PART 2 — THE NICU
After everybody sang, the young father put his hand on Chases shoulder and said, Counselor, my son was in the NICU at Providence Hospital the night Sally hit. The nurses told us the power only came back because one man climbed a pole in the storm.
In 2020, during Hurricane Sally, the winds were eighty miles an hour when the power went down at the hospital. In the NICU, babies were on ventilators, and the backup would not last forever.
A utility lineman climbed a pole in that wind, in the dark, with the storm trying to tear him off it, and he got the power back to that hospital before the machines keeping those babies alive ever failed.
The man Chase called the cable guy had climbed a pole in an eighty-mile-an-hour hurricane to bring the power back to a room full of babies on ventilators.
My son was one of those babies, the young father said. He is four now. He is running around your yard right now. He is alive because a lineman decided a hospital full of infants was worth climbing into a hurricane for.
He had come to the birthday party with Chases own law partner, and he had listened to Chase mock a lineman, until he could not sit still any longer.
Chase, the personal injury lawyer who says he makes more from one fender bender than Ronnie makes all year, had nothing to say.
Ronnie just lit the birthday candles and said he was only doing his job, that the whole crew climbed that night. But the young father shook his head. Not everybody climbs into a hurricane, he said. You did.
Twenty years climbing poles in hurricanes and ice storms and killing heat, and my son also, one black night during Sally, kept a roomful of the smallest, most fragile lives in the state from going dark.
Somebody has got to fix the lights, Chase had laughed. Somebody also has to climb into the storm so the ventilators keep running. That somebody was my son.