When I was 15 years old, I saved a man’s life. I was running a crew for a small construction outfit in South Texas. One day, I was drinking a beer with my boss after work – we were out near Laredo somewhere. A few beers deep, he remembered what he forgot – that he still had to finish the wiring in the breaker box so the new security lights would flick on after sunset. The breaker box was hung from a new telephone pole, soaked in creosote. The dirt from the hole we dug to sink the pole was piled in a fresh mound around the base. Carl ambled up the dirt mound, flipped up the cover on the breaker box and reached for a pair of pliers (or something) from his tool belt.

Everything after that happened fast.

It looked like he was poking around in the box, but I wasn't really watching that hard. I was thinking about something else. All of a sudden, he just started billowing. That's the only way I can say it. It looked like God had just grabbed him by the finger tips and started shaking him, as someone might shake out a rug or a bed sheet. He was more rolling than shaking I guess. Billowing in great trembles. Billowing.

There happened to be shovel stuck in the dirt. That's what young men do when they're finished digging a hole; they stab the shovel in the dirt as a monument.

I don't know what all I knew back then, but I knew that Carl was going to die and that if I grabbed him, I would die too. Electricity rolling out of a transformer bank isn't like the electricity in your house. Kitchen appliances sip juice through little copper straws. Just a sip at a time. That's all they need. But the electricity rolling through a transformer is something else altogether. It's feral and it wants to kill you.

Just as sure as I was standing there that day with a beer in one hand and reaching for some shovel with the other, that electricity wanted to kill Carl. It was just showing off first. Showing how easy it could throw a man around and then snuff him out. Carl was a big man, too.

I hit him with the shovel. It was just one hit across his shoulder--but it was the perfect hit. Didn't feel hard at all, but it was enough. The next second, he was lying on the ground a few feet from the pole. He wasn't all crumpled up, or in a ball, like you might imagine. He was stretched on the ground, like he was reaching for the last part of sunlight as it slinked over the horizon.

Now, this next part you won't believe. He got up.