After Six Decades, a North Country Lineman Hangs Up His Hooks

When young Ernie Covey started work as a lineman for New Hampshire Electric Cooperative in 1969 earning $2.27 per hour, he didn’t have the luxury of working in a bucket. That’s because there were no bucket trucks…in the whole company.
 
Like every lineman of the time, Covey learned to climb. And he learned quickly too. No four-year apprenticeship in those days, he recalled, just the stern direction of his first boss, Leland Shallow.
A man with a quick temper who was just as quick to forget it, Shallow was a living link to the founding days of the Cooperative in 1939. Covey recalled his first day on the job.
 
“He wanted somebody he could teach,” Covey said. “He talked to me a little bit about what the job entailed and said you want to try that? I said yeah! We were supposed to wait four months before I tried it but he said jeez, might as well find out if you’re going to like it or not. He had me in hooks starting off climbing trees, which are a lot harder than poles.”
 
After 44 years and a career that spanned six decades, it’s fair to say that Ernie Covey learned his lessons well. Having spent all that time patrolling the northern reaches of New Hampshire in NHEC’s Colebrook District, Covey is himself a living link to a time when a lineman was jack of all trades.
 
He read meters and built hundreds of miles of line. He cleared rights-of-way and hauled the wood home to burn. When the power went out, Co-op members called him at home.  Being so far removed from the more populated areas of the state to the south, the three or four linemen working the Colebrook District were almost a company unto themselves. So it’s no surprise that when Covey first started work, outage dispatching was done by Mrs. Shallow…from her kitchen.
 
“They had a little radio and an antenna up behind their house. She’d take calls right there at the house and then get on the radio telling us where to go next,” Covey said.
 
That same practicality and Yankee ingenuity was applied to everything they did, including the jury-rigged vehicle that served as their line truck. A big A-frame was welded to the bed, allowing the men to lift and set poles with just the right application of cable and winch. It still wasn’t easy.
 
“It was a big improvement but you had to line the truck up perfect over the hole. And the truck was so short we had to put legs under it,” Covey said with a laugh.
 
With the addition of a long ladder, the old Ford also doubled as a bucket truck.
 
“Lee Shallow had a big heavy duty ladder. He had some big brackets welded to the A-frame and he put that big ladder on it,” he said. “We used it in the ice storm of ’69.”
 
The Ice Storm of 1969, Hurricane Charlie, the Fourth of July storm that peeled asphalt shingles off the roof of the District office…there was plenty of weather to contend with over the course of Covey’s career. But the one that topped them all was the Ice Storm of 1998.
 
“Awesome and terrible” was how Woody Crawford described the ’98 storm damage. Crawford, another NHEC Colebrook lineman who started work not long after Covey in 1975, says he figures he and his partner have either built or rebuilt all 220 miles of line in the Colebrook District. Both he and Covey have the war wounds to prove it.
 
Crawford has had shoulder surgery and expects to have his knees replaced “any time now,” while Covey has endured three knee replacements and shoulder surgery. Fortunately, they’ve managed to avoid serious injury.
 
“Just a lot of nicks and cuts, bruises and bumps,” Covey said.
 
That’s not to say there weren’t close calls.
 
There was the time the three-inch pipe he was using to drive a ground rod kicked back and blackened his eye. Or the time the downrigger nearly flattened Woody’s foot. Perhaps the most exciting mishap occurred while Covey was climbing one of the Colebrook District’s infamous cedar poles.
 
“We had all cedar poles up here, local cedars, untreated, and they were falling over like dominoes, sometimes while we were on them.” Covey recalled. “I think the one that caused the most concern was when I was hanging over the Connecticut River in the middle of winter. The pole was going over and I was grabbing on to a tree, the right of way was so thick, and yelling for Woody.”
 
Fortunately, Woody knew the routine – hustle over with the 18-foot pike pole and prop up the cedar while Ernie scrambled down and unhooked.
 
These days, it’s unlikely you’d find a lineman in a similar situation. For starters, there are no local, untreated cedar poles out there anymore. There’s also a lot more focus on safety, Covey said. The informal apprenticeships of his youth are a thingof the past.
 
“Rules, regulations and safety, they’re big demands these days,” he said. “That’s a good thing.”
 
Today’s linemen also have a wealth of new equipment that is saving time and effort.  It’s a far cry from Covey’s first days on the job when he had to buy his own tools.
 
“We’ve got some nice tools these days,” he noted.
 
At age 68, it’s hard to imagine a day for Covey that doesn’t start at 4 a.m. with coffee and the drive to work. Will he miss it? Covey says yes, but he’s got plenty to do at home.
 
“I’ve got a wife at home who’s a slave driver,” Covey said with a chuckle. With much of their 18 acres occupied by lawns and flower gardens, “I’ll keep plenty busy,” he said.
 
Of course, there will be time for hunting. An avid outdoorsman, Covey and his son take annual elk bow hunting trips to Montana. A plaque from the state of Montana certifies that Covey took the largest bull in the state in 2010.
 
It seems a fitting way to enter retirement in a place where wildlife and the outdoors are the backdrop of everyday life. Since 1958 when his family moved north from Nashua, the North Country has been Covey’s home.
 
“I don’t follow the crowds, so I fit in pretty good up here,” he said. “I enjoy it.”