by bc woods"Well...what do you think?" My father crouched on the roof, biting his tongue between his front teeth as he contemplated a course of action. A power service stood in front of him on the lower edge of the roof, leaning toward the power pole to which it was attached like a flower toward the sun. The wire running from the head of the power service to the wooden column of the telephone pole had the tautness of a fishing line with a shark on the other end. Coupled with the fact that the power service itself was corroded and secured to a foundation of rotten wood, there was no way any human being in their right mind should attempt to tamper with it until it was deactivated. Luckily, my father has never been in his right mind.

From behind, one of my father's coworkers offered his suggestion. "We need to call the PUD, and ask them to disconnect the power service. Then we need to call an electrician. That whole thing needs to be torn out and replaced."

My father squatted down next to the conflagration, licked his lips, grabbed his shovel, and said, "All right... let's do this."

"Gary...what are you doing? That's not safe," his coworker reiterated.

My father scratched his left ass cheek with his opposing hand in contemplation. "I'll just have to be extra careful, then." Nodding at the certainty of his own idea, my father positioned his flat-bladed shovel like a javelin, pointing it toward the space between the power service and the roof. The sky overhead was bright blue, and ripe with possibility.

"You don't understand. This isn't something you can be careful about. It's like pushing a rock off of a cliff and expecting it not to fall. There's no way you're not going to have an accident if you do this."

Taking all of this in, and giving it due consideration, my father coughed, "Don't be a pussy," and threw his shovel in the space between the power service and the roof like the spear of Achilles. Then, prying the shovel up to remove a few old shingles, my father did the inevitable.

Amidst an all-encompassing shower of sparks, which my father recollects as being very similar to the climactic scene of The Natural when Robert Redford hits a home run into the stadium lights and causes it to rain fire, my father's squinted eyes observed the power service fly from the roof like Superman. The fuse box and several feet of wire from a story below decided to fly along with it. Following the taut wire to which it had been attached, like a fish on its hook, the power service flung into the telephone pole with an astounding thud. The pole shook like a Quaker before an angry God.

Surprised to find himself alive, amidst the surging currents of blue and gold flame, my father looked past the edge of the roof and realized the final note destructive symphony had yet to be played. As though he had arrived on Easter Island, and decided to use all of the statues thereon in a game of dominoes, my father watched in horror as telephone pole after telephone pole, for a length of three blocks, began to slowly tilt fifteen degrees off-center. The power service had been holding the first pole in place. The first pole had been supporting the second, and so on. When he had removed the first support, he had unwittingly compromised the integrity of the power structure for almost a half mile.

With one scoop of a shovel, my father cost the Grays Harbor County PUD over a hundred thousand dollars in man hours and equipment. Over the course of three weeks, it took a crew of five men working twelve hour shifts, with several truck winches and ten come-alongs to repair the damage. When questioned by the PUD as to what happened, my father explained that, "Fuck you guys, there's no way anyone could have predicted that."

Posted by BC Woods at 12:00 AM

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