…bringing that line back. Nobody was bringing it back. It’s been de-energized since 2008 and there’s not a transformer left on it. I found him on the third pole, on a Saturday, because I went back out there on my own time and sat in the truck with a thermos until somebody showed up.
Dwight Kolar. Seventy-eight years old, retired off our crew in 1997, and I’d known him my whole career the way you know an old-timer — a name on a plaque, a man at the Christmas dinner. He came up the section road in a Chevrolet older than my marriage with a set of gaffs and a belt in the bed.He didn’t lie about it. He just said, Well. And then he made me a cup of coffee off a camp stove on the tailgate and told me.
His brother Ronnie died on the seventh pole of that spur in September of 1971. Twenty-three years old. A phase they’d been told was clear and wasn’t, and it was Dwight who was on the ground, and it was Dwight who’d made the call to the office that morning.
The co-op paid out and moved on. Dwight climbed for another twenty-six years and never once said a word about it that I ever heard.
When the last meter came off in ’08 and the crews quit going out there, he started going out there. Once a month, April to November. Climbs every pole, checks the groundline, torques the hardware, replaces anything that’s gone. On a line that will never carry current again as long as this earth turns.
I asked him why.
He said somebody ought to be able to say the line was right.
I filed the survey. I wrote that the poles were in good condition, which was true. I did not write why.
