The how to relax after a long day on a tower in the summer heat starts right here…
So there you are, sitting at a traffic light, waiting on red to turn green, impatience getting the better of you as you utter the old “Come on come on come, change already. This light is horrible!” As the light finally goes green you let off the brake and enter the intersection…To be t-boned by another car that thought they could speed up at the last minute and make the light. Other drivers’ race from their vehicles to help you, someone yells “Somebody call 911!” Ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars all are on the scene in minutes.
A woman dialed 911 from her cell phone. Immediately upon answering the dispatcher knew her location before the woman even had the chance to get it out of her mouth. The volunteer fireman get the alert for the emergency from their cell phones and drop what they’re doing. The dispatcher calls it all out over the radios. Police, fire, ambulance, they’re all in radio contact with dispatch and are aware of everything as they arrive on site. The communication from start to finish is paramount. Cell phones and radios. They just work. It’s not questioned. They just work.
You keep your kids quiet waiting at the doctor’s office by watching a movie on your phone or a tablet. You pass the time on your breaks by playing games on your phone. You text a friend inconspicuously from your desk at work to see if they want to meet you for drinks later. You keep up with friends you haven’t seen in years on your favorite social media sites daily, even hourly through the skinny rectangular thing in your back pocket. You don’t even own a camera anymore, you snap pictures of everything you see and send them to friends and family, and share them with the world… You can’t function without a cell phone, but you never think twice about why it all works, your wireless phone and internet.
Everywhere you go, and everywhere you look it’s the same thing. People have their faces glued to a screen of some kind. The cell phone, the tablet, the lap top. They all just work. And when they don’t, aggravation and disgust. But no one really thinks about why that little marvel of modern technology, that thing of plastic and glass that connects it all, the things the world can’t do without now it seems, no one questions why it all works. They just take it all for granted.
As you drive down the road, as you walk down the sidewalks, as you sit in the coffee shop using their free Wi-Fi, as you stand on the side of the river and text a picture of the fish you just caught to your buddy who stayed home to mow his lawn, someone like me is above you somewhere keeping it all working. The radios, the televisions, and the cell phones. All of it. I am a tower climber.
I didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a “tower rigger”, as we’re known, believe me! But it’s somehow where I found myself for the better part of four years. For thirteen years I considered myself a craftsman of sorts. I worked with steel in one form or another. I formed sheet metal into car body panels and motorcycle gas tanks standing at an English Wheel and a power hammer for nine years. Then for the next four I stood at an anvil, forging intricate and beautiful art in the forms of steel and bronze railings and gates for multi-million dollar homes in the northeast, a job I loved and honestly thought I would do the rest of my life.
And then the bottom fell out from under me. The economy tanked, work dried up. I had run out of places to use my skills unless I wanted to move my family, which I did not. I suddenly found myself just needing a job, something up to that point that I really didn’t feel I had ever had. The proverbial saying of “If you do what you love you’ll never work a day in your life” had actually been a large portion of my life up to then. I told myself I would quit chasing silly dreams of being a “craftsman” and decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was thirty-five when I came to that realization, I guess it takes some of us longer than others.
I stumbled into this industry mostly by chance. I found out through the grape vine (a text message of course) a place that worked on cell towers was hiring climbers, no experience needed, and it was less than three miles from home. So I was there in five minutes, because I needed a job. I was asked if I could climb, was I afraid of heights? My answer was I had done some tree work, I didn’t think I was afraid of heights… but I hadn’t been THAT high. I did a climb test, I climbed a hundred feet, and it was kind of cool… I was hired.
It’s not the easiest life on someone with a family. If you’ve got a wife (or husband, there are female climbers out there) then don’t plan on seeing them that much… cell towers are everywhere, and that’s where you have to go to work each week… Everywhere. If you’ve got kids, plan on missing a lot of them growing up. It’s just part of the job. You show up on Monday morning, and you could be driving an hour away, or you could be driving six hours away. And during that drive, you could get a call that turns you completely around in the opposite direction in as many hours. It’s unpredictable, it’s inconsistent, and it’s life as a tower rigger.
Four years doesn’t sound like a long time, and really it’s not. But it was a long four years. Four years felt like ten, and working in the north east one winter on the towers can seem like it ages you twice as many at least. If you don’t like subzero temps and double digit negative wind chills while hanging in a harness well above the frozen earth, you’re not going to like this job. If you don’t like the idea of nothing but a couple hundred feet or more of empty air separating you from the ground below… This job isn’t for you. The turnover rate for employees in the tower climber career field is astounding to say the least. In my first 2 ½ years on the job, I saw a total of 27 faces come and go. Guys that couldn’t hack it. Guys that couldn’t do the heights, couldn’t make it through a winter on the towers, couldn’t make it work with families, thought the grass was greener at other companies. Guys who tried to scam the system through false workers comp cases, guys that thought they would never get drug tested, and guys who realized they could make just as much money at much safer jobs that weren’t on the road if they could only find one.
One of the most dangerous jobs? It’s possible. During the 1990s cell phone boom, cell sites were flying up everywhere. Towers couldn’t be erected fast enough, service needed to be up overnight everywhere, and there were no real safety standards. And the death tolls showed it. It wasn’t uncommon for climbers to fall to their deaths… not even to have catastrophic failures of both tower structures and riggings that ended up in more than one fatality at a time. Eventually OSHA stepped in and recognized the problems and put their foot down, and a couple other private safety entities were born also, and into the 2000s, things quieted down. Safety standards were put in place, the number 1 rule being tied off 100 percent of the time. Deaths were down, accidents were less, and the awareness of the industry by the general public faded.
But now here we are as I write this in March of 2014. Hardly three months into the year, and we have lost 7 brothers already, an average of 1 every 15 days. The cell industry is booming once again, new technology. New phones capable of more, need to be supported by new antenna systems. The structures themselves are in need of repair or replacement, and they need to hold more weight than they were originally engineered to hold…Once again its hurry, hurry, hurry, faster, faster, faster, and the accident and fatality rates of the industries backbone… the climbers, is showing it.
Climbers are only human like everyone else. We’ll tell you it’s not a big deal, if they were doing it right they wouldn’t have died. But it’s in the back of everyone’s minds from time to time. Shit happens. At the end of the day when it was time to climb down I used to tell the other guys “Hit the dirt”. I caught myself trying not to use it so much.
If I didn’t have something to slow my mind down at the end of each work day, something to relax me, I would have gone insane in this line of work. Living in hotels works out fine for some guys. They watch TV, they go to the bar, or they stare at the ceiling. My mind doesn’t sit idle very well for long, and on the road I missed my family, my wife and my two boys.
I started with the tower company in February of 2011. In February in upstate NY there’s not much to do at the end of the day but watch TV in the hotel room. I was on the ground digging and building a few new tower foundations that first winter so I was spared climbing during my first year for about the first four months. But being on the ground seemed like something anyone that could hold a shovel could do and I wanted to learn about the tower and antenna end of the job. I thought I was hired as a climber, so one day at the end of May I went into the office on a Friday and asked how I could get on the towers for a while and learn something. All I had to do was ask. I was put on a climbing crew the next week and away we went.
I found early on that the whole living out of hotels thing was going to give me heartburn in life. I was bored. I didn’t drink much anymore, so going to the bar was boring too, as well as expensive. I needed something to do since we were done working most days by 3:30. That left a lot of daylight to deal with. When I was blacksmithing before getting this gig I always had a fishing pole in my truck, and at lunch time many days I would eat a sandwich while I walked at a brisk pace down to the Oriskany creek at the bottom of a steep hill from the forge. It slowed my mind down from the repetitive process of the many forgings I was doing, and it was a welcome break during the day. A Trout or two or even just the gentle current of the creek was just what I needed each day, so I decided to begin carrying a collapsible fishing pole in my out of town bag every week. Why not?
Once I realized that I could bring up the map on my smart phone and find rivers and creeks and ponds and lakes close to the hotels and job sites, everything changed. Over three years of climbing, what started out when I was a little kid… simple fishing, might have gotten a little out of hand, depending on who you talked to. It’s been said I showed up to work on Mondays more prepared to go on a fishing trip than to go to work. I won’t deny it. Work was that thing that both took time away from fishing, but at the same time allowed me to fish all over the northeast every week like it was my job.
It started out innocent enough. A collapsible spinning rod and a small tackle box. But then after the first year I started packing a two piece ultra-light rod along with the collapsible and a full size tackle box. Into my third year, I showed up Monday mornings with my pack of clothes for the week, an olive canvas duffle bag full of my harness and climbing gear, and another pack dedicated to hauling my fishing gear. Boxes of tackle… Hand tied jigs and hard baits. The collapsible rod, the two piece ultra-light spinning rod, and then two fly rods. A 6wt and a 3wt, and no less than two fly boxes and a portable fly tying kit.
A monster has been created in me that I can’t control, and honestly, why would I want to control it? There’s something inside all of us. In me, it’s a love for the outdoors and fishing, so let the monster feed and grow is what I say. I didn’t care what the job was… I was more worried about WHERE it was! Was there a river close by? I could be welding on the tower that week, we could be hanging microwave dishes, or we could be upgrading one of the major cell carriers to their newest 4G or whatever it is. I didn’t care so much what we’re doing as long as there was someplace to fish at the end of the day… That’s not completely true. When I looked at the schedule on a Monday morning and saw what the job was, I may very well have seen something I wanted nothing to do with. That’s just all the more reason that I better have a place to fish after the day was done. It was as important as breakfast to me. Who am I kidding? I could live off pop-tarts for a week, but no fishing!? Stand back and cover the children’s ears, it’s going to be a bad week!
Talk to a lot of tower climbers, and they’ll probably tell you they work a ton of overtime each week. But the company I worked for didn’t do that much overtime. If the job was going smooth, we just worked 8 hour days, which, depending on how far the hotel was from the tower site, could have you checked into your room by 4pm. In the summer, the sun doesn’t go down until 9… That’s 5 hours of fishing time! As much as I would rather have been home seeing my boys grow up, as much as I would have liked to eat dinner with my wife and kids and talk about how everyone’s day went, as much as I would have loved to have a much safer job, or go back to working in a shop creating works of art in custom cars or standing at an anvil again… 4 to 5 hours of fishing after work each night was one hell of a fringe benefit to me. And I took advantage of it every chance I got!
Everyone has their favorite place to fish, their favorite type of fish to catch, and their favorite type of fishing. Although I consider myself a fly fisherman these days, I still enjoy my ultra-light spinning rod now and then. I still enjoy a worm suspended beneath a bobber with my two sons. I hope to never become a fishing snob, above any one kind of fishing. And if given a choice, I will choose a river or small creek over a large lake most days. It’s just what I enjoy, exploring what’s around the next bend. I know fishermen that will pass up fishing all the time if it’s not their ideal fishing destination. Maybe they’re a diehard trout fisherman but when given the chance to go Bass fishing they turn up their nose at the idea of something other than their ideal game fish. I’ve heard Bass fisherman belittle fly fishermen because it’s different and vice versa, and how many times I’ve seen someone laugh at the idea of fishing a spot, believing it’s a waste of time, the fish will be tiny, or there won’t be any at all! I say, simply, just fish.
The one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t always fish where you want to, or for what you want, or even how you want. You fish where you can, and you fish when you can. Otherwise you may find yourself at the end of each year regretting that you didn’t fish enough. Doing the tower climbing gig, you learn to appreciate your time off the job at the end of every day. For me, the harness came off, the waders went on, and everything was rainbows and lollipops for a couple hours on the water.
I really don’t remember the first time I packed a fishing pole into the work truck, but I do remember the first memorable fishing trip, er, I mean work week with good fishing nearby.
It was in June. Pulaski New York. Known as the Salmon and Steelhead capital of the world by many. To hear stories of this river conjures up pictures of shoulder to shoulder fisherman lining the river banks, hundreds of lines in the water. Waders, arguments over 2ft of river bank, and the illegal snagging of beautiful, huge Salmon fighting the current to get up river to spawn and die. I had never been fishing here simply because these were the things I had heard through almost every conversation with fisherman who had been, and simply, it didn’t sound like enjoyment, or anything I would want to be a part of. As much as I had always wanted to fish for Salmon and Steelhead, these stories had kept me away.
In the summer of 2011, the tower company I worked for was in the process of building a large number of new communications towers and installing the new 911 emergency communications system for Oswego Co. Working the area from high above I got to see firsthand how beautiful the land there really was. From the spectacular views of Lake Ontario and its shores and bays, to the sprawling and endless green landscape, it became one of my favorite places to see on the schedule on Monday mornings… Until I discovered the Salmon River right out the back door of the hotel one day after work. From that point on, it became my favorite hands down, to this day.
Talking to my wife on the phone from the hotel room one night, before I discovered how to use my smart phone and google maps to find fishing spots while on the road, I told her that I had tried some fishing at what I was told was the town pool that afternoon after work. It was a spot right in the middle of town, a deep, high rocky banked spot on the Salmon River. I had casted down from a perch on a boulder probably 15ft above the water, letting a spinner flutter down past the boulders below the surface into the dark water below until it would hit bottom or be taken buy a Smallmouth or Rock Bass, and I had been pretty successful.
But it wasn’t my kind of spot. I like to walk a river, and wade it whenever possible. I complained that I knew the river was somewhere behind the hotel in the woods, but didn’t know if it was too far to walk or not. My wife promptly got on the computer, brought up the hotel on Google Maps, and exclaimed “It looks like it’s right there behind the hotel!” I had heard something from the parking lot of the hotel, something I convinced myself was the traffic on Interstate 81 close by. I was wrong, the river was trying to get my attention.
The next day, as beautiful as the view was from the tower we were building, the day couldn’t go by fast enough. We stacked section above section of new tower, up and up, but my fishing rod called my name all day from the hotel room. A tower section would be lifted by crane. A guy on each leg flange waited with a spud wrench to line up the flange bolt holes and the determination to get his holes lined up and bolts in before his other two co-workers who had the same goal. Being the last to line up your bolt holes meant almost certain hammering and swearing.
When we got back to the hotel, I kicked off my boots, practically jumped into a pair of my old USAF BDU pants that were now shorts, and grabbed my fishing rod and small camel back that held all my tackle. I think I was in and out of the room in less than 4 minutes. I cut through the back parking lot of the grocery store next door and found a small animal path that cut into the shoulder high grass behind the store. Passing through I found myself on the other side looking at train tracks. I stood there for a few seconds and no, the noise I heard was not traffic on a highway… It was the river. I crossed the train tracks and held back a run, it was a hurried walk at this point, and I followed another animal path into the woods. Not 20ft into the trees, I could look down a steep incline and there it was, the river with the summer sun reflecting off it like silver and gold through the trees.
When I got to the bottom I found myself not on the main river but on the shaded, cool bank of a 12ft wide offshoot of the main river, the water was crystal clear, and maybe 3 feet deep. I set my pack down, and unhooking the small spinner from the rods hook keeper, made a cast up stream maybe 20ft, trying to stay below the overhanging branches, and out of the roots of the opposite bank. The first couple casts gave me nothing, and I told myself the lie every fisherman tells themselves, “One more cast and I’ll move on”. Five or six casts later the line jerked, the rod bent, and the line took off for the roots I was trying to avoid. When it turned from the roots, it made for the stronger current on my side, and I fought it in without much struggle as it came right to me. I hoisted about a 9″ Smallmouth bass from the water, gave it a good look over, and returned it to its home.
I caught two more there, told myself the lie three more times, then finally picked up my pack, dipped my foot in the water to test the temperature, and stepped in. I’ve found my old pair of canvas Converse sneakers to be great wading shoes in the summer. The water was about waist deep. I used some roots like a set of steps to exit the opposite bank, crossed about 50ft of undergrowth beneath the trees, and there I was, on the edge of the main river.
At first sight, this stretch looked a little intimidating, as my plan the whole time was wading it for the next three or four hours. The section of river I had come to was some pretty good rough, fast moving water. To wade into the outer edges wasn’t a big deal, it moved slow enough and you could see exactly where you were stepping. But the farther out I went, the more the fast knee deep current, and the large, flat, smooth rocks fought against me. Several times I did a dance trying to stay on my feet. I thought to myself how dumb this might be, no one knowing where I was, and being alone. But I could see a group of rocks and small boulders about 40ft from me, piled up, water running around them and over them, with a deep, slower moving body of water created by their positioning on the downstream side. It looked like a picture out of a National Geographic magazine to me, and I just had to believe there was something in there waiting for a meal to wash down over those little waterfalls they created and into its ambush. I fought my way for another few feet closer, then decided I had better just try and cast to it before I found myself washing down the river.
My first cast with the tiny 1/16oz yellow corn kernel Meps spinner was dead on, like an old west sharp shooter. It landed an inch off the rocks and dropped into the small piece of water and I jerked it once and reeled to match the speed of the current there, just enough to get the spinner spinning. It took about four seconds for the fish to hit it. “Some days, it’s better to be lucky than good” I told myself. The fish immediately took off into the current that I had been fighting to cross, and downstream it went. I wondered how much of this the four pound test I was using could take, the current looking like something a white water kayaker would enjoy, and quickly adjusted the drag until I heard it start to click, then took back one more turn on the adjuster.
I thought to myself that I should try to get to a calmer pool downstream a little bit, rather than try to real the fish upstream through such a strong current and risk either the line breaking or ripping the lips right off the fish. I took a step down stream with my left foot, and my right was swept out from under me. Down I went. The water pushed and dragged me for what seemed like a hundred feet or more. I flailed to wedge my feet into cracks and my right hand flailed for whatever it could grab, and I managed to stop my downstream travel. Like that guy that falls but manages to save his beer, the cup raised above his head, I kept my rod above me and the line tight. A couple expletives and I was standing again, soaked to my shoulders, and decided I would bring the fish to me.
I was rewarded with a golden Smallmouth about twelve inches long. It was a beautiful golden brown, but still, a twelve inch fish had gotten the best of me. I unhooked him, stared him in the eye, and told him “Well played fish, well played”. I sent him back home, and I’m pretty sure he was smiling.
Slowly and carefully I made my way across the river to just below the hole I pulled that Smallie from. Above it was a long skinny island in the river, and on the far side of it was a nice, slow moving stretch of water that was screaming at me to get over there and fish it. When I got close enough to it, the details of what lied beneath the surface were pretty cool I thought. At the top upstream side of the island there was a small calm pool on the river bank side, with a set of riffles between it and the island. From there it flowed through a sixty foot or so long, maybe twenty foot wide stretch that had a couple deep rocky bottom holes, and then it turned shallow once more before flowing through the pool that laid before me now. I squatted low on the edge of the pool. At the top of it was a large boulder just barely protruding from the water, water rolling over its top and swirling around its sides into the pool.
Staying low, I cast just above the boulder with the intent of the spinner washing down around it and into the pool, but no sooner had the spinner hit the water it was taken with a splash and a small tug! I stood up and laughed. Whatever it was it wasn’t big, but I was laughing as I reeled it to me… the work day was gone behind me, the water washing everything away. It ended up being an even smaller Smallmouth Bass than the first, but I was having fun, and I don’t fish for big fish anyhow, I fish to be out there. I fish…to fish. I cast to the pool four or five times and after nothing, I waded across to the island.
The island wasn’t more than twenty-five feet wide at its widest spot, either end a sharp point jutting into the river. Cobble stones were hidden by the tall tufts of grass growing bushy everywhere, and a fallen tree, a huge beast that had likely drifted down river during some high water laid length wise on the island. Small streams of water trickled across the island from the main river side and down across it to the side I had just come from, emptying into the stretch of water above the pool I had just pulled the Smallmouth out of.
I stood there and surveyed my surroundings. Too much to take in at once. Too many decisions to make. Which direction to go. Where to cast to next. I decided to keep fishing the small side and just go from there. I stood on a couple large rocks poking up out of the grass and cast to the pool at the very top of the island along the river bank. I matched the waters speed and just kept the spinner moving, letting the spinner do its thing. On my third cast the water exploded on the side of the pool closest to me and a missile of a rusty orange color shot out at the spinner. The explosion of the fish launching itself caught me off guard and I jumped a little, not expecting it, especially not from ten feet away. It took the spinner, made a hard jack knife turn back in the direction it had come from and in the same motion snapped my fishing line without the slightest hesitation.
My heart pounded. “Shit!” I said out loud to myself. I stood there for a moment and thought about what I had seen. The water was so shallow where the fish had launched from but I hadn’t seen it there… And where the hell did it go? It was gone, along with my spinner, and what was it? I replayed it over and over in my head. The cast. The spinner plunking down. The water exploding as the fish shot out across the pool for it. I could see its back just protruding from the surface, a rusty orange, dark. I wondered what it was. It wasn’t a trout, the back was too humped. Another Smallmouth? Possible, but the color had me questioning it. I had no spinner. I took my small Camel Back pack off and set it on the rocks. Squatting down I opened it and found the small tin inside that held a couple more spinners. I didn’t have another of the same size or color, so I just haphazardly picked one out with no rhyme or reason and tied it on.
I tried that pool a couple more times. Ok, I cast to it at least another dozen times, picturing each time another explosion and fighting a huge fish to the shore to find my stolen spinner still in its mouth, but it was all to no avail. I told myself several times “one more cast”, and each time, one more cast turned into three and four more, until I finally admitted defeat to this small wet creature with a brain the size of a pea, and I moved on. That fish was all I could think about the rest of the night.
Every day we stacked the tower higher. The tower was in the town of Scriba, close to the shores of Lake Ontario. If it wasn’t for the beautiful view to distract me from thinking about the river and exploring it at the end of each work day I would have gone crazy having to work knowing the river was waiting. This particular tower was something of a special job, being that at some point we all knew the crane would not be tall enough anymore, and we would have to finish stacking the tower ourselves with a Gin Pole. The company was full of green horns, and all the guys with the experience would tell us greenies was a Gin Pole was this thing you hung on the tower to lift things in place of a crane… and they killed people. Well that was really all most of the younger guys we had needed to hear. They all wanted to be the ones on the tower when Gin Pole time came around. In the tower industry, paychecks are what you work for, but bragging rights are what a lot of climbers live for.
I had tried to figure out what a Gin Pole really was and how the thing worked by searching it on the all-knowing and all telling world wide web. The only thing I could find was videos and old articles of guys dying in the process of using them. I quit searching. Myself being the oldest of the green horns, I had mixed feelings about this whole gin pole thing. Did I want to be on the job for that part? Well, yea. First off, I wanted to keep stacking this tower, I wanted to go up as it did, climbing higher and higher until it was finished. I wanted to see the job through to the end. I also wanted to prove to the company that they could put me on a good crew with other good guys and we could get the job done, whatever it was. On the flip side…dying was bad.
At about the hundred and fifty foot mark they swapped out the crane we had been using for a bigger one, and this one was going to be able to stack up to two-hundred and eighty feet, at which point we, the tower crews, would take over with the Gin Pole and finish the job, building up to three-hundred and fifty feet. Every day we added more steel. In the beginning the tower gets built piece by piece. Legs, then X braces connecting them, then more legs, more X bracing, until after a few sections, the sections are narrow enough to be built entirely on the ground and then lifted as a whole twenty foot tall section to be set on the one below it where we, the climbers, or “Riggers”, as we’re known, hang in harnesses waiting to install the bolts and move up for the next steel to arrive. Every day we added more steel, more height, and every day afterwards I searched farther up river.
There was never anyone else, no other fishermen anyways, on the river when I was out there. A couple times one or two of the guys I was working with would come down to the river to watch me fish and get out of the hotel for a little bit, but once they realized they would have to wade in up to their waist or deeper to keep following me, most times they just sat on the bank until I was too far up river to watch anymore, and then return to their room. A couple times they stuck with me for the entire time right up until dark, and I thought that was cool. I was getting to know the guys I worked with outside of work. That’s always a good thing when you’re trusting each other with your lives on the job.
I was getting good at picking my way across the river and not falling in. I was starting in the same place each day, hitting the same pocket waters, runs, and pools, and each day I was going a bit further upstream. To be up in the heat all day long with no shade in the hot summer, busting your ass all day while the bosses back home want it done faster… the river was my life saver. It was my stiff drink. My psychiatrist. The cool water on my feet and legs was better than anything I could imagine after being in jeans, steel toe boots, and a hard hat all day in the sun. The sunset was the worst part of the day, it meant the end of the fishing and a hotel room TV.
The view from the tower got better with each section that came up, every twenty feet of elevation changing what you could see little by little. We were above the tree tops on the third day. Up to that point it had been slow building, piece by piece. But once we reached somewhere around eighty to one-hundred feet, I don’t remember exactly, but it was just above the tall pine trees surrounding us, the tower sections started coming up as entire sections. Once we hit this height the steel reached for the sky faster and faster.
One great thing about getting up to just above the tree tops… The bugs were gone! The tower sight was in a clearing in the middle of a swamp surrounded by tall pines, and on the ground the black flies and mosquitos did their best to devour your flesh and drive you to insanity. On the tower you couldn’t run away from them, there was no escape… Until you got above the trees! On the ground in the summer heat our co-workers could be observed swatting and cussing, shaking their heads and even wearing hooded sweatshirts with the hood pulled tight around their faces trying to keep the bugs from eating them alive as the days went. We had no place to go being on the tower, you just got bit, had bugs buzz in your ears, fly into your eyes and mouth, and had one more thing to swear at.
Above the trees the world spread out before you, and the bugs stayed below! Finally a break! I had been up a few towers at this point, but the view at this particular site has always stayed with me more than many others. The pine trees spread out in all directions below us. The first thing to come into sight other than trees was the nuclear power plant which looked to be roughly two or three miles from us. Seeing this, it occurred to me what I should be seeing as we climbed higher and higher, the nuke plant was set on the shore of Lake Ontario, this I was sure of. Sure enough as we built higher, the water began to show itself, until it was finally more than just a line separating the trees from the sky, it was a vast blue, an unmistakable body of water that calmed and cooled my mind by its simple presence. We were merely seeing a small piece of the entire thing, but it stretched out as far as the eye could see. It was humbling and beautiful, something I will never forget.
I was on a leg of the tower positioning me facing directly at the water, and as I admired it for a good hour I said nothing to the kid on the opposite leg, Teddy. I’ll never forget while we waited up top for yet another tower section to make its way up to us when Teddy, a young, early twenties kid covered in tattoos and drowning in attitude, turned around and finally noticed the beautiful expanse of blue water reaching out to the horizon like an ocean view. “Holy shit! Look at the size of that lake! It goes from here all the way out to there!” I couldn’t contain myself as I laughed at him. “Dude, I’ve been looking at it for the past hour! That’s Lake Ontario. It goes all the way to way past where you can see.” He looked at me in questioning amazement. “Ever look at a map of our country bud!? You know, those big lakes at the top of the map that kind of drape down, this is one of them! They’re big! Canada is on the other side.” Teddy just went on and on about how big it was, and after a while as we went higher he swore to us that he thought he could see Canada. The other kid on the tower with us, Brett, him and I just chuckled. You can’t make up stuff like this.
We had two-hundred and sixty feet of tower stacked. That meant the next section to come up by crane was to be the last. We sat at two-sixty and tried counting boats on the lake. The sun was hot, but the slight breeze that was ever present above the trees and the sight of the water cooled us enough to actually make it comfortable. It’s amazing what the human mind can become comfortable with. You look down at your boots and beneath them is nothing but a couple foot pegs no bigger than a magic marker and then empty air. The trucks below parked in the dirt look like Match Box cars. And the crane. What really messes with your head is the boom on the crane as it sways in the breeze. On the ground you don’t notice it looking up unless you’re the operator I guess. But up on the tower, the crane boom being only feet from you and the tower, you watch it sway and flex like a fishing rod with a load on it. And there you sit, waiting for it to come closer. It’s amazing what the human mind can become comfortable with.
The last section came up, we radioed our directions down to the crane operator. From this height, hand signals were too sketchy, hard enough to make out that you don’t want to trust what you might have seen. We radioed left, right, boom up, cable down, easy, easy, cable down, hold that. When it’s close enough to get ahold of the tower section, three guys with nothing more than a lanyard on their harness wrapped around a tower leg, like a lineman on a power pole, grab hold of several tons of steel and push and pull it into position, lining up holes and dropping in bolts.
When a bolt is secured in all three legs and all fingers are clear, “all off” is radioed to the crane operator below and the tower section is set down for good. Three loose bolts now hold a twenty foot section two-hundred and sixty feet above the earth, and one guy climbs to the top of his leg and reaches out and de-rigs the crane. And that was it. The crane was done. We busied ourselves the rest of the day climbing all over the structure adding the remaining hardware needed and tightening everything down as the crane crew closed up shop and hit the road. We all knew what it meant. A crew was being picked by office personnel and supervisors. A crew to finish stacking up to three-hundred and fifty feet… With the dreaded Gin Pole. Excitement and concern mixed in my head.
Back at the hotel it was business as usual. I got to my room and in no time flat I was changed and moving out across the back parking lot and through the woods to the Salmon River. I was getting pretty good at knowing where the fish were on this short stretch of river. For about a thousand yards I knew most of the pockets and pools that held fish, and most likely what the fish were going to be. For the most part, I was catching Smallmouth Bass and Fall Fish. Smallmouth Bass in a river have got to be pound for pound the hardest fighters going. I had made a trip to one of the local tackle shops, Fat Nancy’s, a couple days before when I had snagged and lost my last spinner, and after a short conversation with a guide in the shop we had decided that most likely the rusty orange fish that had left such an impression in my mind days earlier had most likely been just that, a Smallmouth. They were normally golden brown but we had both seen them in different shades and hues, and yes, a rusty dark orange with a short, humped back did fit the description, along with its violent attack.
It was also in this shop that I got my first true look at fly fishing gear. I had always thought fly fishing looked like more work than was necessary to catch something so small and dumb, but there was something about the whip of the line and the floating of a lure the size of a bug with the same weight that I found interesting. But I had never thought anymore about it than that. This shop, being in a town centered on a river known across the country for its Salmon and Steelhead fishing by fly fishermen and spin fisherman alike had everything you could need or want to take fish from the river in any manner. After selecting a handful of spinners to replace what I had lost, I wandered the tackle shop for another half hour, and my interest peaked in the fly fishing half of the store.
I had never looked at fly rods and reels, never studied the flies, never put on a pair of waders, and never realized the amount of money one could really spend on such things if one felt the need for such things. The money… oh my. I picked up a fly rod, I read the specs on the rod just above the grip. 9’6” 6wt. It was taller than any fishing rod I had ever held before. It felt like a whippy noodle. How could something so long and skinny hold up to a large fish I wondered? Then I looked at the price tag. I’ll never forget that first price tag… $699! I carefully placed it back in its spot on the rack and moved on. Holy crap. I looked at the fly reels behind the glass in the counter. The cheapest one was $299! Oh my. From behind the counter came the question. “Can I help you with something?” “Nope, just looking.” Oh my, it was time to go. I left thinking to myself that if that was what fly fishing was, then I would be a spin fisherman the rest of my life, end of story.
Back on the river behind and below the tackle shop I was in my element once again. Alone, on the water, wet up to my waist. It had become a routine since finding the river, fishing for a good four or five hours after working on the tower all day. After all, the sun didn’t go down until around nine. Each evening sometime after the rest of the world’s dinner time, but my fishing time, dinner could wait, my cell phone would ring, and I would stand there in the river holding the phone with my face and shoulder as I fished and talk to my wife and oldest son about the day. Each call started with my wife, Holly, asking me what I was doing and me answering, “Oh, just fishing”. She would get a kick out of it. “Tough life, huh”. I would tell her “Hey, I’m stuck out here, and this is better than a hotel room ceiling!” We would say our good byes when we had either run out of things to talk about, it was time for her to get the boys ready for bed, or I caught a fish and needed to go. It was a routine, a weird “normal” as it had become.
The next day was Friday, and after a couple hours working on site cleaning and finishing up what we could, we packed up and headed back to the shop, and home for the weekend. When we got back, the next week’s schedule was up on the wall. It seemed that every supervisor in the tower crews, as well as a handful of the most trusted (apparently) riggers was on the Scriba job, listed as “Gin Pole”. Among the names was mine. I felt satisfaction that I had been picked above others for the important job, that they felt I was ready for it, but there was an uneasy nervousness in my mind as well. I kept seeing You Tube videos of towers collapsing and bodies falling to their certain deaths, and hearing the voices of the experienced guys in the crews saying things like “dangerous” and “guys die.” I went home to my wife and boys.
When you live on the road, the weekends fly by, and before I knew it, I was hugging Holly and the boys, saying goodbye, Monday morning was back. We loaded up our gear as usual, and then all attention was on getting the Gin Pole trailer to the job sight, about an hour and a half from the shop. To me it looked like we were transporting a small tower, not at all what I had expected it would look like. On site it was a flurry of activity, the supervisors and old hands getting the Gin Pole assembled laying on the ground near the base of the tower, positioning the winch trailer and laying out cables and tackle blocks, and checking the general condition of all the riggings that would hold it all together. Us newer guys trying to be useful, the strong backs and weak minds of the operation.
The gin pole looked just like a small tower, with what they were calling a rooster head on it’s top. The rooster head was basically a pulley wheel from which the load cable ran and carried whatever the load was up the tower. My surprise came when learning how this whole thing worked. The Gin Pole was sixty feet tall, and weighed, I don’t know… a whole hell of a lot. Its structure of three main legs and all of its diagonal bracing was all solid steel, nothing hollow. She was a heavy piece, and we were about to lift it up with heavy cables and a big winch, and hang it on the side of the tower at 280ft. I had expected something this size and weight would get bolted to the tower with clamps of some type, but, as I was about to learn, I was wrong.
This big, tall, heavy thing was going to be raised up to the top of the tower, with about 20ft of it raised above the current top section of the tower, leaving about 40ft below the top, and we would hang it there with steel chokers, steel sling straps if you will. The Gin Pole would be able to sway in these chokers at the top out away from the tower side about a foot. One foot doesn’t sound like much, it’s only 12 inches, right? Well, when your 300ft in the air and something this big and heavy can move around 12 inches with the weight of a load or the wind… it gets your attention.
We had a safety meeting on the ground with all hands, and bodies were picked for various jobs. Three guys were going up the tower to set the new tower sections as they came up just like when the crane was on site, with an added job. After a new section was set, the Gin Pole would have to be lifted from its chokers, and “jumped up” to position it higher to bring up the next section. A project manager from the shop would be sitting in a seat on the winch trailer at the hydraulic controls running the cables on this first day, and other guys would be rigging the sections to come up as we were ready for them. I was going to be on the tower. Suddenly, and in all honesty, I wished I was fishing.
It had been four years since anyone in the company had run the Gin Pole, so we went over the process several times on the ground to be sure everyone got it, and made sure both our radio batteries were good and we all had our hand signals down. Game time. Three of us, Teddy, Bill, and myself, started our climb to the top. I was to stop 40ft short of the top, it would be my job to be sure that the chokers were in the correct place and that when the weight was taken off the cable bringing up the pole and put into the chokers at the bottom, that the pole rested safely in them before anything else happened. We radioed that we were ready, and the load motor on the winch trailer fired to life.
I looked out to the lake and the boats that were like tiny specks, so far away and below that they seemed to move so slowly, like a plane does passing high overhead. I knew they were probably at full throttle, but they seemed to hardly move along from this distance. I thought how much better it would be to be out there in one of them with a fishing line over the side, and then I felt the tower “tense up” as it took the weight of the Gin Pole as it lifted off the ground. I directed my attention to the pole starting its assent and told myself “Forget fishing, pay attention, or you may never get to fish again!”
When the Gin Pole made it to us, there was a tape line on it which needed to line up with the top of the tower, and “Hold that” was radioed down to the winch trailer operator. I had the two steel chokers, the slings, held on my harness with two carabineers, and removed them one at a time and slung them around the Gin Pole legs and secured them with heavy shackles I had in my tool bags. It felt like a good thirty pounds had been taken off me as I removed the items. At the same time up top Bill and Teddy were securing it with a strap to keep it from falling away from the tower. At that moment, looking at how this thing stayed in place, I realized where things could go wrong, why so many guys had lost their lives during these operations. This entire thing was basically sitting in a swing at its bottom, the top just had a strap around it to keep it from falling outward or sideways. All the weight rested in, and counted on, those bottom chokers being attached correctly, and a strap up top. No pressure, just another day!
When I thought they were in the correct position I radioed “bottom chokers in place.” Teddy’s voice came over the radio and he confirmed that the top was also ready. The winch lowered the pole to set it in the chokers. All seemed ok, nothing fell, nothing groaned, our world was good. Then there was a pause in activity. Silence over the radio, but I could hear Teddy and Bill 40ft above me discussing something. I couldn’t make out the entire conversation because of the distance and the slight wind in my ears, but I did finally hear loud and clear Teddy when he raised his voice in a little excitement. “#*&! Bill, I don’t know, you’re supposed to be teaching US!” Great, nothing like a little confidence builder from the guys above you on a job that’s known to kill everyone when things aren’t done right!
After a couple questions back and forth over the radios I decided that Bill was just dotting his I’s and crossing his T’s, making sure, after four years, that he wasn’t missing something when it came to where the cables should be running. They repositioned one cable and we were ready to rock and roll. A voice came over the radio from down below. “Coming up!” It was show time.
The engine RPM’s climbed on the winch trailer and then the tower section began its climb. It seemed to take forever for it to come up. The entire time I watched the steel cable carrying its load up the tower face pass by me inch by inch, painfully slow. Every creek, every whine, every groan seemed to be amplified, every sound warning of a catastrophic failure on its way. I found myself looking back and forth, up and down, one moment watching the tower section on its way up as if it would just drop away, and the next second looking up to the top of the Gin Pole as if it were threatening to fall at any minute. What seemed like an hour later the 20ft tower section finally made it to me. Then it passed me. As it passed me relief washed over me, it only had 60ft to go, it wasn’t going to fall, the Gin Pole wasn’t going to collapse, and we were good. As it reached the top Teddy’s voice came over the radio once again. “Hold that.” It stopped. And suddenly, the relief was gone from my mind, and I felt very, very small, and very, very helpless. I did not like where I was, I was in the worst positon to be at the moment.
Twenty feet of a tower, several thousand pounds of steel, was now hanging from one single cable…directly over me. It in turn was hanging from a structure that itself was hung on the tower by steel and polyester straps. On the ground, you would probably look up, see something this big hanging above you, and take a few steps back, you know… to get out of the way. Up there, with all that steel hanging above me I realized at that very moment… this is where people die. There was no “stepping back”, there is no “out of the way.” Up there you were directly in the path of everything that could go wrong, and none of it was forgiving. The section hung there in midair just off the side of the Gin Pole, and as Bill and Teddy reached out to swing it in over the tower and into position over the center of the tower, the Gin Pole rocked slightly to the right as the rooster head pivoted. “Just get it over the damn flanges already”, I thought in my head.
Of course, Mr. Murphy showed up for the party, an unwelcome guest. As they swung the section around, the first leg flange to try to pass over a lower flange hit, the section needed to be raised another six inches. Unfortunately, there was no more height to be had, the rigging was at the rooster head, there was no more “up”. The section had to be sent back to the ground, the Gin Pole jumped up a foot, and then the tower section sent back up once again! I remember closing my eyes and letting out a muffled four letter word as I rubbed my forehead with my hand. An hour later as the section was lowered into place, the tension faded away. I hadn’t been holding my breath, but for whatever reason I felt the need to let out a deep breath, it just seemed appropriate.
The river. I pushed up the river a little farther each afternoon stretching into evening, staying out just a little longer each day, until I finally began to make it back to the hotel parking lot with squishing sneakers at dark. The farther upstream I went, the better fishing I seemed to find, I was only perhaps six-hundred yards or so upstream from where I had first entered and crossed a couple weeks earlier, and it was like a different river. The river flowed beneath the Interstate 81 Bridge to me, and save for the faster currents between the bridge pilings, it was wide and calm in this spot.
I had ignored this stretch of it for days because it was pretty deep and wide, and looked to have just a flat, smooth, bottom its whole length. Nothing that would hold much for fish… Until I spotted a couple crevices and tried fluttering a spinner over one. Instantly I had a fish on that made me question my choice of ultra-light, collapsible rod and four pound test line. It must have taken me five minutes at least to get the fish close enough to me to even get a decent look at it. That crevice ended up holding several good sized Smallmouths. And there seemed to be more and more hiding places for them the harder I looked. I ended up catching my biggest Smallmouth ever from that spot. I don’t carry a measuring tape with me, but it was no less than twenty-one inches. I also caught my biggest number of fish ever in one afternoon. From those crevices, then upstream, through some rough waters, and then on to a huge deep, dark pool, I caught thirty-six Smallmouths in about 3 1/2 hours one afternoon. Not to mention all the Fall Fish and small Rock Bass too.
I got good at wading in waist deep currents over slippery rocks with an old pair of Converse sneakers. I got good at casting and retrieving a spinner while holding a cell phone with my neck for my calls home each evening. I didn’t really explain all the details of the Gin Pole to Holly when she would ask how my day was. We were building a tower. We bolted stuff together. She could learn the details later, after the fact, after it was all done. The river was my friend to confide in, that friend you could spend time with and say nothing, because words weren’t necessary, they were unspoken but understood. The fishing healed the days stress. I had fished my entire life, but this fishing was most definitely like starting over, it meant something totally different.
There are a lot of memories from building all those towers that summer up there, but that tower, it’s the one that sticks out the most. A crane stuck in the swampy work site below while we all hooted and applauded from above as the crane operator jumped out and spiked his hard hat. The dreaded Gin Pole. The view of the nuclear power plant and of Lake Ontario stretching out to the horizon. Lunch sent up to us on a rope at three-hundred and fifty feet, the very top, twenty minutes after setting the last section in place.
But the river. The Salmon River. I will go back there and work any day just to visit that stretch of river again if I could. It’s not more than an hour from home, but I have yet to take a Saturday or Sunday and stand waist deep in its waters again. I ask myself why, every time the memories show themselves. After baking in the sun all day up on a tower in the summer heat, what could have been better than wading a cool river for three or four hours afterwards? Smallmouths, Rock Bass, Trout, Fall Fish. Spinners and collapsible fishing rods. I got good at not only knowing what spots held fish there, but what the fish would most likely be too. In my time there, I’m sure I caught the same fish from the same holes more than once, and I’m sure I passed by as many holes that I never saw. I’ve never caught a Salmon or a Steelhead on the Salmon River in Pulaski. And I don’t regret it. Not at all. That summer, for a short time, that stretch of river was mine.
Fish or Die! 