Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  Csük had gotten excited about a long, cavernous space beneath the elevated track, because in the winter the space harbors huge icicles, and she led the way down to it. Before the final staircase, she warned, “You gotta be careful. People can see you here.” I poked in hesitantly and saw some giant gears, but no icicles. Eager to remain concealed, I climbed out quickly. On the way up, I noticed that Csük was using her tripod as a hiking staff.

  Like an old sage, she walked casually through a dark room with black paint peeling off a maroon and yellow patch of metal. “This at one time was cobalt blue,” she said. “Cobalt blue. It’s just amazing how it’s changed over the years.” She walked around a furnace, and behind massive slag cars—now cauldrons full of green, slushy water. She jumped down a three-foot ledge, and then proceeded into a courtyard, where she looked up at the side of a building. “The whole panel was blue last time I photographed it. Now it’s black. We should just try it anyway.” A flock of geese flew overhead, following the river. For a second, their squawking sounded like voices.

  All of a sudden, the Bethlehem Steel Works seemed like a wonder of the world, a historical artifact as impressive as a pyramid. A few hundred feet away stood blast furnace A, the oldest standing blast furnace of its kind in America. Soon after it was built, in 1914, Bethlehem Steel produced twenty-five thousand shells a day and became known as “America’s Krupps.” Sixteen years earlier, Bethlehem Steel was the place where Frederick Taylor had worked out how to make high-speed tool steels that could cut three times faster than anything else, which captured the attention of Harry Brearley, the father of stainless steel. Of Bethlehem, its president in the early twentieth century, Charles M. Schwab, used to say he wasn’t in business to make steel but to make money. Bethlehem made plenty of money, but it also made bank vaults, battleships, rail ties, and the enormous 140,000-pound axle at the center of Ferris’s famous wheel. The company built the USS Lexington, America’s second aircraft carrier. That beam captured in the iconic 1932 black-and-white photo, with eleven workers sitting on it, eating a carefree lunch eight hundred feet above New York City: that’s Bethlehem Steel steel.

  Numerous are the elegiacs for Bethlehem. The authors of Forging America: The Story of Bethlehem Steel call the Steel “silent,” “shuttered,” “stark,” and “empty.” The author of Crisis in Bethlehem: Big Steel’s Struggle to Survive calls the Steel a decaying, abandoned wasteland, lamenting that pigeon droppings cover idled rolling tables. When I asked Csük about this mourning, she said the backdrop only made coming upon her abstracts that much more delightful. While the authors and historians focused only on the obvious, Csük got to dance between two worlds. “While many may look at these sites as brownfields littered with abandoned buildings and humps of rusting metal,” she explained later, “I find in contrast an emerald city of jewels amidst a dark and mysterious place.”

  The Times seemed to agree. In the eight-photo spread titled “Seeing Beauty in the Rust Belt” that appeared on Sunday, May 15, 2011, the author wrote, “During the decline of the American steel industry, Bethlehem Steel’s properties have suffered. The result may be bleak, but it’s not boring.”

  Csük wandered on and set up her tripod in front of some metal that she said reminded her of trees in a forest. I did not see trees. I saw drips. I watched as she worked. It dripped on her subject. It dripped on her jacket. It dripped on my notepad. It dripped on her lens. She said, “Stop dripping on me!”

  By four thirty, there was time for only one more shot. She made her way toward the formerly cobalt panel. The best vantage point, she determined, was tricky to get to: up a flight of stairs, down a ten-foot ladder, over a grate, and onto a four-foot pipe. From there, she’d traverse forty feet out, using smaller gas pipes as railings, and then follow the pipe where it bent up at 30 degrees. Following behind Csük, I reached down from the top of the ladder to pass her the tripod. The big pipe reminded me of the Alaska pipeline. It was the same size, about as snowy, but it was thirty feet up above concrete and steel instead of four feet above tundra. From out on the big pipe, the panel appeared gray and mottled.

  “It’s subtle,” Csük said. It was the first time I couldn’t tell what, exactly, she was aiming at. “See how beautiful it is?”

  She took a few photos. The tripod kept slipping.

  “I like it. This might be better than what I shot before.”

  She climbed a bit higher, took another photo, and struggled to brace the tripod on the slippery snowy cylinder. Then she said it was too dark, so we headed down.

  Csük led the way back through the scraggly littered courtyard to the spot at the chain-link fence where we had climbed in. On the way there, she caught her foot on some rusty thing and tripped. She caught herself easily. It was the only time I saw her trip.

  Though it was dusk, it was not yet dark enough for comfort. Getting out turned out to be tougher than getting in.

  I climbed over the fence first. Once over, Csük passed me the tripod. Then she saw lights approaching from the east.

  “Walk!” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Just walk!” she said. “Go! Anywhere!” Then she retreated into the steelyard.

  I thought about climbing back over the fence, but wasn’t sure I could do it fast enough. So I hurried away from the lights. I stuck along the fence, looking for spots to hide. There were none. The saplings were all too thin and leafless for cover. I looked back: the trio of lights was getting closer. I considered lying down and staying still. Then I saw a buttress of steel girders, and hid behind it. I felt like a cartoon character squatting behind a too-small bush. The sound of the approaching train grew louder, the shadows on the ground shifted, and then the train—only two engine cars—was gone.

  I jogged back and met Csük at the fence. Wordlessly, she passed me her backpack and then climbed over. She made it fewer than ten feet before she said, “Did you hear that?” I had heard something, but it sounded distant. Then I heard it again. It was the sound of a car on gravel—which meant a security patrol. Though Csük couldn’t see anything where the sound had come from, she decided to hustle. She skirted along the fence, and then across the tracks, over the parked train, and onto the levee. I followed.

  The sight of the Lehigh River was soothing. I felt free and contentedly weary. My feet were soaked, my pants drenched up to the knees, my hands cold. As I walked the half mile behind Csük, I thought about a hot shower, the only way to extract the rust dust from my hair. Then Csük froze. The train that had gone by was stopped under the bridge, exactly where we wanted to cross. Beside the train, guiding it into position, were two railroad employees. “Shit,” Csük said. “You do not wanna mess with those guys.”

  Alyssha Eve Csük—so experienced in patiently extracting beauty from this unfriendly, forsaken place—decided that the most prudent thing to do was make a beeline for terra publica. She slipped down the snowy grass, crossed the tracks, and looked both ways.

  Then she ran.

  6

  THE AMBASSADOR

  Dan Dunmire arrived in Kissimmee late and looking something awful. It wasn’t quite ten in the morning on the day before Halloween, and as Dunmire stepped out of his Ford Excursion into the small parking lot at Bruno White studios, his face, hidden beneath a Pittsburgh Steelers cap, appeared haggard. His eyelids sagged, and his thin gray beard looked matted. He scuffled more than he walked. Nothing about him suggested Pentagon official. His black slacks hung low, and his khaki button-down shirt ballooned out from a large waist. Exacerbating the ballooning effect was a thin nylon Steelers jacket. Velcro shoes and white socks bearing the Steelers logo completed Dunmire’s disheveled look, but Dunmire—sixty years old and proudly quirky—didn’t care. He’s a Pittsburgh fanatic, always wearing, beneath business attire, at least one article of clothing from the city. His exhaustion and tardiness were typical, too, but their cause was not. He’d been driving for fifteen hours, through Hurricane Sandy, which had grounded the flight from Pittsburgh th
at he’d planned to take. Through horizontal rain and eighty-mile-per-hour winds—through seven states, three of which had declared states of emergency, through a natural disaster that stopped Romney, Biden, Obama, and Clinton from campaigning—he’d driven, with only a short stop outside of Washington, DC. To Florida’s clear skies this federal official drove because he was determined not to miss the day’s video shoot. The only thing that Dan Dunmire, the nation’s highest-ranked rust official, likes more than Pittsburgh is Star Trek, and actor LeVar Burton, a.k.a. Lieutenant Commander Geordi LaForge (the officer with the thing over his eyes), was in the dressing room getting ready to talk about rust.

  Just inside the front door, Dunmire grabbed a bottle of water from a buffet table and proceeded through the director’s room into the studio proper. He took a handful of pills, a swig of water, and gulped. “I feel horrible,” he said hoarsely. “Lousy. 5-hour Energy, yeah! I had three 5-hour Energies in less than fifteen hours. Yes!” Burton emerged to greet him. Tall and confident, he was wearing a navy hoodie and fashionable jeans, sporting silver-tipped black leather shoes, a scarf, and a mustache two degrees slicker than that of any engineer. He said, “Dan the man.” They shook hands and hugged, and Dunmire’s weariness evaporated.

  Dunmire’s official title is director of the Department of Defense’s Office of Corrosion Policy and Oversight, but he has called himself the corrosion czar. It’s easiest to think of him as the rust ambassador. In his dealings with industry, academia, and the military, implementing hundreds of rust-prevention measures, that’s a fair representation of the role he fills. In enlightening and educating the public about corrosion—a large and unique ambition of his—the rust ambassador has ceded much of his position to LeVar Burton. The actor, with two decades of experience hosting the children’s TV show Reading Rainbow, is the rust ambassador’s rust ambassador. He is the Pentagon’s public face for rust.

  Since 2009, Burton has hosted four thirty- to forty-five-minute Pentagon-funded corrosion videos for a series called Corrosion Comprehension. The first, Combatting the Pervasive Menace, defines the challenge facing the Department of Defense and the country. Demeaning rust as “a defiant and dangerous enemy,” a “silent, pervasive, and unrelenting scourge,” and a “real and present danger,” Burton sounds the alarm: “It’s what we can’t see that’s even more troubling.” What Burton, Dunmire, and the rest of the DOD can plainly see and be troubled by is rusty plumbing in aircraft hangars at Fort Drum, rusty bridges at Fort Knox, rusty heat pipes at the Redstone Arsenal, rusty roofs at the Kilauea Military Camp, a rusty water treatment system at Fort Huachuca, a rusty water tank at Fort Lewis, rusty pumps at Fort Polk, rusty diesel tanks at Fort Bragg, rusty masonry straps at Fort Stewart, rusty munitions storage facilities in Okinawa, rusty fire hydrants, rusty air-conditioning coils, rusty jeeps, rusty tanks, rusting jets, helicopters, missiles, cruisers, and aircraft carriers.

  In the second and third videos, Burton focuses on corrosion prevention via polymers and ceramics, deploying long strings of factual but numbing passive sentences (“ . . . in this case, the continuous matrix is an organic polymer such as epoxide or polyurea . . .”) that bring to mind an audio-book of a medical journal or Star Trek gibberish. The fourth video brings the subject back to earth by examining how the military operates in various corrosive environments, much like a top-ten list. Considering the videos outreach and equally valuable to the public and the military, Dunmire has posted them on the Office of Corrosion Policy and Oversight’s website. Always involved in the script writing, Dunmire has allowed that they have their elements of kitsch. Burton’s introductions (“Hi, I’m LeVar Burton, and I’m going to take you on a journey . . .”) are no less cheesy than his closings (“. . . and remember, rust never sleeps”). Star Trek and Reading Rainbow insinuations lighten things up, but sterile techno/Enya music and Burton’s soothing voice, sinusoidally intonating like that of an NPR reporter, have a soporific effect. The exposition-to-action ratio runs pretty high. The videos were Dunmire’s attempt to bring to life the unglamorous subject of corrosion. Whether or not they have succeeded is debatable. Regardless, Dunmire drove to the studio to oversee the production of a fifth corrosion video, Policies, Processes, and Projects, which he calls “LeVar 5.” The subject of LeVar 5 is the Office of Corrosion Policy and Oversight and its “aggressive” plan to fight corrosion. In other words, Dunmire came to Kissimmee to oversee the production of a movie about himself.

  While a dozen staff were readying for the shoot, and Burton was changing, Dunmire greeted the executive producer, a woman named Lorri Nicholson. Around her, an audio guy, a lighting guy, a jib guy, a makeup artist, a teleprompter, a photographer, a caterer, two cameramen, and two production assistants shuffled about. Wires snaked every which way on the floor. Dunmire rocked back and forth on his feet as he caught up with Nicholson, whose composure only highlighted Dunmire’s swaying. Dunmire sways when he’s excited or exhausted, which is most waking hours, and it makes him look nothing so much as kooky. He tilts his head down, locks eyes, lets his arms hang at his sides, and teeters. It does not put newcomers at ease. People who know Dunmire, though, are used to it. Unfazed were Stacey Cook, the cheery producer of the shoot, and Shane Lord, the mellow creative director, both of whom greeted Dunmire warmly. Lord, in ripped jeans, had pulled his long hair back in a ponytail and removed his shoes, so that he skirted about the studio silently in argyle socks. Cook, for the occasion, had put on a short-sleeved shirt bearing the unofficial and oversized logo of Dunmire’s office. It said Corrosion Prevention and Control.

  Dunmire shuffled past the teleprompter, the boom mike, two Kino lights, and three video cameras—one on a jib crane—and stopped at the edge of the green screen. There he settled into a folding chair, donned a pair of headphones, picked up a clipboard, and began examining the twenty-five-page script. Dunmire had to make sure that everything LeVar Burton said would pass DOD muster. The DOD, decidedly not moving at warp speed, had not yet approved the script for LeVar 5, and the script, written by a man in Los Angeles, was riddled with minor flaws. Dunmire—in the Pentagon since Reagan’s first term—was there to clean up the script as he suspected the DOD would. In his chair, he was still the rust ambassador, but he was also an executive producer.

  At ten o’clock, Cook yelled, “Cell phones off!” She closed the doors, turned on the lights—and the studio began to heat up. The talent entered. Burton now sported a black suit over an unbuttoned striped shirt with no tie. As he walked into the studio, he was talking with Lord about zombie movies, and the first thing that everyone heard him say was, “In the case of a zombie apocalypse, stay the fuck out of San Francisco.” To ears that grew up on Reading Rainbow, it was a shock. He walked onto the green screen and took his position where Lord directed him. Dunmire, with the script in his left hand, reminded Burton, “We’re trying to get the word out.” Burton said, “Stem, baby, stem,” by which he meant STEM, for science, technology, engineering, and math. Then he asked Lord, “Are you sure zombies don’t eat soup?”

  While one of the PAs covered the silver tips of Burton’s shoes with black gaffer’s tape, the actor rubbed lint off of his suit and practiced intoning the lines of the script from the teleprompter. Dunmire, ten feet away, sat with his legs crossed, a cup of coffee in his hand, rapt. From his front-row seat, his eyes were glued to Burton in pure idolatry. The baby boomer resembled any of the boys up the road at Disney World.

  With the cameras rolling, Burton began from the top of the script: “The United States is a nation that earns a proud place on the world stage,” he said mellifluously. “Teeming with activity are its bustling cities, its busy highways, a proud military, and magnificent landmarks. And yet, a subtle and silent enemy threatens it all.” Here his voice got suggestive. “For every gleaming bridge, there’s another near collapse. Buildings decay, pipelines explode, roadbeds crumble. The enemy is rust.” Curiosity oozed from his voice. He continued, pacing across the floor. “It’s a destructive force that cost
s us over half a trillion dollars a year. With that much at stake, a new initiative is under way, with Washington, DC, as general headquarters of an all-out war on corrosion . . . Corrosion, you see, whether on iron or any other material, is something that never stops. We can fix it when it happens, and we can try to prevent it, but all we can ever really do is slow it down. That’s why we call it”—here his voice lowered—“the pervasive menace.”

  Lord looked to Dunmire and asked, “Okay?”

  Dunmire piped up, “Wait, we gotta change that.”

  Burton said, “What?”

  Dunmire said, “About half a trillion, not over half a trillion. If we go over, it’s not right.”

  Burton did a second take, and kept going after the bit about the pervasive menace: “I’m LeVar Burton. Join me now as we meet some of the people who have come up with an innovative and successful plan to fight this insidious peril. Watch as they lay out the battle strategy to fight corrosion as no one has ever fought it before.” He finished the take and then, in an aside to Dunmire, said, “Subtle. Nice. Boom!”

  Just to be safe, Burton did a third take. Partway through, he stopped abruptly after saying, “For the safeguarding the national security of the United States.” The word of was missing. To himself he said, “How did I get through that twice?” Dunmire leaned back and grimaced, fixed the script, and had the teleprompter make the edit. While Burton practiced the next section, makeup came out and patted sweat from his face.

  Burton went through the next section. “Congress chose the Department of Defense to lead our war on corrosion,” he said, “at least in part because the army, navy, marine corps, and air force have so much that’s vulnerable to corrosion.” Dunmire interrupted. “Stop, no, no, no,” he said. “The marine corps is not a department. They’re a service, so they come last.” Burton raised both eyebrows, and after the edit was made for the teleprompter, he resumed. The cameras were still rolling. He said, “army, navy, air force, and marine corps,” in the proper order, and proceeded.