Bushmills Tales

Last night my roommate, a kid my age with a thick Boston accent, told me we were going to the bar. He had had a long week. He works as a lineman, maintaining and repairing the high-tension, high-voltage power lines around town. A dump truck malfunctioned early last week: the bucket lifted without the driving knowing it, caught on a power and telecom line, tore down two poles. Power and communication was lost across much of base. He put in eight days of work averaging 14 hours a day. He's not done yet, but getting there.

There are two bars on base, Gallagher's, non-smoking, and Southern Exposure, smoking. We walked to Gallagher's, building 108. His drink of choice was two shots of Bushmills on the rocks, add lukewarm tap water from a clear plastic pitcher. The music inside was loud, there was hardly another soul. Seven people? The profanity is not mine. It is his.

The Lineman's Sister
When he was finishing high school his eleven year-old sister had to complete a science project. He agreed to help her, and they decided to construct a generator. “It's simple, really. I took some 11mm copper cable we had. This is big cable,” he held his fingers apart to approximate eleven millimeters. “We had a whole coil of it, maybe yea around, but after my sis and I tightened it in a vise it was half the size, or a quarter the size. Really fuckin tight. I attached that to a rubber base, right, and then glued that to a fiberglass sheet. Then I put this crank from a bike on and that attaches to a track around the coil where there's a magnet, so when I turn the crank the magnet spins. Oh, and there's a magnetic rod inside the coil too.” He cranks his hand. “So I start spinning it with my sis right there. That's it. Through the induction between magnets a charge gets going. Now I really went at it, and before too long I start seeing these arcs of electricity jumping off the coil. I'm thinking, 'Holy shit.' My bro comes down and I say to him, 'Hey Jeremy, get my charge meter,' so he goes back up and comes down with it and when he takes the measurement it's 670 volts.” He pauses. I ask him if that's a lot and he looks at me with eyes half-drunk and melancholy. “670 volts? 480 is enough to blow a hole in a person. Say you got 480 volts going in here.” He extended his index finger. “And your elbow or whatever is touching a wall. Well, the charge'll jump from here,” wiggling his index, “to here,” pointing at his elbow, “and it'll blow a hole right outta the back. It'll kill all the fuckin tissue in between.” He looked over his shoulder. “I had 670 volts right. I was like, 'Gah!' so I put on my rubber line gloves real quick and I take the damn thing apart. It was outta control. Next thing I do I get this tiny thin piece of copper cable make a single loop and crank it up. 2 volts. That's what it measures. I give it to my sis, 'Here.' ”

Dirt Nap
“Did I tell you about the mousetrap I made?” We are two drinks in. The Cure is playing. A cook steps out of the kitchen playing air guitar and lip synching. I shake my head. “Oh man. I was four or six months into my apprenticeship then, thought I was hot shit, ready to do all sorts of things with electricity. We had this shed out back and I decided to set up a mousetrap. I took one piece of copper wire and bent it like this.” He draws esses along the table, like the curves of a snake. “And then I took another wire the same length and bent it the same way and set it so they just overlapped. Then I attached them to little blocks of fiberglass so the wire was maybe an inch off the ground. I took a wire and stripped one end and wrapped the cable around the copper, then plugged the other end direct into the main switch of the breaker. It had a direct line to outside, right? I sprinkled a bunch of food and shit on the wires and below. Then I forgot about it for, like, three days, or a week. Completely forgot about it. My mom asks me one day if I can get something out of the shed and I go back there and have this bad feeling, and when I open the door there's maybe five or six dead mice on the floor, and two cats. The cats must have followed the mice, dug under the walls or the door or something. But I swear there were six dead mice and two dead cats. Now my mom is one of those animal lovers. Don't get me wrong, I love animals too. I really like cats. So when my mom looks out the window and sees me in the yard digging with a shovel, naturally she comes out. 'Sean, what are you doing?' 'Nothin ma,' I say. 'What are you doing.' 'Nothing.' She comes over and grabs the bag while I'm holding it and I'm saying, 'No, no,' and then she pulls it outta my hand and opens it and jumps back. 'My God, Sean. What have you done?'

The third story will have to wait. But the other day two coworkers and I dropped a package off at NASA's satellite ops building, and were given in exchange a pile of stickers. I'm hoarding them.