The Tower We Raised for Dad’s Sunday Net

Saturday

Two men from Reinhold’s crew pulled into our drive at seven on Saturday morning. They had climbing belts and lanyards over their shoulders and a cooler of coffee and a box of donuts from the bakery on Commercial Street.

They were younger than Reinhold, both in their thirties, the kind of men who say “yes ma’am” and mean it. One had a little girl in a car seat at home and showed me her picture before he had his boots laced.

“Ma’am,” he said, “Reinhold says this is for your dad’s radio.”

“It is.”

“My granddad had a radio like that. He used to let me listen to the truckers when I was little.” He pulled on his gloves. “Let’s get your dad on the air.”

I had never seen a tower go up. I thought they would use a crane. They did not.

Reinhold bolted the first ten-foot section onto the base stub. Then one of the men climbed it in his belt, clipped his lanyard around the steel, and they hung a gin pole off the side, a long aluminum pole with a pulley on top.

The other man and I stood on the ground with a rope through that pulley. When the climber said “up,” we pulled, and the next section rose slowly up the side of the tower, swinging a little, until he could guide it onto the one below and drop the bolts in.

My job was the tag line. It is a second rope tied to the bottom of the section so it does not swing into the man on the tower. Reinhold showed me how to keep it tight and walk it.

“Don’t let it get away from you,” he said. “That’s the whole job.”

“What if it does?”

“It won’t,” he said. “You raised two boys. You can hold a rope.”

I held that rope like it was my children. I prayed the whole time, the way my mother taught me, quick little prayers under my breath. Keep his feet. Keep his hands. Keep the wind down.

The wind stayed down. By noon the second and third sections were up. The men ate their lunch sitting on the tailgate and talked about a transformer that had blown in Effingham. Nobody talked about Tyler. Nobody needed to.

The fourth section went up at one-thirty. Then the top plate, then the rotor, then the little beam antenna that Alois’s father had taken down himself six years before.