The steady beat of the pan line is the sanest thing in my life right now. Work grounds me. Slinging bread pans and breaking a sweat. Earning a living. I'm grateful for the regularity, the rhythm and routine.
After the bread comes out of the proofer it's baked on racks in stand-up ovens, typically at 355 degrees. Another team rolls them in and out of the ovens, taking the baked bread to a conveyor called the depanner. One member of the ovens crew is assigned to load them off the racks onto a conveyor belt, where the still-hot loaves are blown free by a burst of air and then suctioned out of the pans.
The crew rotates in 30-minute shifts on the depanner position, the alpha job in the bakery. If you can run the depanner you're recognized as full-fledged crew member, a person who can hold his own. It takes strength, endurance and toughness.
They wear safety glasses, special sleeves on their forearms and long rectangular heat pads attached to their wrists by elastic. The ovens and racks are hot enough to burn skin instantly, as dangerous as unacknowledged grief. Quick, deep burns happen if you mishandle a pan or take a rack out of the oven without being careful.
Once the racks are emptied they are rolled over to a double line along the north wall of the proofer to cool until they can be filled again.
The floor space where the cooling racks are stored becomes littered with fallen crumbs and seed from baking. There's a little oil in the recipe, so this builds up quickly, forms a layer on the floor.
Tap tap. Tap tap tap.
The line runs continuously. We bake more than a half million loaves a week, all day and all night in shifts. Periodically the line is taken down for cleaning, every conveyor, machine, corner and cranny swept, scrubbed, and sanitized, first with air hoses and then with buckets and brushes, blue plastic buckets for cleaner/degreaser, white for sanitizer, yellow buckets and brushes for the floor and floor-level surfaces.
After a few days the space under the cooling racks develops a layer of fallen detritus that has to be worked off with a tool, a four-foot aluminum handle with a four-inch scraper attached to its business end, not sharp enough to cut but sharp enough to work up the crust of crud on the floor.
Scraping the crud is my favorite job in the bakery, along with taking a scrub brush the size of an outsized tooth brush to the fixtures, pipes, baseboards and stanchions along the walls and corners, making sure everything is clean and sanitized throughout the production floor.
It's deeply satisfying to me, left to work alone on a task no one wants. I love seeing the results, love being acknowledged or praised for completing it, making the grimiest, most ignored corners of the bakery clean enough to pass any inspection. We get them regularly, from corporate headquarters, from the state. They are called audits. Everyone snaps to attention for pending audits, but the standard of cleanliness is constant. We bake the staff of life, trustees of people's food.
No matter how careful we are, there's a crust of crud that falls to the floor in our lives, one that congeals to our souls over time. It has to be worked away. We have to find the neglected corners and crevices of our past and attend to them, scrub away the neglect. If we don't, something terrible grows within us, unclean and unexamined. A fungus of hurt, searing, tamped-down hurt, is the most toxic.
There's another level the cleaning assignments appeal to me in their solitude and simplicity. It's a connection to my mother.
Rosemarie Newton was a remarkable woman. She came to America at 16, a child-bride of an American soldier whose one mistake became a quiet international scandal in Darmstadt in 1955. She crossed the ocean in a slow boat to America with a squalling baby in her arms. She was sick and sorrowful for the entire crossing, wrest from her mother and two brothers, though bound to the land of Elvis, Hershey bars and Frank Sinatra. The baby was me.
The hastily-discharged private had very little except an eighth-grade education and a capacity to dream. They lived in rundown rented houses or a tiny trailer house while he raised watermelons on rented land and drove truck. One morning she spied a rat by my brother's ear in his crib.
Three children came quickly and four more followed.
When I was 5 Everett, my father, scraped up enough money to buy a place, a 60-acre farm 8 miles outside Hermiston in Eastern Oregon, the family crammed into a ramshackle two bedroom farmhouse with peeling linoleum in the kitchen and an ancient refrigerator and range, a tiny old-style sink. The dining area had a oil stove with a knotty pine wall behind it.
When I was 7 my grandfather built us a shotgun third bedroom to the left of the stove, a project he completed on his vacation while grandma made scrapple in the kitchen with cornmeal and the meat from a boiled hog's head, lifting the head out of large pot with a giant set of tongs. I was dubious and alarmed, but the fried scapple was delicious, though not a breakfast approved by the American Heart Association.
Four of us crammed into two beds. Michael, another boy with almost-white hair, made it five soon after, and Monika, a beautiful baby girl, arrived by the time my mother was 25.
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| This image from Steve Frazier photography; our farm, though at the end of a lane, was less grand. |
The lawn was weeds. An overflowing septic tank trickled out a few feet from the front porch. My sister Therese grew an eight-foot high patch of corn another 30 feet along the trickle, an observant scientific mind even then.
Farm life was mean in places, and we clung to each other. Soon we were old enough to be aware of my mother's growing despair, talking to herself in the kitchen in German as she prepared meals in the tiny kitchen. Mice scurried through the cupboards. We were horrified to have guests. "Your teeth are YELLOW," a little girl once said to me on the school bus.
Before long we were old enough for farm chores. I drove tractor and farm trucks by the time I was 8, milking a small herd of cows before school. One summer my brother and I were given charge of a plot of field corn, irrigating it every Tuesday with curved pipes that drew the water from a ditch. The Ditch Rider, a county employee, made sure you didn't take water any other day.
We became old enough too to hear and see the ugliness in my parents' marriage. Love wasn't safe. He had affairs, even a secret second family on the road. They screamed at each other. He raised his fists to her, beat us savagely with a belt. It wasn't about discipline, it was pure, raw anger at the world. The best he could do was far short of enough. A coarse, uneducated man, he would relieve himself in the toilet while we took baths, idly scratching his scrotum while he lectured us on carelessness or the occasional poor grade. I still remember the stench of him, discovering while still a hairless child that I did not love or respect my father; I only feared him.
Love wasn't safe in that household. Affection could be given or taken away in an instant. The searing ugly scenes we saw, brutal things that were nothing like The Wonderful World of Disney or My Three Sons. One summer afternoon a lineman from the electric co-op walked up the lane. He seemed a hero from the Old West to me striding in his jeans and massive tool belt with hammers dangling like six guns. I followed him like a puppy, peppering and pestering him with questions. He was there to shut off the electricity. For six weeks my mother cooked and boiled water over a fire near the pump shed. The Old Man was building a dam somewhere on the Snake River.
The ugliness grew and we clung to each other, inventing games that took us out to the junkyard and outbuildings, or hoeing and weeding in the Eastern Oregon sun until there were blisters on our backs. They would have strange, passionately intense reunions, fondling each other on a lawn chair in the shade. I couldn't understand the giving and the loathing, sometimes hours apart. The shouting. It was all so raw.
The crud accumulates until you scrape it away.
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