Chapter 10: Storm Crew

The wind came over the divide on Tuesday night and took down half the county.

My phone went off at ten-fifteen.

"Callout," the foreman said. "Yard. Twenty minutes. Wear everything you own."

By midnight we were on the east side of town in sideways rain.

A cottonwood had come down across the line on Clinic Road and snapped a pole clean in half.

The clinic was dark.

Its backup generator had run for two hours and then quit.

"They've got a woman on oxygen in there and a baby on a monitor," the foreman said. "They've got maybe an hour of battery."

"Then we've got maybe an hour," the old lineman said.

Nobody said anything else.

We just went to work.

The young guy ran the saw on the cottonwood.

The old lineman and I hung the temporary line while the foreman set the new pole with the digger truck.

The rain came in so hard I couldn't feel my fingers through my gloves.

At forty feet, the wind swung me around the pole.

"You good?" the foreman shouted from the bucket.

"I'm good!"

"You're lying!"

"I'm good enough!"

He laughed.

I'd never heard him laugh.

At two-forty in the morning, I made the last connection.

The foreman called it in.

Below us, every window in the clinic came on at once.

Somebody inside cheered.

I could hear it from the top of the pole, over the wind.

A nurse came out on the step in scrubs and waved both arms at us, then went back in.

I hung there in my belt with the rain pouring off my hard hat.

Nobody up the mountain had ever cheered for a light I fixed.

I climbed down.

My legs were shaking.

The old lineman thumped me on the back hard enough to knock my teeth together.

"Not bad for a new hat," he said.

At three, headlights pulled up behind the trucks.

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