Friday, October 25, 2002 6:24:03 PM Joe Coluccio

CO2 sublimates - from a solid to a gas without passing through the liquid state - Dry ice

Cleveland.2:32 PM

Pallet jacks with containers of dry ice maneuver their way from a island depository of mist and sublimation in the center of the new dock floor into a freezer abandoned of any mechanical refrigeration. The fog filled warehouse air beams from the high intensity discharge lamps twenty or so feet above the newly cleaned and damp floor. Most definitely, Dorothy, this isn't Kansas anymore. There is more work and more life in this refrigerated bedlam than I have ever seen. Fork lifts snake around flotillas of scissors jacks carrying workers from the pipe insulator trade, the electricians, the pipe fitters, the sprinkler workers, the steel erectors and the rack builders. I walk beside a row of large gondola cardboard containers loaded with jumbo pumpkins. The single word Jack-O-Latern is striped diagonally across the front of one box, another has a Halloween pretty scary cartooned orange and black All Hollows Eve Scene. The propylene glycol filled temporary refrigeration air handlers add a constant white noise hiss. Air blows in terrible torrents from them. It is colder in here than in the rain fall filled world outside.

In the engine room, a surprising changed ambiance without the constant shrill of rotating dual lobbed screw compressors, two crews of welders are cutting, welding, fittings and pipe. They climb off their lifts and scramble among the confusion of piping. We are in some primeval mechnical jungle with the slight smell of ammonia and motor oil and ozone. The steel metal whir of portaband saw biting in to pipe, sprarks from a cutting torch and the deep powerful crack as an arc is struck - the welding rod in the stinger intermingles the molecules of the rod and the pipe into a solid presence. On the floor we look up.

On the loading dock, a 300 yard strip of concrete fronted by truck dock doors that lead to motorless trailers waiting to be filled, thirty or forty workes on pallet jacks pushing cartons of tomatoes, pumpkins, eggs, grapes, leaf lettuce, cheese, pomegranites, apples golden and red delish, pears and plump possibilites, glide like gondaliers on the Grand Canal, around the obstructions of construction work. As I walk, freightened, wary, ( I know one of these bastards is going to roll right over my foot) the more apt metaphor of bumper cars at an amusemet park pops into my mind. I can feel the chill throught my blue and red winter jacket. This constant movement from the autumn low of the outside to the mechanical heat of the compressor room to the artificial lower temperature of the refrigerated warehouse to the electric heat of our job trailer is wicking me weak. Both metaphoric and physcial toll is beating at me.

We wait for gas bound vessels to empty themselves to the tanker outside. Then a flurry of work. Then we wait again. It's much like rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again. The day passes hot to cold to hot again. I can hardly wait for tomorrow.

Oh well I guess there's always Tara.