hundreds of feet long, the machine whined and spinned as thousands of feet of brown paper flew through its core. Steam, heat and humidity erupted from the massive lime green contraption that looked everything like a kid’s Erector Set dreams. Walkways and ladders climbed its complex exterior as workers scurried about in the eleventh hour.
“People did their job, they still went about it,” Houseman said. “They had a solidarity there that they would remember.”
***
The weeks following the announcement where mournful. With no more upgrades or projects, Steigers kept after the steam traps.
Two weeks later, he gathered his tools, hung his hat on the fence outside and left for the last time. A year later, the finality of that day is what he remembers most.
“You knew you weren’t going to see these people again that you had spent 30 of your years with,” he said. “They’re like family.”
The following months were filled with uncertainty, he said, having lost the “normalcy” that made up the last three decades.
“It was hard. It has to be one of the harder things I’ve done in life,” he said. “To lose a job to no fault of mine. No fault of anybody out there at the mill… How do you deal with that?”
The only structure in his life were the classes he took at the Lifelong Learning Center in Missoula, made available by the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act. The courses included ways to deal with the loss of a job and how to go back to college. He also tried to find a new job, but all of his applications were denied.
In May, he decided to go back to school to study diesel mechanics.
For Houseman, the decision had come earlier. Just days after the shutdown, he began to put the paperwork together to go back to UM, this time for a Master’s in public administration. Within a month he was back in class after being away from school for seven years.
Having more free time also meant he could focus on his new job as city councilman. But free time didn’t mean easy times and the months that followed were financially tough for him and his wife.
“I would love to be making $20 an hour and working 40 hours a week with a group of people who supported me,” he said. “To say that I would not want to work out there is wrong.”
The feeling’s the same for Steigers, who said even months after he left the mill, he still had dreams about it. In August when his girlfriend asked what he wanted for his birthday, he had only one answer.
“I just want my job back,” he said.
***
But Steigers and Houseman aren’t the only ones dealing with the decision made in a boardroom thousands of miles away.
Smurfit-Stone’s Frenchtown mill was one of the largest industrial employers in the state and in Frenchtown, it provided almost a quarter of the town’s tax base.
“When you look at the economics side, it’s like taking an arm off,” said Patrick Barkey, director of the UM Bureau of Buisness and Economic Research.
According to a press release from the bureau, released soon after the announcement, the closure will have lasting effects on the Missoula area. Besides the initial 417 jobs lost at the mill, the report estimated that in the years to follow, more than 1,000 jobs could be lost.
“Markets don’t shed any tears for a specific city,” Barkey said.
It was fact realized by Randy Cline, the school superintendent in Frenchtown, as soon as he heard the news.
According to Cline, Smurfit-Stone paid 22 percent of the school’s annual budget, or about $825,000. That amount will likely drop in 2010, since the company will pay fewer property taxes for the inoperable mill.
But money isn’t the only thing lacking in the school district, according to Cline. Since 1985 the school had consistently seen a 2-percent increase in students every year. In that time, it went from Class C to Class A, an unheard-of growth in Montana. But this year when the school reopened in the fall, it did so with 60 fewer students, most of them from families who moved away after the mill closed, said Cline.
The story is the same in the Frenchtown Rural Fire District, according to Chief John Bibler. Like the school, taxes from Smurfit-Stone made up more than 20 percent of the department’s budget. With more than 80 percent of the budget going to staff salaries, Bibler said that once the money from the mill does stop, layoffs will be a real possibility, forcing the department to rely more on volunteers. For now, Bibler focuses on making due with what they have.
“There’s been so many rumors about the mill in the last year – that it’s been sold or this and that – that if I spent all my time worrying about it, then I’d never get anything done,” he said.
According to Barkey, what’s happening in Frenchtown and Missoula is just another example of a struggling wood products industry in western Montana and the region. Whether the area economy can recover from the shutdown has yet to be seen.
“It depends a lot on the flexibility of the work force and attractiveness of business investment,” he said, adding that it will be some time before anyone knows the outcome.
“Ask me in a year and I’ll tell you what’s going on now,” he said.
***
As the clock ticks toward 3 p.m., students run around the College of Technology garage putting tools away and waiting for the professor to dismiss them.
Steigers isn’t one of them.
Sitting on a wooden crate, he stares at a computer terminal in the middle of the shop, navigating the Eaton website, looking for a parts list for the axle that he and his classmate are assigned to disassemble, explain and then reassemble.
Nearby, a few other former Smurfit-Stone employees continue to work while students rush for the long white sink to wash up and head home. Only when the teacher washes up and grabs his bag, do Steigers and the others start to head to the sink.
Stiegers likes the structure the classes have brought to his life and he has developed a strong connection with the other students.
“Like the workers at the mill, I’m (invested) with some of these students that I’m going to school with,” he says. “They’re already my friends.”
And for the first time in months, he’s having more good days than bad.
“There’s something to look forward to… it gives you some kind of hope,” he says.
The hope is for a good-paying job, to work another decade before retiring. But even with those prospects in mind, he still wishes he could go back to what he did for so long.
“I still can’t… I mean, I believe it, but I just don’t understand why I’m here yet, you know? I still feel like I should be out at the mill and the mill should be running,” he says. “I think that this is always going to be a sense of loss, it’s like losing someone in your family.”
It’s with these thoughts that he leaves school, gets in his car and drives out of the city, turning onto County Route 12, near the now-closed mill, on his way home. There are other roads that could take him, but he still drives past the mill – and the hundreds of hard hats still hanging on the fence – every day.
As he crests the hill just north of the mill, a school bus slows to a stop.
Watching the kids cross the road, Steigers eyes take in the gray buildings that once shot smoke and steam skyward, the buildings that were the cornerstone of a community and his life.
“I still don’t believe it,” he says.