…he reached in and lifted out his climbing hooks — the steel spikes he’d strapped to his boots for forty years — and set them on the desk with a heavy clunk that made twenty-two eight-year-olds gasp.
Then the gloves, thick orange rubber. “These are rated for thirteen thousand volts,” he told them, and let them pass them down the rows, every kid’s eyes going wide. A coil of line. A wicked-looking tool. And last, a photograph, which he held up: a transmission tower encased entirely in ice, black sky behind it.
“Boys and girls,” he said, gentle, “when the ice comes and the whole town goes dark — no heat, no lights, no way to charge anything — somebody has to climb up there in the middle of the night and fix it. That was my job. Forty years.”
He told them about the ice storm of ’93, when he climbed for eighteen hours straight to bring the power back to the county hospital, because there was a baby in there on a machine that needed electricity to breathe. “That baby’s a schoolteacher now,” he said. “Right here in Waco.”
The room was dead silent. Then he looked, just once and without any meanness, toward the back where the tech dad sat. “They tell me a computer’s gonna do my job someday. Maybe. But it’s a cold night and a tall pole, and so far nobody’s built the machine that’ll climb it. Till they do — somebody’s got to hold the pole. Otherwise none of your screens ever light up.”
The kids swarmed him. Even the tech dad’s own son begged to try on a glove. My father let every last one of them.
The man they called obsolete in that hallway was the very reason the lights — and every laptop that fed that man’s pride — had ever come on at all.