The Night the Lineman Came Home
If you skip a tap with forty members on it to go fix your cousin’s house, you have left thirty-nine families in the cold. Every lineman knows that, and Rick would have had my hide.
The other part of the plan is the hours. Our co-op runs sixteen hours on and eight off during storm work. That is the rule, and it is a good rule.
I have seen what a man does at hour twenty with a hot stick in his hands, and I never want to see it again.
Brad and Kara lived on an acreage eight miles southeast of town, on a gravel road we call 448th Avenue. Their house sat on a tap off the Spring Lake feeder.
That tap was on my section. I knew it was on my section the night of Thanksgiving, and I did not think about it once until the ice.
On Wednesday we worked the Spring Lake feeder itself. It had nine poles down in a two mile stretch along the highway, and two of them were crossing poles where the line jumped the road, which meant flaggers and a lot of standing around in the wind while traffic crawled past.
We set new poles with the digger derrick. The ground was frozen eight inches down, and the auger chattered and screamed going through it.
Luis ran the derrick and I worked the bucket, and the other two on our crew, Kyle and Tom, framed poles on the ground with their gloves frozen stiff.
I remember the ice on my safety glasses more than anything. Your breath fogs them, and the fog freezes, and you take them off and wipe them with a glove that is also frozen, and you put them back on and they fog up again before you have finished the next bolt.
We got the Spring Lake feeder energized at about one in the morning Thursday. The whole main line lit up, nine hundred and some members along the highway and the lake.
Out on the section roads, the taps were still dark, ours included, waiting their turn.
I went to the motel and lay down in my clothes on top of the bedspread. I called Nicole.
She was at our place in town, which is on the city’s power, so she was warm, and she had a pot of chili going for anybody who needed it.
“Have you heard from Brad?” I asked her.
“Kara texted,” Nicole said. “They’ve got a little generator in the garage running the furnace through a cord. And one lamp. They’re keeping Harper in the nursery because it’s right over the furnace and it stays the warmest.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s smart.”
“Brad’s going out every four hours to fill it. He’s not sleeping at all now.” She paused. “He asked Kara not to call you.”
I lay there a minute looking at the water stain on the motel ceiling. “Why not?”
“Pride,” Nicole said. “Mostly pride. Go to sleep, Jake. I love you.”
Thursday was the second full day. By noon we had been through our eight off, and we went back out to start the taps on the Spring Lake feeder, in order, the biggest first.
There were six taps off that feeder, and Brad’s road was the fourth one on Rick’s list.
We finished the first tap by four in the afternoon and the second by nine. The third was a short one, five spans, a tree on the line.