Our elevator is still broken, bluntly, our elevator is down, it has become stationary, it doesn’t elevate, at all. It’s just a small room stuck between the 1st floor and basement, slowly lowering to the bottom. It seems there is a hydraulic fitting failure somewhere and the fluid keeps leaking out.
Unfortunately, our shipping department is on the third floor. We spend a lot of time hauling boxes that have been processed down two flights of stairs. Sometimes we have to carry something up to add it to other parts, run it through the shipping process and then haul it back down.
It’s a labor-intensive project. Load a cart full of boxes, and bounce it down 33 steps, I counted them. Each drop vibrates through the knuckles on your fingers, yanks on your shoulders, stretches muscles up and down your back. Your hips, knees and ankles begin to ache in sympathy. In the dock the boxes are unloaded onto a wooden pallet, the cart is lifted and carried back up-stairs. It seems like a lot more than 33.
I used some cold coffee to chase down a couple of Ibuprofen tablets. An oily film had started to form across the top of the coffee. I stared at it, and it seemed to be looking at me, maybe it was laughing. It was certainly smirking.
In the oily film floating on my coffee I saw the past, thousands of years. For so many years man had been at peace with the world. Living with nature, symbiosis.
Then came the age of machinery, and in the oily surface I saw the oil wells and automobiles streaming across the globe. Mountains being torn down, ripped into rubble for the coal. Trains and ships steaming across the expanses, billowing black smoke, leaving garbage and flotsam everywhere.
I saw enormous buildings reflecting a burning sun, waves of heat shimmering off the sidewalk and the cars crammed into the parking lot. I saw people inside the building working comfortably. There was no way they were going to sweat, unless it was from the deal being sunk by the rising cost of plastic, or the civil war threatening the mining operation in some backwards African country.
In the cinematic spot of coffee there were scenes of children trapped in a pit, digging small bits of precious metals out of the mud with hand tools. Through the magic alchemy of modern greed, the metals were carried across the world to be burned into chemical batteries. And people were patting themselves on the back for driving an electric car. Power plants burned day and night to add a charge to the cars, coal, natural gas, the emissions enveloped the earth, trapping the heat.
Air conditioners are working feverishly to keep the pace.
And, people still needed things, things from other places. Trucked across the deserts (which are growing every year) or carried across the oceans (which are rising constantly) in transport systems that nobody even tries to convince us are environmentally friendly. In the film I saw caravans moving back and forth, endless, unceasing, growing, a geometric progression of pollution.
I saw floods and draughts, hurricanes and famine. Everything was changing, and it wasn’t improving.
I knew that carrying the boxes down the stairs was a temporary gig. Sooner or later they would fix the elevator, or close the business, and sell the building to the ravenous developers that have descended on the neighborhood. Moreover, I knew, in the few minutes I stared into my coffee and knew that nobody was willing to make the sacrifices that averting the catastrophe would require. Nobody was willing to carry the boxes by hand when they had an elevator.
Maybe I’m just tired, living too close to the edge. Maybe we all need to find a way to carry the boxes ourselves, though. I don’t like thinking about the alternatives.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
