Yesterday at work, my colleagues and I witnessed a captivating drama unfolding. During a minor mechanical breakdown, some of us wandered over to the railing along the front edge of our second-floor balcony, from which we had a view of the plant’s main floor below us. We were hoping to get a clue as to the nature and duration of the delay. Our line boss Punkin has a radio, but communications arrive that way only about half the time. Often it becomes a matter of watching what guys in the distance are doing, or receiving long-distance hand signals.
Anyway, we had a view down onto the main floor conveyor belt, on which loads of trash were being carried along the gallery and up a slope to the pinnacle, about twenty feet in the air, at which point the trash was going over the falls and was lost to our sight, like the Moldau River.
And we quickly noticed that a large rat was on the belt, apparently foraging for food among the cans and containers. It was harrowing to watch him, because again and again, he was transported right up to the precipice, where the belt’s contents spilled toward an unknown fate. (I’ve never investigated where stuff goes when it passes beyond our reach . . . though I once proposed the theory to a fellow temp that it goes into a hopper from which a payloader brings it around back to the beginning of the Greenstar pipeline, and that which was becomes that which is — there is no new thing under the sun.) But whether the rat would have plummeted into grinding, compacting machinery or not, at the very least, if he’d gone over the edge, he would have had a long fall.
The belt, about six feet wide, is transected every eight feet or so by a vertical barrier about six inches high. These bafflers keep objects from sliding backward down the belt when it climbs. They were also just high enough that the rat would dash up to one and think, it seemed, that he could go no farther . . . and he’d make a U-turn and dart straight back up toward the brink of possible annihilation.
But it became clear that the rat also had acute perception and amazing reflexes. When he’d find himself right at the top, where the world fell away, he would scamper back down again, hopping over the baffling walls, poking his sharp nose into more soup tins and pizza boxes — left, right, diagonal . . . up the belt, down the belt. Three or four times, his human audience was sure he was a goner, and a collective cry went up. But each time, the rat re-emerged from the vanishing garbage and raced back downward.
Most of the guys seemed greatly amused by the rat’s antics and predicament, but I was terrified for the rat. I wanted him to leap off the belt at the floor level and find safety among the deep, undisturbed warrens. I felt a kinship with him. He seemed to be illustrating our human condition, especially we who work in places such as recycling plants.
We forage; we follow our senses; we scuttle here and there in search of small opportunities. But the inexorable forces of the world pull us higher, higher, toward the great fall into the dark. Bills . . . taxes . . . the passing of time . . . the mortality of our cars and our bodies . . . the horrible white winter, which already has its fangs sunk deep into October . . . To stand still is to succumb. So we do the rat dance, scurrying and scurrying. Fortunately, we are not without help. The machines themselves may be passionless and impartial, but I believe in the Hand that set the machines in motion, and can stop them at any time. It is a Hand of kindness and power.
After a time, our engines started again, the paper belts moved, and no one saw what became of the rat. Judging by his escapades, I’d say there’s quite a fair chance that he lived to forage another day, for he seemed to be a master of the belt, not ignorant of its workings — this is his world, where belts move and engines growl, where cats lurk and men point at rats and say, “There goes your man!”
These thoughts remind me of one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema. It’s in the old movie The River, starring Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek. Nice soundtrack, too! Anyway, the main characters are farmers who struggle to survive along the banks of a river that brings life to their crops, but can also bring destruction. In a particularly bad year, when the crops fail, Mel Gibson and many others like him are forced to find any work they can. He signs on with several truckloads of “scabs” — strike-breakers, who are brought into factories at which the regular employees are on strike, trying to get better conditions from the owners. Naturally, these scabs are extremely unpopular with the regular workers, who throw things at them, rattle the chain-link fences, and shout obscenities — “You’re taking our jobs!”
So, under terrible conditions, the scabs go to work, and the factory keeps running. One day, in the sleepless, infernal darkness of the steel mill, the men notice that a wild deer has somehow wandered in from the sparse woodland outside. Lost, disoriented, the deer stumbles through the labyrinth of gears and belts, its panic increasing.
Excited, the men shout, “Let’s get it!” They deploy themselves, their hunter instincts taking over. They surround the deer, cutting off its retreat. Finally, the animal stands trapped within a ring of sweaty, hungry, tired, sad, desperate, unshaven men. There is no escape. The deer stares at the men; the men stare at the deer. The creature is so terrified that its bladder lets go.
No one says a word, but somehow, in that moment of witnessing the deer’s terror, the men see themselves reflected in its eyes. They, too, are surrounded by a sea of hostiles. They, too, only want to live. They, too, are in need of mercy and miracles.
Acting in unison, the men slowly move their circle, keeping it intact, herding the deer along in their midst. They thread through the maze of smoke and furnaces to the open bay door of the factory. There, they open the circle and allow the deer to run back into the forest.
We live in a world of darkness, but it is not an abandoned world. When the fulness of time had come, God sent a Savior. So, too, He orders our paths and opens the circle at the right time, delivering us from our rat dance, restoring us to the green woods.
As the autumn deepens, let us remember mercy: that which we receive, and which we may in turn give.
Hagiograph says: 
jhagman 
Morwenna 
fsdthreshold 
Tim in Germany 
Buurenaar 
Daylily