Author -

It was Christmas day 1991, and I was in my first week of on call duty ever.

   I had only had my J for a couple of months when my supervisor approached me with a mutual dilema. He was short a night man (on call from 4:30 till midnight), and I didn't have enough vacation time to cover the Christmas lay-off. Therfore, I was the night man. I had zero experience trouble-shooting...talk about trial by fire.

 The first couple of days were fairly quiet, so far so good. but as is usually the case in Manitoba the week of Christmas generally sees temperatures dip below -30c.

 The previous summer a crew had done a voltage conversion in a rural area outside the city, meaning of course that all the fuses in the area had been changed. When you fuse a door tightly in +20c temperatures, it tends to snap at -30. Suffice to say that the next few days were spent merrily riding the gravy train.

 When the phone rang at 3:00 am. on Christmas morning, with the dispatcher telling me it was another no power call in the same area, naturally I assumed it was just a fuse pulled apart in the cold, I knew this drill by heart. I kissed my sleeping wife on the forehead, looked in on my ten month old son, thinking of how much fun his first Christmas day was going to be, and hit the road.

 Of course you know, humble reader, this is where the plot twists.

 When I checked my maps I realized that this call wasn't quite in the area of the voltage conversion, and sure enough when I got on site I didn't find a cutout door open, but a single phase line that had broken in the cold. And I mean COLD. With the windchill it was below -40c.

 According to the map the OCR was one mile to the west, but the road was blown over with snow. I had to travel three miles around to make sure the line was locked out , and ground it.

 When I drove back around, I updated the dispatcher and got out to check the condition of the conductor. I was very disappointed to find that it was 9d conductor. Two strands of aluminum, and one of galvanized steel, a little bigger than 3/13 steel. Not a very widely used type of line and one that was not likely to be stocked on such a small vehicle.

 The conductor was broken in one spot, and a chunk had burned off when it contacted the neutral on the way down. The only thing I could patch it up with was squeeze-ons, and a small chunk of guy wire.

 You may have noticed something peculiar about this story so far. In all of this so far I haven't mentioned anyone else besides myself. I was such a greenhorn, I thought that if I called anyone out to help me, they might be pissed off. That was the last time I made that mistake.

 I grabbed a chain hoist, a sling, a press, the blocks, and the conductor and hung them all on my belt. I headed up this skinny old black lodge pine with 100 meters of line hanging off my ass, my hands and feet getting very cold, very fast, looking forward to having this over and done with as soon as possible. I pulled the line up as far as I could with the rope blocks, then hitched the rico on as far as I could reach. As I'm pulling up the conductor I'm thinking to myself that I should have called the dispatcher again. I realize I'm a long way from help if I need it.

 The stick had to be better than 40 years old, it had a v-line running north and south, taps double dead-ended east and west, a guy wire at my feet and this thing is really starting to creek as I pull up the conductor. With every click of the rico I'm feeling a little less certain of my environment. I was freezing my ass off, and I was praying this pole doesn't snap under the tension, when all of a sudden I realize something was different.

 In my state of complete concentration I hadn't noticed that the sun had broken over the horizon. I stopped what I was doing and turned in my belt to watch the sun come up. There were a few shelter belts and farm yards within a few miles, otherwise, the only thing I could see was white snow fading to grey in the distance, fading to back in the winter sky with that bright orange light right in the middle of it.

 I lit up a smoke and stood there watching the sunrise. I watched the sun rise until my smoke was done, then I watched for a little while longer. I thought about where I was and what I was doing. My family would be waking up soon and I might not make it there in time, or at all if I do anything stupid. I thought about why I was doing this job in the first place, and as I stood there breathing in the dry, lung freezing air, I realized that there was nowhere I would rather be. Nothing I could ever do as a working man could come even close to be this satisfying, this exhilarating.

 I dead-ended the line and re-attached the riser. Climbing down, calling the dispatcher and driving back to the OCR all went by in a flash. I removed my grounds and plugged in the OCR and called the customer to make sure his power was on.

 As I drove home I couldn't help feeling like this was something that I had done before. Like this was something that I had always been doing, that I was meant to do. 

 I've been hearing a lot lately about how unhappy guys are in this trade. Unions, wages, management, mismanagement, de-regulation, privatization, amalgamation, power shortages and manpower shortages. Bullshit safety initiatives that only cover the company's ass. Whacked out customers and all weather conditions humanly imaginable. Underpaid overtaxed and unappreciated, this is one mother of a way to make a living.

 And I wouldn't trade it for a thing.