“History is that certainty produced when imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
- Julian Barnes
This story begins with a framed photo.
It features the sort of black-and-white image that doesn’t make sense at first glance—a transmission tower wrenched into a spaghetti mess of tangled steel, the steepled tip dangling over a mountain cliff, surrounded by an immensity of piled snow. All the angles are wrong, the shapes violent and jagged, reminiscent of an M.C. Escher illusion.
If it were taken today, you would assume from the angle that it was a drone shot, but because it was taken more than 50 years ago, chances are it was taken from a higher elevation. It looks professionally composed, a tragic scene ready to paint, raw with wild energy.
For my entire childhood, this photo was mounted on the wall of my granddad’s living room in Tsawwassen, B.C., right next to the steps leading into the kitchen. Its placement meant anyone attending one of his bustling family dinners would have to pass by it multiple times, and it loomed over us grandkids during all the after-school afternoons we spent watching Saved by the Bell and the animated version of Batman back in the ’90s.
My siblings and I weren’t especially curious about the photo, granting it no more significance than the antique cuckoo clock, the fine art prints and the multiple maps of British Columbia lining the walls. It wouldn’t be until my teenage years that I even thought to ask about it, and wonder why it was there.
The things we keep
This photo has proven to be elusive.
When my granddad passed away in 2006, it would’ve ended up amidst the belongings that were gifted to his six children. An idiosyncratic spread of unchosen objects were displayed in the living room for anyone to claim. There were items of real value, nostalgic and otherwise, but there were also the everyday possessions that simply needed a new home.
Who wanted his spoon collection, for instance, acquired over years of travel? Or the sparkling geodes he kept on living room side tables? What about the animal-themed cork coasters? This was the detritus of his personality, each item a window into his psyche.
By the time I was given an opportunity to take something, there wasn’t much worth the effort of keeping. There was a crystal toucan, a few old issues of The New Yorker, and some antique cookie tins. It was slightly depressing. Earlier I had expressed interest in his giant maps of B.C., but those had already been spoken for.
The only thing that caught my eye was his framed engineering degree from UBC, partially because we shared a name. During my own university studies years later I would keep it on my bedroom wall, momentarily confusing everybody who stepped in.
By the time it occurred to me to inquire further about the photo, it was unclear who had ended up with it—if anyone had it at all. One uncle had a similar black-and-white photo of a transmission tower, but it was upright; searching through newspaper archives produced shots of damaged lines throughout B.C., but none of the particular one I was looking for. Family members weren’t sure whether he’d personally taken the shot, or if somebody else at BC Hydro was responsible.
There was a good chance it was sitting in a folder or a box somewhere, in a relative’s archives, waiting to be rediscovered—or thrown away forever.
Myth and memory
Memory is a tricky thing sometimes, so I can’t actually recall who told me the mythic narrative behind the photo on granddad’s living room wall—but I do remember the story.
It was an older relative who explained the transmission tower pictured had collapsed during a vicious blizzard in the Sea to Sky corridor decades previous and had caused a widespread power outage. It was my granddad, working for BC Hydro, who was called in mid-emergency to help with the repair efforts.
I pictured him with a snow-blasted face, crimson under his parka hood, as he shouted into the screaming wind and oversaw the heavy machinery. The embellished way the story was told, it sounded like he was a one-man operation who had miraculously saved countless lives, introducing an innovative method of hoisting up the downed lines while the tower was being reconstructed.
It was this move that meant power was restored to the thousands of grateful customers who had been plunged into freezing blackness.
This wasn’t the only family story told about granddad’s tenure as an engineer, a career that financed his hilltop home on the Tsawwassen bluffs overlooking the ocean. It was impossible to tell which aspects were exaggerated, and which were simply fact.
When we drove down the highway or took road trips to the Interior, my parents would point out the wooden power-line structures my granddad had designed—apparently single-handedly. We were told that at one point he had his own helicopter to fly all over the province, and some days he would visit hidden lakes in the Rocky Mountains nobody else ever got to see.
These anecdotes all seemed consistent with his booming braggadocio, his thunderously authoritative voice, his general air of intellectual supremacy.
My granddad wore an iron engineer’s ring to commemorate a tragic bridge collapse in Quebec caused by a flaw in the design, a reminder that the work he was doing could mean the difference between life and death.
Not gone yet
Record-keeping is always imperfect, as a rule.
The doctor who was supposed to deliver my granddad and take official note of his birth was not present when he came screaming into the world in 1928. This was in Agassiz, a town his mother had travelled to during her labour.
My granddad didn’t officially become a person until the physician arrived and wrote it down the next day—making his birth date incorrect for most of his life. Every Christmas we would tell the story of his two birthdays.
When it comes to family storytelling, the record-keeping becomes elastic. Combative siblings will recount drastically opposite accounts of the same event. People exaggerate, and editorialize, and make up meaningless fibs. What’s important to most families isn’t so much the facts, but the feelings. The power dynamics. The family reputation.
There are so many reasons to lie, to massage the truth, to manipulate memories.
When I told my father I was looking into granddad’s past, dad was quick to insist that he wouldn’t be a reliable source of information—at 70, his memory is starting to go. He read through an early draft of the story and remarked that the granddad I described was different from the one who raised him, pointing out particular passages where our vision of him didn’t align.
It wasn’t that he was telling me I was wrong, just that we had different perspectives.
A decade after granddad passed, I sat down with my gran to talk about his memory. Hers was being compromised by dementia, and throughout the conversation she repeated questions multiple times. I was surprised to see her choke up when I mentioned that he was now gone, her chin quivering with emotion.
There was an entire library of information in that expression, the type of grief you can’t fake. This was the man she’d spent more than half a century of her life married to. She took off her glasses and dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
“I don’t like to think of him as gone.”
Downed lines
When a high-voltage power line goes down in a storm, often you’ll see a blinding flash of light. Kind of like fireworks, or a movie explosion, the moment it reaches the ground a surge of lightning-like electricity will burst out with malevolent intensity.
That’s a sight granddad saw at least once, in the chaotic midst of the 1972 snowstorm that would later be deemed one of the worst in the province’s history, from the interior of his company car. He would later tell relatives he believed the flash was from a 500kv conductor striking either the ground or maybe its tower.
According to my uncle, another engineer with BC Hydro who was a teenager at the time, this flash happened near Agassiz, where multiple kilometres of line had fallen to the earth after being buffeted by intense winter wind. Granddad was the manager of the route engineering department, so he had a personal and work interest in regards to the environmental effects on power line route selection.
When the weather started to ravage the province, he took off with his camera to see the devastation first-hand.
Which of their structural designs had succeeded, he wondered, and which had been overcome by the almighty effects of Mother Nature? He was 43 years old at the time, just half a decade older than I am now, a father of six and a dutiful Christian. But the religion that truly ruled his life was electricity, a power he had learned to harness and respect.
“Later it became apparent that the failure of a tower near Whistler was leading to a critical shortage of transmission capacity. I believe the tower there failed due to snow slippage or movement. I don’t think it was an avalanche,” my uncle told me.
“As he had a responsibility to select safe routes, I believe he went to the site to learn more about the location of the tower relative to local terrain features so that such locations could be avoided in the future.”
While there, granddad took a picture of a crane holding an insulator string and a conductor bundle—possibly the photo immortalized in his living room. How involved in developing that method of safely energizing the line, my uncle couldn’t say. Likely it involved a discussion at the site, and it was a solution arrived at by multiple contributors.
Either way, he was not involved in or responsible for the operation and maintenance of the line, or directing the work—all which made for a slightly more muted and humble version of the childhood tale.
“When the tower fell over, one phase contacted the ground and caused the outage. The other two phases were still in the air and able to keep operating. During the temporary repair the phase on the ground was freed from the tower. An insulating string was installed to safely connect the crane to the soon-to-be live wires,” my uncle said.
“I think the crane was used for some period of time, days or possibly weeks, until other sources of electricity could be obtained. I recall him saying that there was a concern with the crane wire/hook slipping under an extended and perhaps unattended situation. I don’t recall him saying how this was addressed.”
Later my granddad would drive my uncle and my father up the Sea to Sky highway to see the reconstructed tower in person—an event that my uncle remembers, but dad doesn’t. The fact that he returned to that particular tower seemed like a significant detail to me, signalling granddad’s desire to pass the story to the next generation, and validating my interest in the photo. Though I never heard him speak one word of this story before he passed away in 2006, I sensed it was one he would want to live on.
And who better to share it than the grandson who shares his name?
The storm of ’72
A broken story is like a downed power line.
When I began to seek out information about the photo in my granddad’s living room, I was looking to keep the electric flow of information from one generation to the next free-flowing. Like my namesake, I was looking to accomplish an emergency repair—otherwise the real story could be lost completely, rendered irrelevant and forgotten.
Once I had confirmed the picture was taken in the Sea to Sky corridor, I approached the Whistler Museum and Archives to see if they had stories from that storm. Unfortunately, the local paper didn’t start until 1975 and newsletters from earlier than that didn’t cover the news. After searching through the archives, though, staff produced an article from a Jan. 23, 1972 issue of the Vancouver Sun about the impacts felt across the province during the storm: blocked rail lines, phone lines down, cars trapped by slides.
BC Hydro funnelled power from U.S. utilities to keep the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island going.
“It was probably the greatest weather disaster BC Hydro ever faced,” another article reads, calling it “one of the worst winter storms in history.”
Both the 500,000-V transmission lines from the Peace River power station and the two 360,000-V lines from the Bridge River generating station were knocked out. Power was lost in Chilliwack, Rosedale, Agassiz, Harrison, Cultus Lake and other communities. It took eight days before the broken links were partially restored.
According to my uncle, the storm of ’72 was more like an interesting event that happened to occur during granddad’s career than a meaningful personal achievement as I had first interpreted. This photo was one of many he took while studying how his power line structures had held up under pressure, driving across the province to document their failed cross arms.
Maybe it was a fluke that this was the one he framed.
As I continued to spelunk through the research, nobody seemed to have a definitive answer to granddad’s exact role in repairing the downed tower. Was he more of a researcher or observer? Was he having meetings with the head honchos, slamming his fist on the table?
“The decision to route one line past Whistler may have avoided a much longer and more dangerous outage. If both lines were working together past Agassiz and both went down in the same way this could have been a real disaster,” my uncle told me.
“If he was in part responsible for routing one line past Whistler this might be considered a meaningful achievement of his. But I don’t know who would know this, and I would not like to speculate.”
Namesakes
Our legacies are told in story, whether we like it or not.
When I first contacted BC Hydro to retrieve research information about the collapsed power line tower and his career, they told me it would take at least a month—which was plenty of time to ruminate on what I hoped to find, and to accomplish. Did I really want to dismantle the mental image I had of him?
Since he was on my mind, granddad started coming up in conversation with my wife. She had never met him, but understood him to be a traditional patriarch, a product of a different culture. Hearing about the lavish family dinners he threw multiple times a year made her wonder if maybe a sense of familial duty had been lost over the course of the generations, if we’d ever really regained stability after losing him at the head of our family dinner table.
Then we visited Tsawwassen, the town where I grew up, and ended up spending time with a toddler nephew I hadn’t seen since he was a baby who is also named after my granddad. I was surprised to learn he already knew about his namesake, and the fact his great-grandfather was an engineer—same as his dad.
Our lives echo long after we’re gone.
A slow-moving avalanche
After waiting for a month to hear back about my media request from BC Hydro, I was starting to make peace with the idea that I would never really nail down the particulars I was seeking. I wondered what it could possibly change, and what I was even trying to accomplish in the first place. Was I trying to prove myself wrong?
Then I received an email from the chief librarian, confirming my uncle’s story and supplying additional information. The account was published in an internal magazine.
“Break in second 500 kv Peace line was caused by slow-moving avalanche that knocked down on tower eight miles southeast of Squamish. It took four bulldozers four days to cut path through 12 snow slides to reach the site where snow was 20 feet deep,” it reads.
“Joe Brand … transmission supervisor for Lower Mainland area, directed tricky operation which saw crane holding the undamaged powerline aloft until base of tower could be repaired.”
The power flowed for 11 days until it returned to regular operation on Feb. 6, 1972.
Reading over the short paragraph, I was thrilled to learn the more specific details and to get some clarity on the operation. It even came with a couple of photos, very similar to the one that had started this exploration.
It wasn’t until later I realized what was missing from the account: Granddad’s name.
His voice
That’s the thing about knowledge: it needs to be passed down to survive.
An electric current needs somewhere to go next. If I had taken more interest as a teenager, I could’ve heard this story first-hand. Granddad loved to opine, to monologue from the front seat while he was driving us to school or launch into a long-winded joke from the throne-like couch in the living room, one slipper-clad foot resting against the coffee table. In church, he loved to overpower everyone with his operatic vocalizations.
Electricity has a musical vibration, and so does the human voice. Now that he’s gone, I have to be content with echoes, the reverberations from his sonorous baritone voice, a fraction of his presence. It’s like being in the pew after a hymn ends, listening to the dying thrum, after all the singers have retaken their seat.
Eventually there will be silence.