The Lineman's Gaff and the Clarity of the Climb

I met Leo at a diner just off a county road, his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee that looked small in his grip. He’s a troubleshooter for a rural electric cooperative, one of the men who goes out when the lights go out. We got to talking about work, about focus, and he kept coming back to his gaffs—the spiked climbing irons strapped to his boots. Not as a point of pride, but as a point of philosophy.

“You don’t think about the pole when you’re on the gaffs,” he said, his voice low and even. “You think about the *next* pole. The one you’re on is a given. Your spikes are in, your belt is set, your body is at the right angle. That’s your foundation. The second you start pondering the thirty feet of air between you and the ground while you’re on the pole, you’ve already lost your focus. The work isn’t about being up there. It’s about moving to the next anchor point.”

The Work is in the Transition

He described his process on a storm call. The truck arrives in the dark. The problem is somewhere on a five-mile stretch of line. Your job isn’t to “fix the outage.” It’s to methodically establish a series of small, certainties. Is the substation breaker open? Certainty achieved. Is the sectionalizing switch closed? Certainty. You move from one known point to the next, like climbing a pole, until you isolate the single span where the problem lives. The gaffs, he insisted, just make the metaphor physical. Each secure step is a piece of information processed, a checkpoint passed.

I asked him about distraction, about the modern plague of context-switching. He gave a dry chuckle. “You can’t context-switch on a pole. You can’t check your phone or wonder if you should be working on a different line. Your entire world is the texture of the wood in front of your face, the feel of the leather strap on your thigh, the next handhold for your strap. It’s the most focused environment you can imagine. The only ‘inbox’ is the next piece of hardware above you.”

Leo’s tradition, passed down from old hands to new, is this ritual of the climb: the deliberate thud of the gaff biting into the wood, the shift of weight, the testing pull before the ascent. It’s a mandatory slow-down that enables speed. Rushing the bite of the spike means a slip, a “gaff out,” and a dangerous jerk against your belt. The system forces presence.

Walking away, I thought about our own work. How often do we try to fix the whole “outage” at once, staring into the chaotic dark, overwhelmed? Leo’s way suggests a different path: strap on your tools, find your first solid anchor in the chaos—a cleared inbox, a single document opened, a five-minute block honored—and plant your gaff. Don’t think about the whole climb. Don’t stare at the void. Just find the next certain grip, and move. The clarity isn’t at the top; it’s in the rhythm of the climb itself.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: