Nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. RUST A Memoir of Steel and GritBy Eliese Colette Goldbach Everyone who grows up in Cleveland is familiar with the sight of the orange flame that burns over the steel mill in the industrial valley along the Cuyahoga River. In “Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit,” Eliese Colette Goldbach describes working under that flame — the “flare stack” — beginning with the day in the spring of 2016 when she pulls into the parking lot and becomes Utility Worker No. 6691.
The mill is a vast dystopian landscape, “a grisly amusement park,” with chimneys jutting up at freakish angles, crumbling concrete, stairways to nowhere, gantry cranes, catwalks — and everything, even the workers in their jumpsuits and hard hats, is covered in dust. The noise is thunderous, and the place stinks, too. But the pay is good, and the new recruits are made to feel as if they’d won the lottery. “Rust” has elements of Tara Westover’s “Educated,” but Goldbach’s background is not as extreme.
She went to Catholic schools and asked the Blessed Virgin Mary for a sign that she should become a nun. Her father was a conservative and a gun owner but not a fanatic. He ran a pawnshop, and one of the items in the pawnshop that pleased young Eliese most was a toilet seat made of pennies. All this rings true to my own experience, two generations earlier, growing up Catholic on the West Side of Cleveland — except the toilet seat.
My idea of art was a holographic image of Christ, in a drugstore window, that flickered back and forth between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. There were times, while reading “Rust,” when I wanted to shout at the author, like a kid at a horror movie, “No! Don’t open that door! ” The first time was at her decision to go to graduate school in English, which left her painting houses and living in a dump.
It was the struggle to pay off her student loans that prompted her to apply for a job at the steel mill. Goldbach is interested in the chemistry of steelmaking, but she swiftly comes to understand that “most steelworkers didn’t know how steel was made. … Everyone knew the few steps they were personally responsible for.
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“” In the breakrooms, the “shanties, booths, and pulpits” in the mill where the employees could go to warm up or cool off, she listens as the old-timers exchange stories, often about people who were crushed when a coil flipped (finished sheets of steel are rolled into coils) or a forklift toppled.”
At one point, Goldbach trains in the Hot Dip Galvanizing Line, skimming dross off a vat of molten zinc. If you had the misfortune to fall in — and it had happened — it could “cook you alive. ” I also flinched at her original choice of college: the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. Many memoirs have at their heart a trauma that must be approached obliquely and transformed into a turning point.
During her first semester away, Goldbach, drunk and possibly drugged at a party, was raped by two upstanding young men, and everything she did in the aftermath — confide in a friend, confess to a priest, report to the institutional authorities — had the worst possible outcome. She tells us at the outset that she has a genetic and biological propensity for bipolar disorder, and it is in Steubenville that it emerges. Unhinged, she returns to Cleveland. A third sign or portent appeared when the author, exhausted by a stretch of 12-hour days and swing shifts, and feverish from a cold or flu, takes a blanket to work with her.
Clinging to the blanket is a desperate gesture to stay warm and hide, and it’s not going to work. The rodents in her apartment get bigger and bolder. Her boyfriend breaks up with her. And Donald Trump, nominated by the Republican National Convention that summer in Cleveland, slouches toward Washington.
Goldbach tries to express how tragic it was to see her fellow laborers — and her parents — fall for Trump’s appeal to their baser instincts, but her prose is strongest when she sticks to the steel industry. She develops “a complicated love” for the steel mill, sharing her fellow union members’ anger at the millowners for treating the workers as replaceable parts. The mill comes to represent something holy to her because it is made not of steel but of people. She understands the outrage of the steelworkers when a shopping mall was built on “steel mill soil.
” Cleveland isn’t as famous for steel as Pittsburgh, but the Mistake on the Lake — as only its own citizens are allowed to call it — was a major supplier to Detroit’s automotive industry, and steel is at the core of its identity. As Goldbach finds her footing at the mill, she experiences something like an epiphany on arriving at work one morning: “The sun was just beginning to rise, and the rusty buildings stretched far into the distance, nearly glowing in the rosy dawn. The steam rising from the Hot Mill bled into the sunrise, and the white tower above the Hot Dip took on a crimson hue. Everything was sepia tones and faded edges.
… It was the kind of thing that made you wonder who would ever let something so intimate slip through their fingers. ” “Like a lot of kids who grow up in Cleveland, Ohio, I mostly wanted to leave,” Goldbach writes near the beginning. She not only stayed but found her way to the heart of this gritty city.
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