Sidetracked

Preface

In real life, I actually do live on the side of a hill overlooking the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Southern Transcon, one of two primary rail routes between Los Angeles and Chicago. For over a quarter century I've heard the rumble of diesels and the rattle of steel wheels on steel rails as freight trains carried goods across the continent, Metrolink trains whisked commuters to and from their places of work, and the Amtrak Southwest Chief carried passengers on a two-day journey between Union Station in Los Angeles and Union Station in Chicago.

Years ago the BNSF built a storage track alongside the transcon that can be seen from my house, and from the bottom of the hill on Esperanza Road just before one makes the left turn at Fairlynn to go up the hill. Growing up, my daughter Emily found the sight of unstaffed, unmoving trains to be unnerving, exacerbated by a ghost train story that she read in elementary school. 

Sometime after Emily reached adulthood and moved out on her own, and time and distance allowed the creep-out factor to fade at least a little, I heard a song by Chris Knight called "A Train Not Running", in which the sound of a train not running becomes a metaphor for this country's perceived industrial decline, and all the anxiety and social cost that goes with it. I also recalled hearing back in my high school days a jaunty little ditty by Dave Frishberg—Frishberg wrote a lot of jaunty little ditties—called "My Attorney Bernie". Two years ago, I felt that somewhere in all of that I had a story.

The Chris Knight song is written as a monologue that's being spoken to someone named Mary. Mary is never heard from, and serves as a neutral sounding board for all of the song's pain and self-doubt. With all due respect to Knight's powerful and moving song, I took some license and decided to give Mary agency of her own, and a voice. 

Ed Little, November 2023

Acknowlegement

Once again, I am indebted to Nicole Bailey for her mentorship and her insight into making my story more clear and my characters more alive.

 

For Emily. May your train always be clear to proceed at maximum authorized speed.

Four Months to Closure

Sometimes a subject can become so talked about, so intellectualized, so abstracted that it's easy to forget that there's a real place where it's happening. Mary stopped her car at the red light on Esperanza, waiting to turn up the hill and toward home. She glanced at the train tracks to her right, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Southern Transcon. Sixty kilometers behind her were the docks of the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex, the busiest port in the world, the point at which the products of China's economic miracle gained entry into that country's largest trading partner. Thirty-four hundred kilometers ahead were the rail yards of Chicago, and from there just about any point in North America could be reached in another day's journey by rail. In her mirror, she caught sight of BNSF 3917, and she glanced to the right as the eastbound container train passed her passenger side window.

Mary grabbed the microphone on her mobile radio and brought up 146.520 MHz. "Kilo echo six echo charlie hotel, kilo november six bravo charlie delta". Jim had been a radio amateur since high school. Just a couple years ago he had finally talked Mary into taking the Technician exam. It was, she had to admit, more fun than a cell phone.

The speaker crackled. "KN6BCD, KE6ECH."

"KE6ECH, KN6BCD. I'm by the Circle K. You want a pop before I come up the hill?" Matthew, their youngest, had just graduated from the University of Michigan. Mary had spent the last four years gently teasing her son by saying pop instead of soda, the far more commonly used term in California. She was finding the habit strangely hard to break. 

"No, thanks. I'm OK. See you soon. KN6BCD, KE6ECH clear."

"KN6BCD clear and continuing to monitor five two oh."

As the last car of the eastbound train passed Mary and disappeared from view, she noticed the train sitting on the third track. This portion of the railway had been double-tracked ever since the '90s, when Metrolink made taking the train to work a real thing for the first time since the last of the Pacific Electric Red Cars disappeared in the mid '60s. About fifteen years ago, BNSF built a third track—which Mary strangely still thought of as the new track—between mile post 35 and mile post 38 as a place where a train could be stored for a few days when the yards of Los Angeles and the dockside tracks at the harbor were too full. Today a container train, BNSF 6502, waited patiently on the storage track. 

There was something oddly disconcerting about the sight of a train just sitting there: all that steel, all that power, and no place for it to go. You could sometimes hear the whirr of compressor motors, or the chuff of excess air being bled off. Sometimes the headlamp was on; sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes the locomotive number was illuminated; sometimes not. Various panels all around the locomotive body blinked—seemingly randomly—with arrays of status lights, like the blinking lights on the set of Star Trek. The cab was too high and the window glass too thick to tell if anyone was in the cab. The train seemed at once both ready to spring into action and consigned to wait, both alive and dead, like an industrial interpretation of some cheesy zombie movie.

Mary turned up the hill and was walking through her front door within a few minutes. 

"Jim," she called out.

"Out back," was the distant reply.

Mary walked through the sliding glass door into the back yard and saw Jim standing at the grill.

"I put these steaks on right after we signed off. They'll be done in a few minutes. Would you like to pick out a wine to go with?"

"I, uh, sure. What's the occasion?"

"Just wanted to do something nice for Van Horn Manufacturing's most underappreciated plant manager," Jim said.

"Soon to be ex plant manager."

"How about retired plant manager?"

"Erstwhile plant manager."

"Done," Jim said.

Mary walked into the kitchen and looked at the wine rack. Mary and Jim didn't like to think of themselves as wine people per se, but they always made sure they had a few bottles on hand. None of the half dozen reds on the rack really got her attention today, so she opened the fridge and was glad to see that what she was looking for was still there. She pulled out a bottle of premier cru from the village of Nuits-Saint-Georges. It was a little-known fact that even though the name of the place is used to describe a maroon color, France's Burgundy region produces more white wine than red. It was also a little-known fact that if you opened a bottle of white with a steak, particularly a nice mineral-heavy Chardonnay from Burgundy, the Wine Cops weren't going to break down your door and haul you downtown.

Jim was just serving the steaks and baked potatoes onto the plates he had set on the patio table when Mary walked back out with the wine. "This is awesome," she said. "Thank you."

"No prob. You know, I was thinking of breakfast in bed tomorrow, but that's hard to pull off on a weekday, and I didn't want to wait until the weekend. So I decided to do this instead. Did I ever tell you about the guy who made his wife duck à l'orange for breakfast in bed?"

"That seems like an odd choice."

"And that's what she said. 'Besides,' she said, 'I can't eat this. Not here. Not like this.' The dude was crestfallen; he'd worked hard on that meal. So he says, 'Oh darling, why?' And she says, 'Because one should never eat quackers in bed.'"

"That's truly awful. So, anyway, it looks like that train down there might move soon. I think I saw the guy by the switch."

"Well," Jim said, "I was talking to you on my HT. It's over by the grill. I can grab it and we can listen in."

A handheld transceiver, or HT, typically used by radio amateurs for local communication has a couple fairly narrow ranges in which the transmitter is enabled—144 to 148 MHz and 420 to 450 MHz—but can receive (with the transmitter disabled) over a much larger range of frequencies. In that respect it's functionally like the police scanners that were popular in the '70s and '80s, except that most police communications these days were encrypted. Jim thumbed the power button on the radio and punched in 160.650 MHz, the frequency used by BNSF dispatchers in this subdivision. They were halfway through their steaks when the speaker crackled.

"San Bernardino dispatch to BNSF 6502. I have your movement authority when you're ready to copy."

"BNSF 6502, San Bernardino dispatch. We're ready."

"BNSF 6502 has the authority to enter and occupy Main Track 1 westbound between Esperanza and Atwood."

"Copy BNSF 6502 has the authority to enter and occupy Main Track 1 westbound between Esperanza and Atwood."

"San Bernardino dispatch to BNSF 6502. Correct on the readback. I'll give you a call when I can give you a signal at Atwood. Have a safe trip."

From the patio table on the side of the hill Mary and Jim could see down to the railway. They heard the diesel engines rumble to life, and saw the train, slowly at first, begin moving off the sidetrack. A mechanical zombie no more, the train that had waited for days was finally going somewhere. Mary was going nowhere, and even though none of them knew it yet, she was taking a hundred fifty people with her.

One Year to Closure

"Now that's United States Department of Agriculture inspected grade Prime bullshit!"

The members of Mary's management team sat around the conference table with a combination of stunned silence and admiration. They'd never seen her this angry before. They'd all been called to corporate headquarters in Terre Haute, heard the announcement, glanced at the paperwork each of them had been handed, and didn't like a bit of it. They'd been afraid to say anything; apparently Mary wasn't.

"I get that the plant has to close. I get that all our work is going to be outsourced. Hell, I'm surprised it took this long. But that nondisclosure agreement is fucking horseshit."

No one was saying anything. Oh well, Mary thought, might as well fill the silence until one of these dumbasses figures out that they need to regain control of the meeting.

"If we talk to our employees now, they've got a year. They've got options. Most of them will probably be able to line up new jobs. Waiting until ninety days before we close gives them almost no options; they'll be out of work."

Amy, the director of corporate communication, spoke up. "We've done these before—".

"No shit, Sherlock."

Amy sighed. "We've done these before, and we've found that they go more smoothly when the release of information is carefully managed."

"Oh, please. You don't want anyone to know because you don't want any of them looking for new jobs. You need them to stick around and do the work of closing the place down. After that, you could give a good goddamn if they're all on unemployment." The resumption of silence around the room was all the confirmation she needed. Well, if all these fuckers responded to was self-interest, she might as well try that. "Think of it this way. Every employee who finds a new job is one fewer severance package you're going to have to pay out."

Bob, the CEO, cleared his throat. "Thank you, Mary. Unfortunately, we didn't work in an item on today's agenda for negotiating. You're all going to sign the NDA. You're all going back to Anaheim where you'll spend the next twelve months managing a smooth transition of the work to our business partners in China. When it's over, you'll all receive generous severance packages. Your employees will also be eligible for severance and job placement assistance. And if there's anyone here who's not comfortable with that, I'll accept your resignation now. Are there any questions?"

Mary asked, "Can we hire Tommy Shaw to hang out at the office and go around singing, 'Secret, secret. I've got a secret.'?"

"Leave your signed documents on the table in front of you. Reception will arrange for your ride back to the airport."

It was interesting, Mary thought on the flight back to Los Angeles. Along with her, not one single member of her management team was offered a transfer to another Van Horn plant. All that experience, all those results, all of it was being tossed out. Terre Haute wasn't just chasing cheaper labor; they were getting rid of a problem.

Van Horn had a roster of plants that mostly supplied parts to the automotive industry. The supply chain for automobile manufacture is unbelievably complex. The final assembly line that appears in the adverts, with its pristine clean floors and rows of shiny robots, is just the last step in a process that involves hundreds of small factories—very few of which are owned by the large auto companies—each producing parts and subassemblies that ultimately go into the finished product. Van Horn's flagship plant in Terre Haute produced plastics, of which a modern automobile has a staggering amount. A plant in Saline, Michigan made disc brake assemblies. Waukesha, Wisconsin, Mary and Jim's hometown, made fuel injectors. Thomas Van Horn, ever the motor racing fan, also made sure the company always had a few contracts for producing performance and racing parts. The plant in Anaheim, California made instrumentation packages for race cars that included the dash display, wiring, and all the sensors. They even had a software guy on staff who made sure the system played nice with the popular telemetry and data acquisition systems.

Mary and Jim met at Carroll College in Waukesha. They married right after he graduated, as she was finishing her sophomore year. Jimmy, their oldest boy, came along a little sooner than expected, and college was going to have to wait. Out of a combination of wanting a little more spending money and wanting something to do outside the house, Mary applied for a job at the Van Horn plant after Matthew, their youngest, reached school age. She enjoyed the work, and most of the people, but there were also more than enough jerks to go around. 

The petty power trips, the guys who got off on intimidating entry-level and semiskilled workers who had no other place to go, those things got under Mary's skin. After a particularly bad day, she and Jim talked it over.

"You can quit. You can walk in tomorrow and just tell them all to take a flying leap at the moon. I'm making plenty of dough. We could get by without your paycheck if we had to. If you still want to do something, do something else, even if it doesn't pay as well."

"Thanks, that's really sweet," she said. "There's a bigger picture, though. If I quit, they'll just hire someone else to replace me. And those assholes will just be assholes to someone else. If anything's going to change, someone needs to be the change. Someone needs to change the system from the inside."

Mary enrolled in night school the very next day. She didn't so much ask as tell her supervisor that she would not be available for overtime on the nights class was in session. In light of her conversation with Jim, she wasn't worried. If they fired her, they fired her. She majored in business. It wouldn't have been her first choice but beggars can't be choosers, especially beggars returning to night school after not finishing college on the first try. She used her electives to take as much physics and math as she could so that if she ever did make management, she could at least have halfway intelligent conversations with the engineers. 

From that day forward, she approached every day as if the worst thing that could possibly happen to her is that she'd no longer have to go to a job that wasn't working out anyway. It was like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The guys who wanted to threaten and intimidate had nothing over her. They'd almost be doing her a favor if they made good on their threats, which they never did.

Like the guy in the movie Office Space whose fuck-it-all attitude ironically led to promotion, Mary's newfound confidence attracted attention. She once heard someone say that sometimes you reach a point where you can either change the place where you work or you can change the place where you work. She was now finding that a willingness to change the place where she worked was unlocking a previously undiscovered potential to change the place where she worked. Mary was named to management within months after graduation. When Anaheim's plant manager retired, Tom Van Horn personally offered Mary the job. She still had the leather aviator's cap and goggles that Tom presented her as a newly promoted executive prominently displayed in a glass cabinet in her office.

In Anaheim she started building the kind of organization she had in mind that night she and Jim sat at the kitchen table crying over the awful day she had back in Waukesha all those years ago. She built a diverse management team. Borrowing from an article she had once read in the Harvard Business Review, she maintained a strict no-asshole rule. Every employee was expected to treat every other employee with dignity regardless of seniority. Everyone was expected to focus on the task, and on solving problems. When someone would send an e-mail to their supervisor pointing out how a coworker had screwed something up and copied her (and often a VP or two), she filed those messages in a special folder. When it was necessary to downsize, which is inevitable in any business when things get slow, she'd review all the e-mails about all the people who screwed up—and the people that sent them were the first to go.

That was when Tom was still around, before the day when his Cessna 172's logbook would forever show a number of takeoffs that exceeded the number of landings by one. It didn't take long after the shock had worn off to realize that Bob's Van Horn Manufacturing would not be anything like Tom's Van Horn Manufacturing. Before long, she was getting e-mails, and then printed and signed letters, outlining her need to be more of a team player, and criticizing her "disruption to managerial cohesiveness." She didn't need the MBA that she never had time to earn to figure out what that euphemism meant.

And so now those guys in Terre Haute, those guys who all had the same haircut and went to the same school and wore the same suits and drank the same beer and had the same conversation about the same football team day after day, now those guys had what they wanted. Mary and her band of leftie creampuffs would all be gone in one move. Mary saw the financial numbers every month. Among Van Horn's plants, Anaheim was always much closer to the top in profitability than the bottom, all while doing business in a location where rent and labor costs were sky high. Results be damned though; the suits in Terre Haute had their managerial cohesiveness at last. All too often in corporate America, bullshit talked plenty and money walked.

Well, Mary thought, she'd done all she could. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. She was sure the severance would be obscenely large. Jim's job was going well. She and Jim had some savings. The kids were all graduated from university and moved out, so they could always cash in some equity on the house and move into a smaller place. Mary reclined her business class seat and began to doze off. Maybe I could get used to funemployment.

Eleven Months to Closure

"Jesus! You signed it? Are you out of your mind?" Oh yay. Bernie was in tough love mode.

"I had no choice," Mary replied. "The whole thing was a foregone conclusion. I could either sign it or walk."

"You're probably right. Had I been there, I probably would have just told you to sign it. But that's the last one. These guys are gonna spend the next year playing hardball. From here on you don't sign anything without your attorney seeing it. I don't care how much of a goddamn hurry they say they're in. Tell them you need some air. Tell them you're nauseous. Tell them you just got a text from Jim and he's home with the flu and he needs you there to hold his hand and turn on cartoons. Tell them anything; just get out of the room and don't sign anything until I see it."

"Yeah, yeah."

"Don't 'yeah, yeah' me. And another thing. We're not doing a no-compete clause."

"Why? I'm not going into business for myself."

"Oh, right. You're going to plant flowers and play with that radio of yours and bake cookies for your bridge club. In six months, you'll be bored out of your ever loving mind. And if they've got a no-compete and you open a goddamn lemonade stand, they're gonna nail your ass. So, we're not doing a no-compete."

"Okay. Thanks, Bernie. You're the best."

"Well," Bernie said, "just looking out for my favorite client."

"Oh, Bernie. It's just like my accountant was telling me: I owe it all to you."

"Toodles."

"Toodles."

Mary tapped the End button on her phone.

Ninety Days to Closure

"There's no easy way to say this," Mary read from a written statement that she wrote—and had approved by corporate communications—weeks ago. "Effective ninety days from today, Van Horn Manufacturing is ceasing operations at its Anaheim plant. This is no reflection on the quality of work from this facility, customer satisfaction, or the performance of our people. You've all put safety, quality, and customer satisfaction first and should be as proud as I am of what we've accomplished here. This was a difficult decision, but one that was necessary for the good of the business and for all of our stakeholders. Now I'm going to turn this over to Kim from HR, who will talk a little bit about what happens next, so please give her your undivided attention."

The groans from the assembled crowd were audible. Mary was pretty sure she heard the words "fucked up" in there somewhere. Kim, the most senior HR manager in the company, had flown out from Terre Haute for the occasion. Mary wondered bitterly if Kim would make it out to the beach on this trip, or over to Grauman's Chinese Theater to see the handprints in cement. Kim droned on about opportunities to apply for transfer, severance pay, and job placement assistance; Mary was certain the employees weren't hearing a thing. She couldn't even look them in the eye. She was in charge, the one who was supposed to zealously stand up for her crew, and she'd let them down. Severance. Depending on what Mary's lawyer and those corporate pukes worked out, her settlement would be well into the six figures and might even touch seven. What would the employees get? She could almost hear the voiceover from one of those '70 television game shows reading off the list of lousy consolation prizes. "Some of our departing contestants will receive not even enough money to cover a month's rent, a case of Turtle Wax, a year's supply of Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat, a twenty-volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the home version of our game."  This day was not working out.

As she stopped to turn up the hill on her way home that night, Mary noticed BNSF 8179, an auto rack train, stopped on the storage track. Going nowhere. There may or may not have been a crew in the cab. It was hard to tell. It was hard to care. The traffic signal turned green and Mary turned up the hill.

Eighty-nine Days to Closure

Saturday morning dawned to thick fog. It was unusual to see morning fog this far from the ocean, but not entirely unheard of. Jim snored softly on the pillow next to Mary. Mary knew herself too well to think there was any chance she'd be back asleep today. There was no point in lying there staring out the window at the nothingness, and she didn't have the heart to wake Jim up.

The night before she planned for just such a contingency. From the clothes tree next to her side of the bed she grabbed a pair of shorts, a long-sleeve t-shirt, and a pair of comfortable walking shoes. She slipped quietly out of the bedroom and dressed in the hall.

Outside the air was thick and damp and chilly. Not exactly shorts weather, but she was sure that half a mile into her walk she'd build up enough internal heat that it wouldn't be so bad. She could hardly see a thing. She could hardly hear a thing for that matter; the fog muffled what little sound this still-sleeping suburb might be making. At each street corner she took an extra look for cars and then crossed briskly.

She was right. By the time she reached the bottom of the hill, the damp coldness didn't bother her a bit. She'd probably even work up a little bit of a sweat on the walk back up the hill, which would be taken care of by a slightly-too-hot shower. It sounded delightful. She felt some of the tension drain away. The solitude of the silent gray morning was actually doing her some good. She'd had enough of the plant, enough of those corporate twits, enough of the guilt and crushing sense of responsibility. Responsibility. That was the dumbest part. Like there was anything she could've done to have prevented this. A lot of people who lose their jobs wind up better off anyway. It was time to put this all behind her, take care of herself, take care of her family, and trust that everyone at the plant would have the good sense to take care of themselves and their families. Yeah, that hot shower was gonna feel great.

An ear-splitting hiss shattered the tranquility of the moment and made Mary jump out of her skin. She felt her heart rate pick up as a bell started clanging. Then, the sound of an engine revving up, but too loud and too low and too rumbling to be an automobile engine. She struggled to make sense of all the things that had so suddenly ended the quiet of the morning. Her first thought was that an airplane had become lost in the fog and was seconds away from clipping the treetops above her head before violently impacting the ground. She stood motionless, reflexively looking to the featureless gray sky in all directions, not so much paralyzed by fear as knowing the futility of moving. She could run, but without knowing where the danger was coming from she could as easily run toward the danger as away from it. Several seconds passed. Whatever the source of the din, it wasn't moving or changing, and an airplane wouldn't explain the bell anyway. She shifted her attention to the ground, through the gray void and across the road, and she could just barely make out the outline of a locomotive. That train. That stupid train. Still there. Still going nowhere. Making a ridiculous amount of noise for an early Saturday morning in a residential area, but still going nowhere. Mary turned around, the peace and quiet of her morning walk ruined, and made a joyless trudge back up the hill.

Eighty Days to Closure

It was a long day at the plant. Mary drove toward home in the dark, and stopped to turn at the bottom of the hill. The train was still there. In a dumpy strip mall, just up the hill from the Circle K, was a bar that had been there since dirt was young. It was a bar Mary and Jim had never seen the inside of in all the time they'd lived on the hill. A raised pickup truck, looking like a poor imitation of those monster trucks that the boys used to love when they were like eight, sped out of the bar's parking lot and started down the hill. As the truck bounded down the hill, its headlights alternated between drilling holes in the ground and searching the skies above for enemy aircraft. For a split second, like poorly done movie lightening effects, the truck's headlights illuminated the inside of the locomotive's cab.

It happened so fast. Mary would later try—without much success—to convince herself that what she saw couldn't really have been there, that it was the interplay of light and shadow and all the bullshit that was going through her head all played out over what couldn't have been more than a few tenths of a second. But that face. She couldn't will herself to unsee that face. She saw him through the windscreen, side lit from the truck's lights coming from his right, her left. His face was sickly pale in the imperfect light. His hands were resting on the back of his head, his downcast face spoke of an unfathomable despair. He was going nowhere, as alive on the outside and dead on the inside as that train would ever be. And then, nothing. That one flash of light was it, replaced by impenetrable darkness. Indicator lights still flashed on exterior panels, but there was no way of knowing if there was even anyone in the cab. He could be still standing there, in the darkness, pondering the soul-crushing emptiness, or he might not even be there. The light turned green and Mary started up the hill.

Sixty-five Days to Closure

"Well, have a great time," Mary said. "Text me when you're on your way back to the hotel."

Work took Jim to Chicago for a few days. As Mary made her way home, he called to say that he was at Ravinia to catch the Chicago Symphony as long as he was there. Tonight's program was the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4. Lucky bastard. She was going home to watch Jeopardy and hope there was enough stuff in the fridge to throw together a sandwich. On second thought, to hell with it. If Jim's off having fun, she could order delivery from the Indian restaurant down the hill. Sure, the serving sizes were really too big for one person, but that just meant she'd have lunch tomorrow.

As she turned up the hill, she noticed the train was still there. She got home, made good on her threat to order in, answered nearly every clue on Jeopardy (she really should think of auditioning one of these days), and absent mindedly turned on the radio, tuning it to the railway's frequency of 160.650. Like most VHF/UHF radios, this one had a squelch, a device that cuts off the audio when no signal is detected so that you don't have to constantly listen to static. She picked up a book and read for a bit while the radio stayed mostly silent. Exhausted, she wasn't even sure when it was that she dozed off.

Mary noticed the sound of voices, but at first was in too much of a fog to make out any words. Without even bothering to look at the clock, she guessed that it was about two in the morning. She must have fallen asleep with the radio on, an easy enough mistake to make with the squelch closed. She still wasn't sure if she was completely awake, but she was starting to catch what the voices were saying.

"BNSF 8179, San Bernardino dispatch. Look, we've been here a long time. How about getting us our movement authority?"

An awkward fifteen or twenty seconds passed in silence and complete darkness. "Well, how about it?"

The reply that came back was short and broke all radio procedure and was so devoid of anything like human feeling or empathy as to send a chill right through Mary. "You're never getting movement authority."

The conductor was livid. "BNSF 8179, San Bernardino dispatch. That's absurd. Never? You're just going to leave us here? Are we stuck on this train forever? Alone? Forgotten? That's not acceptable. Now you find us some clear track and get us our movement authority."

The dispatcher's reply was as chillingly emotionless as before. "You're not going anywhere. Ever. You can just stay in that cab an act like everything's fine. Just pretend like there's no problem here. You're getting paid whether you move or not."

Mary's feet found the cold floor as she sat straight up on the edge of the bed. She fumbled with the lamp on the nightstand, and turned it on. The radio sat silently on the nightstand but, as she had correctly guessed, its power was still on. She crossed the room to the window and looked down the hill. It was a dark, moonless night, and she hadn't put on her glasses. Maybe she saw the dimly lit headlamp of the sidetracked train, maybe she didn't. She glanced again at the still silent radio. Asking the guys at Curry Out to crank up the spice on the lamb vindaloo probably wasn't the best idea. The voices on the radio had gone silent. Maybe they'd said all there was to say. No. That wasn't all there was to say, and everything wasn't fine. Everything hadn't been fine for almost a year now, but the sunrise, still a few hours away, would bring another chance to find a better way.

Sixty-four Days to Closure

Despite the fact that their sauerbraten and Wiener schnitzel were both outstanding, Anaheim's best German restaurant was typically busier for breakfast than it was for dinner. Lacking sleep, Mary had decided to drop in on her way to the plant. She took one last bite of her German pancake, and asked the server for another splash of coffee and to take her plate. She grabbed her phone and tapped on Bernie's number.

"How are the negotiations going?" she asked.

"Looks like we're gonna get you seven-fifty. We might've been able to do a mil, but they gave me a little pushback on that no-compete clause and I had to concede a little."

Mary frowned and looked at her coffee cup. "I wonder if I wouldn't just be better off with the cash."

"We've been over that before. I know you too well, Mary. You've got as much chance of going into retirement as I have of playing shortstop for the Angels. You'll thank me later."

The server dropped the check on Mary's table. Hand-written in the margin was "Thanks - Megan", and a smiley face. The smiley face. Mary first read about it in a James Fallows piece in The Atlantic. If you make a two-dimensional plot of a product's life cycle with time on the horizontal axis and value added on the vertical axis, the plot resembles a smiley face—at least the upturned-mouth portion of the smiley face. At the beginning—product design, design engineering, production engineering—a high amount of value is added. At the end—distribution, promotion, retailing—a similarly high amount of value is added. The low point in the middle is manufacturing, where comparatively less value is being added. Beginning in the 1960s and then really kicking in in the 1990s, the US manufacturing sector experienced foreign competition that it hadn't really seen before. Through a long series of actions and inactions too disconnected to be called intentional, American businesses, American consumers, and American government effectively conceded the win to those foreign competitors, largely because of the perception that manufacturing wasn't where the real money was anyway.

"Wait, Bernie," Mary said.

"I'm listening."

"We don't make anything here anymore, right?"

"That's why we're having this conversation."

"You know what we do still do here? We design new products. We design improvements to products. We come up with ideas. We come up with crazy ideas. And then we try to get venture capitalists to throw a bunch of money at those crazy ideas."

"Okay. Sure."

"Thanks a lot Bernie, this is brilliant."

"What?"

"Bernie, you said I'd thank you later. I'm thanking you now. Oh, and be thinking about ways to incorporate. LLC, LLP, S-corp, whatever; I'll leave it up to you to work out some options."

When she got to the plant, Mary went directly to Jerry's office. Technically Jerry worked for corporate accounting and wasn't on the Anaheim plant's org chart, but since all of his responsibilities were centered on the Anaheim plant, he was sure to be on the final list of those being let go. Mary guessed—correctly—that Jerry wouldn't need much convincing.

She then walked back to her office, closed the door, and called Jen at the Los Angeles sales office. Jen wasn't in much danger of losing her job and Mary expected her to need more convincing than Jerry did. The risk that she was asking Jen to take weighed on Mary, but this whole thing wasn't going to get off the ground without someone who had the necessary contacts to get out there and bring some work in, and Mary would make sure it would be worth Jen's while if everything worked out. Besides, in sales switching jobs from time to time sort of went with the scenery, and Mary knew that Jen had been passed over—twice—for sales management positions, losing out both times to men whose qualifications were, let's just say not any stronger. As it turned out, Jen practically jumped at the chance to try out a new challenge. Poaching Van Horn's people was turning out to be fun.

Sixty Days to Closure

Jim was in his usual role of grill master. Mary stood at the edge of the patio, and the guests, sitting around tables, turned the folding chairs to face her. The management team that had flown with her to Terre Haute were all there, as were Jerry from accounting and Jen from sales. She had invited two additional guests: Tony, whose talent with a 3D printer was PFM, pure magic, and Maria, the B-shift foreman, who lived and worked as if the notion of a leader who is there to serve the crew rather than the other way around was a genuine aspiration and not just another business cliché.

"Thanks for coming today. Before we start on this wonderful meal that Jim has put together for us, I'd like to say a few words about why we're here.

"When a person or a company has an idea for a new product, one of the first things they need is a prototype. They need something tangible that people can see and touch and evaluate while they try to get support for the product from prospective customers and potential backers. The actual production, if the product ever goes into production, will probably be done overseas, but that short initial run is usually done by shops over here where engineers and designers can work together closely.

"What I would like to do—or more to the point I would like for us to—is to open a prototyping shop. It's a different kind of work from what we're used to, but one that draws on the same skillsets that we have under our roof at Anaheim.

"Most of the major auto manufacturers—even the overseas ones—have design studios in L.A. We'll call on them. Our capabilities won't have much overlap with Van Horn, but maybe we'll steal a short-run job or two from them just to say we did." The group erupted in laughter. Good. She had them. "There are aerospace shops in Long Beach and El Segundo. We'll call on them. We'll call on the industrial design boutiques in L.A. and South Orange County.

"I talked to the landlord a few weeks ago and he freaked out when he found out that Van Horn wouldn't be renewing the lease. When I told him I might be able to line up a new tenant, I'll just say he was motivated.

"Jerry and Jen will be employee numbers zero and one, respectively. Jen's job is to bring in work. My job is to figure out what we need in terms of equipment and staffing to do that work. Jerry's job is to tell me I can't afford it. 

"If there are no objections, I'll be offering Maria and Tony positions as employees number two and three. The rest of you can get in by buying equity. I'm not going to sugar-coat this. We've got access to a lot of talent and this thing could take off and we could all make millions. Or we could lose it all. If anyone doesn't want in, I won't be offended.

"I know this is a big risk, and I can't promise it's going to work out. But we have a chance here to build something new, something that's entirely ours. We can build it our way, without 'advice'," she resisted the urge to draw finger quotes, "from Terre Haute. Are there any questions?"

"Where are we supposed to come up with the money?"

"That's a personal decision. Each of you knows your own tolerance for risk, I don't. I know that everyone here is about to get a big check. It'd be kind of funny if Van Horn indirectly provided some of our startup capital."

Mary looked up at Jim. He gave her a nod and she gave a slight nod in return. Jim rang the triangular dinner bell that hung from the patio cover by the grill. After everyone had a chance to fill their plates, Mary grabbed a plate and walked over to the grill where Jim moved a piece of salmon filet from the grill to her plate. She stepped over to the table beside the grill and added a scoop of coleslaw and a slice of home baked bread, taking a moment to drizzle some olive oil on the bread. She reached into the trash barrel that was filled with ice, pulled out an Asahi, and studied the label. Interesting how many Japanese companies use that word in their branding, everything from cameras to chemicals to beer. She thought something over for a moment. Was it appropriation? She didn't think so. The wording might be the same but she was thinking of a different meaning, having more to do with a fresh start than with national symbology. She'd ask Jim later to talk to Dave in his company's art department about taking on a freelance job.

Down the hill, BNSF 8179 slowly began to roll forward and onto Main Track 1. Everyone at the barbecue was having so much fun, they never even noticed.

Closure

The movers had cleared out the last of it the previous week. The employees had been told that they could simply clock in for eight hours on each of the remaining days and they'd call it good. The Anaheim plant's final day of operation was entirely ceremonial. Bob, the CEO, and Ron, the vice president of manufacturing, had both been invited to attend. Both executives' secretaries apologized and said that their calendars were full. 

She asked all the employees to arrive at ten in the morning. Separately, individually, she asked the staff and management who would be present on the new company's first day of operations to arrive at eight. By now the existence of the new business was no secret, but she wanted to be sensitive to the fact that not everyone would be celebrating new opportunities today.

When everyone had made it into the lunch room, Mary stood in the front of the room. She wore the leather aviator's cap. The goggles rested on the cap just above her forehead.

"Help yourself to coffee and doughnuts everyone," she offered.

"Everything is ephemeral. It isn't physically possible for anything to last forever. Not the earth, not the sun, not this or any other galaxy. Not kingdoms or empires or chess clubs," she paused a moment, "or companies."

"Everything is specific to its own particular time. That doesn't make it any less real. What we had here, what we did here, is real. What we did—in terms of creating value, in terms of serving our customers, in terms of providing for our families—is profoundly real, even if we all go on and do something else tomorrow. 

"I said this ninety days ago, and I'll say it again in a couple hours, and unlike some of that other bullshit that corporate communications made me say," a murmured laugh rose from the assembled group, "I'm intensely proud of, and deeply grateful for, all that we've accomplished here.

"In a couple hours, we will lower the Van Horn Manufacturing corporate flag for the last time. A few moments later, we will lower the national flag, but not for the last time. A week from Monday, we will gather for the beginning of a new day. We will raise the national colors, and we will raise the symbol of our new company and of our new beginning."

Mary reached into a box on the table in front of her and held the flag in her hands. Dave had done a nice job on the logo: an abstract design that evoked the sun coming up over mountains to the east, as it did every morning here in Southern California, and a clean sans-serif type identifying the new enterprise as Rising Sun Prototyping.

There were more than a few misty eyes at the flag lowering, followed by more than a few laughs and shared stories at the catered lunch. By two in the afternoon, everyone had pretty much gone their separate ways. Mary carefully returned the aviator's cap and goggles to the glass display case—they'd still be there when she came back—and locked the door for what would not be the last time.

A westbound mixed freight train passed as she made her way east and toward the house. Those lumber cars carried beams that would one day be people's homes. At least a few of the box cars would be carrying massive rolls of paper to one of the L.A. area's remaining large printing plants. The tank cars were bound for various chemical plants. There was still industry in this country, still industry in this state; you just had to know where to find it.

One of her and Jim's favorite guilty pleasures was to occasionally find one of those industrial promotional films from the middle of the twentieth century on YouTube. They all followed pretty much the same script. Shot of a mile-long coal train. Cut to an interior shot, a river of molten steel, camera panning until reaching the river's source: a giant ladle pouring out the glowing hot metal. Cut to an assembly line, with automobile transmissions or radios or washing machines stretching as far as the eye can see. Then, near the end, cut to a laboratory. Flasks full of liquids sat bubbling atop Bunsen burners, while serious looking technicians in lab coats looked at things and took notes on clipboards. As the spectacle of the laboratory played out on the screen, the narrator's voice would crescendo, promising that "here at the Amalgamated Manufacturing Company of America, we will never stop looking for new and better ways to produce new and better products, so that your family can enjoy the highest standard of living the world has ever known." As if to underscore the point, the film would close with a montage of families at home, schools, places of worship, and a United States flag (forty-eight stars, if you got a really old one) waving majestically in the breeze. 

American business today doesn't look much like American business of that era. A combination of automation and foreign competition ensured the necessity of finding vastly different ways of producing value. While it might be easy to get nostalgic for what superficially looks like a simpler time, the promise of impermanence was always a built-in feature. Each new sunrise would bring Mary and her team a fresh chance to come up with new and better ways, just as the white-coated note takers in those films had done sixty or seventy years before. The train kept moving. She kept moving.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.