Paper's Life

In the northern part of Michigan, a tree harvester grinds into my soft trunk. My evergreen branches are limbed and bucked and my bark is stripped before my naked trunk is bunched with others of my species. Men and women organize us onto large trucks, where we travel south to a pulp mill in Wisconsin.

I know this, because I am one pine tree in a long line of softwood conifer trees. We have one purpose, given to us by the industrial engineers of a past generation. I watch the sun climb high over the green earth before settling back down again on the western horizon as we drive. We finally reach our destination at sundown, and more people unload us onto older stacks of bundles.

"What happens now?" I ask no one in particular.

A hundred whispering voices answer at once.

"We get inspected."

"We get splintered apart into a million pieces."

"We get flattened and made into something new."

Bundles come and go. Finally, a metal machine with a silver claw lifts our bundle into the air and deposits us onto a black conveyor belt with a wood chipper attached to one end. A man walks toward us, respirator mask in hand. He takes a step closer and presses a red button on the open maw.

The conveyor belt rumbles to life and the trees in front of me slowly get fed to the gaping hole. I hear their bases snap and crackle, but I’m not afraid, only curious. I feel no pain when I splinter, but I feel my consciousness spread out wide in a net between wood chips.

A woman strides over to our little group and says to the man, “How is the new layout of the machines working out?” A small tag on her chest reads, “Control Engineer”.

"I think it’s better, just like your plan said it would be." His badge says, "Mechanical Engineer". "I like that the wood chipper is closer to the digester now. It makes the process go faster. I just have one thing to fix on the extra twin roll press and our output will be higher than ever."

The woman replies, "Hopefully this helps us get our pulp shipments out faster. Amazon is going crazy, needing more packaging materials. People are doing way more online shopping since the COVID quarantine started. And who knew the main thing people would be worried about is toiletries? Toilet paper is leaving the shelves faster than our industry can stock them."

My pieces are next loaded into a vat of boiling liquid along with the tree chips. It’s a strange sensation, being broken down and mixed with other materials. A man stands over the tank, mixing and monitoring and adding sodium sulfide and sodium hydroxide so that I become a pulpy liquid. His tag on his chest reads, “Chemical Engineer”. I can feel the sap and natural glue of my trunk get separated and stripped away as he adds different liquids, following a complicated set of directions. Soon, all that’s left is cooked cellulose fiber.

When he deems the concoction satisfactory, he hits another button and the liquid drains out small holes in the bottom. As the water and liquid chemicals drain, my new form hardens to a 500-pound brick of white pulp.

I'm taken by another truck to the Neenah Paper Mill in the center of Wisconsin, hundreds of miles southwest of my roots. At this mill, my brick, along with those of the other former trees who followed me, is thrown into a large metal vat called a pulper or blender. Again, I only feel a strange sensation as I am blended and turned into a mixture that is 96% water.

I am loaded onto a heated steel drum and I feel the water slowly evaporate again, so I am 96% pulp and 4% water. I’m poured onto a slat, and a large piece of metal flattens me so I am barely three-dimensional, only 0.05-0.1mm thick.

I am sliced and layered and packaged away, feeling only the whisper light hands against my new papery self. I am sent by another truck to North Carolina, where clever hands bind and glue my pages between secure covers. I suppose this means I am to become a journal, ready to be filled with thoughts and feelings and memories and ideas.

Stored in a box on a shelf in a warehouse, I wait to be selected by someone. A young student, perhaps, with the desire to vent to someone, anyone, about how she can barely keep it together because her stress is choking her. Or a woman whose mind brims with ideas about her future that need to be written down.

In time, a woman opens my box in the warehouse and pulls me out. It seems I have been bought. She packages me in a cardboard box and I feel the sway and rock of yet another vehicle, driving quickly to our new destination.

I arrive in front of a driveway, where lively trees stand proud and tall, protecting a robin’s-egg-blue home. The driver of our truck sets me down on the stoop and leaves. It is not long before the cream-colored door opens, and a girl reaches down.

She runs her hand along my cover thoughtfully and walks through the house to her room. She sets me down at her desk and picks up a pen, pondering only for a moment before lowering it to my pages and spilling her mind.

I know every word she writes. Her emotions. Her happiness. Her pain. I watch her grow a little every day, and I watch her written voice change. I hold it all safe for her, between my black cover and white pages. She is me. I am her. I am the only one who knows every secret, every thought.

Until the day she creates the last curl on her last letter on my last page, and she closes my cover. I am again set on a shelf, but this time I feel full, happy, satisfied.

I don’t know how long it is before someone takes me down. The old woman who pulls me off of the shelf is the same person as the young girl I knew, but years have lined her face. She leafs through my pages slowly, and her tears make her ink run. I don’t think she can stand the stories pouring out, so I am taken out to her garage and I am placed carefully in a plastic bin.

My life seems to be a never-ending series of trucks, because I am once more dumped into the back of one and taken to a new paper mill.

Though the location is different, the process is the same. I cry in mourning at first as the familiar chemicals strip the ink from the girl’s pen away from me, so I feel empty once more. I am again flattened and pressed and sliced, and the memory of the girl slowly fades from my fibers. Yet again a new hope fills me, and I wonder what life I might touch next.