How it all started: a stubborn mill stack

I first visited Berlin in September 2007, when the stacks of  the  Burgess mill were being dynamited. I was struck by the warmth of the people and the rugged beauty of the place. I knew a prison was being built just outside of town, but I didn’t know much beyond that. Driving north of Berlin on Route 16, the dense forest seems to envelop you. As I stood before the parcel of woods that has been closed off by construction, I felt like fairies might leap out from behind rocks. That  a prison would be built here, in this place, seemed to me so unusual.

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On  this second Saturday in September, Indian Summer has finally broken. It’s been raining since long before dawn. The temperature struggles to rise above 45 degrees. In spite of the downpour and the chill, clusters of people are people are gathered on wooden porches, or on truckbeds and under colorful umbrellas, their faces turned toward the same sight: the silent old Burgess Mill, its four stacks sitting quietly at the city’s heart as they have for decades.

At its height,  the Burgess was the largest pulp mill in the world.  This morning, at precisely nine o’clock, three of the 300-foot-high stacks are to be felled by dynamite.
A crowd of several hundred pushes close to a yellow line of police tape at the corner of Unity and Coos. They wait only a few hundred yards from the tallest stack, the one with a long white banner down its side: ‘North American Demolition.’

Like Belanger, many in the crown had a father, brother, uncle or son that once worked at the mill.  Though many huddle under umbrellas, the older men–the ones with liver spots on their faces and mill-scarred hands–stand unblinking in the rain, letting it run down their cloth caps, down their Carharrt jackets, along their boots and onto the wet pavement. Many of these men know the inside of the mill intimately. They discuss its infrastructure in soft tones and reminisce about watching the stacks built, ten-foot section by ten-foot section. One points out the faint black seams that ring the stack at even intervals, from bottom to top.

Nine o’clock silently comes and goes. When five minutes have elapsed in silence, the onlookers grow restless. Some draw sharply on cigarettes. Others hold hands.  “What the hell are they waiting for?” asks one man to noone in particular, running his fingers through the white beard that stretches down his chest.

His companion smiles and bellows, “Maybe they’re thinkin’ of opening the mill back up.” His accent has the mischievousness of the North Country, sharp As and drawn-out words that would be easily heard in the middle of a storm.  He looks around for a reaction, and the crowd laughs and nod at him fondly.

Three loud blares sounds, as if from a bullhorn. The crowd seems to hold its breath. Silence, rain. Three more horns. Then a tremendous boom rocks the ground as 150 pounds of dynamite explode at the bottom of the most distant stack. A flock of seagulls spray into the sky, circling in confusion. They look like bits of confetti against the slate grey clouds. The stack lingers for a moment, then lists to the right, falling in silence. It is eerie to watch something so large, so ubiquitous to the town, falling without a sound. But it is too far away.
A murmur of ‘oh mys’ and whistles fill the air at the corner of Unity and Coos. Two minutes pass. Three more bullhorns, and another boom rumbles through the belly of the crowd. The second stack, the one attached to the remains of the mill, falls gracefully away from the building. A rumble is felt and heard as it hits the ground.

A cloud of beige dust rises but can’t travel far in the rain. A teenaged girl jumps up and down in excitement, her hands dug deep into her tracksuit pockets.  Several denimed arms hold aloft digital cameras and cell phones. The next boom comes almost instantly, this at the base of the stack closest to the crowd, and a long white banner is draped down its flank: North American Demolition.

As the reverberation subsides, the stack continues to stand. It doesn’t even shudder. The crowd, wide-eyed now, waits. Seconds turn into a minute, then three. “It ain’t comin down,” shouts one woman, either complaining or proud.

“I wouldn’t want to be the poor sonofabitch that’s got to reload,” says the bearded man. People turn their heads away for the first time in ten minutes, asking each other for news.
“That’s the mill for you. Don’t want to come down.” This from a drenched old man, his VFW cap festooned with pins.

“50 bucks to go in and reload, Ronnie!” Laughter. Ronnie, who worked at the mill in its heyday, shakes his head.

An uneasy silence sets in. Some onlookers wander away from the line but most stay in place, pinned in the shadow of the stubborn stack. No more bullhorns and for awhile, no more booms. But most of the people keep standing in the rain – on the porches, on picnic tables in the local park, — and wait to see who will prevail this day, mounds of out-of state explosives or the stubborn old mill stack that’s presided over their town since long before they were born.
The Eastern Depot diner sits in the shadow of the Burgess mill, a few hundred yards from the foot of the recalcitrant stack. A full breakfast can be had here for $3.98.  At twenty past nine on this rainy morning, the Depot’s counter is littered with half-eaten pancakes and crepes, still-warm cups of coffee, crumpled napkins—the still-life of a hasty exit.  Most of the diners abandoned their breakfasts when the first bullhorns sounded; even the waitresses left their rounds and filed out the back door. As uncertainty grows about the remaining stack, a clutch of middle-aged waitresses trickle back in, clearing plates and mugs and apologizing for the mess. Older people, tired of standing in the rain, begin to wander in as well.

The screen door thwapps behind a stout woman in her mid-50s as she pushes into the foyer. She shakes her umbrella and sets it on the floor near the cash register. Her only shield against the rain is a bright pink sweatshirt and a pair of loose jeans. Her close-cropped grey hair frames a permanently furrowed brow. “The crowd is too close,” she says to anyone at the counter who will listen. “Better to move those people . No telling which way that will fall now.” A waitress sets a cup of coffee in front of her.

The kitchen slugs back into operation. The counter, now clear of plates and mugs, gratefully accepts the damp rag of a busboy. A pear-shaped man in a green baseball cap tells her, “Says they’re going to try again in a half hour.”
Hearing this, the woman in the sweatshirt gets up and casually strolls behind the counter. She picks up the phone and punches a number quickly. None of the staff seem to notice. “No, it didn’t come down!” she argues. Once she’s hung up, she lumbers back to the counter and sits down. “They wouldn’t believe me.”

Like many in the crowd, her father, brothers and uncles had all worked at the mill through the years. “It’s a sad day.” She pauses. “But now we have that lovely prison coming in.”
A visitor reminds her that the press has reported solid support for the prison in Berlin. A shadow passes over her face. “Well, they lie.”

An older woman, perhaps a witness to the earlier rush, carries her dishes up to the bussing station, grabs a rag and wipes her own table down. One waitress shoots her a smile and she flicks her hand into the air as if to say, no bother at all.

10.09. Along Berlin’s Main Street, clutches of men, women and children stand on porches, stoops, and sidewalks, idly talking. Another blast silences them. Their faces turn toward the remaining stack. It looks back, unwavering. Indifferent. Two blasts at its base have failed to bring it down. The rain grows stronger and steadier.

Near the yellow police tape, Ronnie and his friends are still standing unprotected in the rain, and exchanging good-natured jibes. “The old one, it was sad to see that go,” he says of the stack that had been attached to the remaining mill. “Been there since I was…since I was…”

Like some of the other men who are standing around watching, he now works in the Cascade paper finishing mill, down the road in Gorham. “But who’s to tell how long that will last?”
The storefronts on Berlin’s Main Street now lie half-empty. Weathered signs announcing JCPenney and the Berlin Boxing Club jangle against red, white and blue placards–John Edwards08, Hilary Clinton for President—that plaster the inside of triptych windows.

Travel away from Berlin’s main drag, into the neighborhoods that curve slowly up toward the base of the mountains, and storefronts give way to sprawling Victorian houses fringed by broad porches. Many of the lawns are adorned with ‘for sale’ signs that compete with each other in different combinations of red, white, and blue.

In prison parlance, inmates are called ‘offenders.’ One thousand two hundred and eighty  new ‘offenders’ in a town of 10,000 people will swell the population of Berlin by 12%. If ‘offenders’ are counted as residents, then by 2011, one in every ten Berlin residents will be behind bars.

If you leave the main part of Berlin and cross the Androscoggin, you’ll find yourself in the more heavily-French eastern district of the city.  Streets with names like Bowdoin and Dutil are lined with three- story apartment buildings in tepid shades of blue and grey, wooden staircases angling up their sides. A brick Catholic school sits on a rise in the center of the neighborhood. Many driveways are filled with trucks so clean you could preen in their siding—F150s, Tacomas, Sierras.

As the town has been preparing to say goodbye to its mill stacks, contractors have been clearing trees a few miles north of town, on the edge of Milan.

To reach site A1, which is really not so much in Berlin as the edge of neighboring Milan, you drive north on Route 116—past lumber and concrete companies, a few cemeteries, and a trailer park. You’ll pass the White Mountain Chapel, ‘weddings & banquets’ advertised in green script across a stucco façade. You’ll pass the Cimitiere St Anne,  and St. Kieran Cemetery—some call it ‘Irish Acres’—where both towns bury their dead.

After three miles or so the road will narrow and broad trees will clasp overhead, as if the land were trying to swallow the tarmac. Moose tracks lead off from either side of the pavement. Clusters of pine, fir, birch and spruce form a canopy over the road. When FCI-Berlin opens in the autumn of  2010—if it opens on time, or at all—some of the trees here will be beginning to take on the golds and vermillions of fall.

But for now the forest here is still dense,  almost impenetrable. The only sign of what is to come is a small white placard that appears along the road’s eastern edge: “Restricted Area”. Barely months old, the signs are already yielding to the undergrowth.
At the mouth of a dirt road that cuts sharply uphill, a larger sign:

By a vote of the BERLIN CITY COUNCIL on July 2, 2007, Success Loop Road is no longer a city street.

Forty-three families lived on Success Road at the time. In the council minutes for July 2, 2007, four residents protested the closure of Success Loop Road in order to build a prison. Anthony Harp, suggested ‘the prison go elsewhere’. Lucille St. Onge-Hickey, who lived on Success Road with her husband, Dave, said she ‘didn’t understand how we are losing our security and privacy for the sake of a few jobs.’ No one spoke in favor of the closure. When they were through, then-Mayor Danderson closed the road without comment.

~ by Corin on February 4, 2009.