The power-line inspector who walked the mountains for half a lifetime

Lao Wu's inspection route runs along ridgelines more than a thousand meters above sea level.

He is a transmission line inspector. His section of line crosses more than sixty kilometers of mountains and a hundred–odd towers. Inspection can't be done from a vehicle — it's all on foot: over ridges, across gullies, through woods, tower by tower. Has the tower foundation settled? Any cracked insulators? Broken strands in the conductors? Has anything along the right-of-way grown past safe distance? One full circuit takes days and tens of thousands of steps. Boots are consumables — he wears out four or five pairs a year.

Lao Wu has done this for twenty-eight years — "half a life spent walking in the mountains." His inspections have no such thing as close enough: every tower gets a visit up close, checked from below, from the tower itself, through binoculars. Summer heat, leeches in the rainy season, freezing rain in winter are constant companions. The closest call was a special patrol ahead of a thunderstorm: he and a colleague raced the downpour along a ridgeline and finished checking every hazard point before the storm clouds arrived.

What he inspects isn't only the line but the human world at its feet. Many tower foundations sit beside village woods and farmland, and in twenty-eight years he has come to know everyone along the route: whose dog won't bite, whose elders live alone, which household struggles. Passing by on patrol, he'll fix a light bulb for an elder living alone or check their aging wiring — work outside his job description that he has never once treated as outside it. The mountain people say: "Lao Wu patrols the electricity, but it's people he keeps warm."

On a line inspector's map there is no such word as off duty. One hazard left unresolved on the line means a patch of lights below could go dark. Their sense of responsibility is measured in households of light.

The battle Lao Wu is proudest of was the ice storm two years ago. Freezing rain fell for a week; ice on the lines far exceeded design limits and the mountain grid went critical. He and his colleagues fought in the mountains for seven straight days: monitoring ice, knocking it off, making repairs. On the coldest night they slept in a tent on the ridge, icicles snapping off the towers like gunfire. In the small hours of the morning when the repairs were done and power restored below, Lao Wu looked back from the ridge — the county town's lights were coming back on, patch by patch.

He took out his phone and sent his son a message: "Son, see the lights down there? That's Dad's year-end report."

Lao Wu is fifty-one now and still climbs the line himself. Younger colleagues suggest he move to a desk job; he refuses. "I've walked this section for twenty-eight years. I know which towers have tempers. A new man would need ten years to learn it all again." He has compiled twenty-eight years of patrol notes into a volume: which stretches are slick after rain, the best vantage point for checking each tower, which birds like to nest on which line and need to be moved along early. Handing the notebook to the young ones, he said: "The line is inanimate; people are not. Treat the line as if it were alive, and it will seldom let you down."

His notebook has one extra page of records — an account of human ties along the line: whose dog needs a stick thrown first, which old woman always makes him stop for a drink of water, which stretch of road the schoolchildren cross on their way home. A line inspector walking the mountains, he says, is never walking only the line. "If you treat the people along the way as neighbors, even the mountain wind goes easier on you."