"First You Get Your Pole Up"

Note: this is #5 in a series of stories of settling in the North Country

There are some things we had always taken somewhat for granted: you open a tap and water flows into the sink, you flip a switch and lights go on, you flush and – well, you know. When you live in the country, you play a sizable part in obtaining those things you’re used to having the urban utility companies handle so smoothly.

Although we hoped to one day be off the grid, accomplishing that immediately was totally unrealistic and impossible. I called the power company and asked when they could hook us up.

“Have you got your pole up?”

“The electric lines are on our side of the road, and there’s a pole near the driveway about 100’ from our mobile home.” (We had quickly learned that it was a bit undignified to call your mobile home a trailer…)

The electric company representative then explained to me that we needed to purchase a utility pole and put it up within a short distance of the trailer. “Get your pole up and then call us,” she said, sounding as though there was nothing to it.

The local Agway sells poles. They’re 25 feet long and weigh, well, A LOT. We borrowed a flatbed truck, Agway loaded the pole on it, and we drove it out to the land. It was supposed to be sunk five feet into the ground, so with pick, crowbar and shovels we dug a hole the required depth some six feet from the trailer.

Now think about this: putting a flag in a flagpole holder can be tricky, especially if you can only hold onto the bottom end of the flagpole. You’ve got a lot of flagpole (and flagpole weight) waving around as you try to put one small end of it into a hole. Then think about how to do the same thing with a 25’ long 700# wooden pole. It’s a bit harder!

During our time in the North Country we have been blessed with amazing and wonderful friends. We rounded up two of them – folks who were building a log house from trees they had cut. Here maybe a couple of pictures will shorten the description:
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It drizzled off and on, and the four of us worked all day, but no matter how we tried, no matter how high we were able to prop the truck end of the pole, it would not slip into that hole. Darkness was closing in. We were hungry and tired. I used the Coleman camping stove to put a fire under some water to make spaghetti, and we decided to give it one last effort.

We built an even higher tower of cement blocks on the truck bed and leveraged the top end of the pole up as high as we could. We put a hemlock board in the hole so that the bottom of the pole might slide down it rather than get stuck in the earth and rocks of the hole’s interior wall. We tied a long rope to the top of the pole.
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On the count of 3, Husband and Joe would try to heave up on the truck end of the pole while Cathy and I would pull the rope for all we were worth. 1… 2… 3… They heaved and we pulled, the pole rose (!) and for several seconds seemed to teeter perpendicular to the ground (!) ---- and then it fell, not into the hole, but more in the general direction of the mobile home, missing it by about a foot and landing flat on the ground with a sickening thud.

No one said a word. We stared in silence, realizing both our great good fortune that the pole had not crushed our “house” or any of us, and the grim knowledge that our electric pole had now lost the advantage of being four feet above ground level. We went inside and ate our spaghetti, the silence continuing until the four of us hugged each other and said goodnight.

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So how DID we get that pole up? Well, we had a friend named Jim Brown, a man employed by the local Soil and Water Conservation District to make a soil map of the county.

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Jim happened to stop by one sunny afternoon about a week later, and Jim – almost single-handedly – put up our pole. As Bonnie Raitt sings, “You got to know how!”
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Jim was our hero. Pssst… don’t tell the power company we cut four feet off the bottom of the pole, okay?
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I called the electric company and they brought wires to the pole. One of the neighbors we had met while blocking the road with our mobile home was an electrician, and a few days later he lit up our lives.
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