Settling In

This is a photo that shows the blue bridge I walked for three years, from town to the mill. Right foreground shows a wooden road. Left foreground is the building that held the swimming pool. Many famous swimmers came of the Ocean Falls swimming club. Photo looks down Cousin's inlet, the only way out.

My week of training was soon finished and I was now a full fledged pulp tester. By now I had learned a lot about the department I was working in, the company I was working for, the people I was working with, and the town I was living in. It truly was a different world. My job was a junior position and I would not have 'arrived' until I graduated to 'paper tester' a job with more sophistication, respect, responsibility and of course, more pay. I was already earning more than three times what any of my friends back home were earning. I thought the money was quite simply incredible.
As I learned my job, I also learned about the fascinating process of manufacturing paper. The mill at Ocean Falls had at one time done it all, but due to scaling back, aging infrastructure and poor paper markets, the process now only involved making newsprint and a few specialty papers. Newsprint only requires wood fibre with little processing as opposed to whiter kraft papers that require digesting and bleaching the pulp. The groundwood mill was quite fascinating to watch in operation.
Even though we were surrounded by forests, it was all inaccessible due to steep terrain, so all the wood was brought in by self dumping barges. The grade of wood was poor for lumber but for paper it was just fine. The logs would be cut into 4 foot lengths and sent down a flume, powered by a steady flow of water, to the groundwood mill. There they entered the grinder room where grinder operators would select a piece with remote control grapplers, send it through a high powered de-barker run by extreme water pressure, and dump it into the grinder pit. There were 4 grinders in a line and each had its own operator. The trick was to select the right types of wood and the operators had to be experts at recognizing the different types of wood. There was birch, alder, pine, hemlock, fir and cottonwood. If the mix was not right, the resulting pulp would be too fibrous or not fibrous enough. When the grinder pit was properly loaded, with no two pieces crossing each other, the hydraulic pit door would close and the grinders would rev up. The grinder was a circular stone like a large wheel, five feet across and about 6 feet in diameter. The surface of the stone (granite) was scored in a criss-cross fashion and when the wood was pushed against the spinning stone, the wood fibres would sheer off the log and become pulp, naturally mixed with large amount of water. The large stones had to be sharpened (scored with diamond wheels on a jig) every few weeks so it was rare to see all 4 grinders operating at once. It also happened a few times, while I was there, that a rock, lodged in a piece of wood, undetected by the grinderman, would enter the grinder pit and it would shatter the grinder stone. It would then have to be replaced at great expense to the mill.
My favourite Grinder Mill foreman, John Vanderjacht, was a great teacher and also a very personable and friendly man. He was a very good looking and rugged man who was a sharp dresser and seemed too cultured to be working in that rough environment. He would do his own pulp testing when there was a problem, not because he didn't trust me, but he wanted to make sure I got my 15 minute break every hour. We spent many a night shift, when there were no bosses around, shooting the breeze. Things were always under control on his shift.
As for Richard, my trainer, he was promoted to paper tester. A few weeks after he was settled into his new position, I went to the other end of the mill to visit him on one of my breaks. I asked him what it was like. I knew it was just a matter of time before I would move up because there seemed to be a lot of turnover of staff in the mill. He looked at me with a big grin on his face and said, "I guess paper tester."