My name is Danny Stelzer. I'm 35 and I've been a lineman for thirteen years, the last eight as a journeyman, for a rural electric cooperative in southern Idaho. I'm not going to say which one. It isn't the one in the book, and my general manager would like to keep it that way.

I've spent a good part of 1999 on Y2K. Not the computer side, which is above my pay grade, but the field side: going out with the engineers to substations and pump stations and the radio sites, writing down every piece of equipment that has a clock or a chip in it, and standing there while they rolled the dates forward to see what it did. Mostly it did nothing. A transformer is copper and steel and oil. It doesn't know what year it is. The stuff that did care got fixed or replaced, and then we tested it again.

So let me say this plainly, before anybody e-mails me: I expect the lights at my house to stay on New Year's Eve. I'd bet my truck on it. I'll be on standby at the shop that night like every lineman in America, eating cold pizza and listening to the radio, and I expect to be bored.

But I've been doing this long enough to know that the trouble you plan for is almost never the trouble you get. The trouble you get is a drunk in a pickup at two in the morning, or a squirrel, or ice, or somebody who did something nobody thought anybody would be dumb enough to do. That's what this book is about. It's not about computers. It's about one long night at a little co-op in a county you won't find on the map, where everything works exactly the way it's supposed to, and the lights go out anyway.

I write at the kitchen table after work. My wife Dawn reads every chapter before you do and tells me where I lost her. If a chapter is late, it's because there was a windstorm.

The plan is sixteen chapters. The last one goes up on Friday, December 31, in the afternoon, before I leave for the shop.

MIKE EASON, 37. Journeyman lineman, fourteen years at Coldwater Valley Electric Cooperative. Careful, quiet, good in the cold. Wife Tracey, daughter Kayla, 9.

DONNIE JACKSON, 32. Journeyman lineman, Mike's partner on the truck. Talks the whole time. Never once made a mistake on a pole.

RALPH WATSON, 48. Line foreman. Twenty-six years on the crew. Eats sunflower seeds by the pound and spits the shells in a coffee can.

JOSE "JOE MAC" McCORKLE, 30. Third-year apprentice. Came to line work late, after six years in the Army. Wants to do everything right.

SANDRA KANE, 46. General manager. Spent two years getting the co-op ready for this one night and would like it to go very, very quietly.

LAURIE CRANFORD, 35. Night dispatcher. Runs the radio, the phones and the outage map, and knows every member in the county by voice.

RAY MULVIHILL, 65. Retired after forty-two years on the line. Trained half the crew, including Mike. Lives alone out past Bitterbrush since his wife died, with a generator and a lot of opinions.

TOM ARCHULETA, 41. Coldwater County sheriff's deputy, on the road all night.

JUDITH ALVARADO, 54. Lives across the road from the Bitterbrush substation. Has called the co-op about every coyote, car and porch light since 1987.

A lot of readers have asked, so here it is in plain English. This is the general picture, the kind of thing you'd hear on a school tour. It's not a manual.

1. Generating plants. Somewhere, a long way from you, a dam on a river or a plant burning coal or gas spins a generator. Out here in the Northwest a lot of it is hydro, water coming down through a dam.

2. Transmission lines. Those are the big steel towers you see marching across the desert. They carry power at very high voltage, because high voltage loses less on a long trip. They tie whole states together, so if one plant goes down, others pick up the slack.

3. Substations. The fenced yards full of equipment by the side of the road. They take that high voltage and step it down to something the local lines can carry, and they have big switches called breakers that open on their own when something goes wrong down the line, to protect everything else.

4. Distribution lines. That's us. A co-op like the one I work for usually doesn't make any power. It buys it wholesale and owns the poles and wires that run down the county roads, from the substation out to the farms and towns. Our members own the co-op. We have only a few members for every mile of line, which tells you how far apart everybody lives out here.

5. Your transformer. The gray can on the pole by your house (or the green box in your yard, if you live in town) steps it down one last time, to the 120 and 240 volts your house uses.

Almost every outage you've ever had happened at step 4 or 5, and almost every one of them was weather, a car, an animal or a tree. Keep that in mind when you read the book.

Q: Is Coldwater County real? I couldn't find it in my road atlas. (Barbara, Ohio)
A: You won't. I put it together out of pieces of three counties I've worked in, so nobody could say I was writing about their co-op. The weather is real. So is the coffee.

Q: Is my power going to go out on New Year's? (Earl, Montana)
A: I can't speak for your utility, but I'd be very surprised. Call them and ask what they've done. They've all been at it for a couple of years, and they'll be glad somebody asked nicely. Then do what you'd do for any winter storm: flashlights, a few days of water and food, your prescriptions filled. That's good advice every January, not just this one.

Q: Then why write a book where the lights go out? (Jason, Utah)
A: Because a book where everything works and everybody goes home at 12:15 is only exciting to linemen.

Q: Can a lineman really work up on a pole in a snowstorm? (Linda, Nebraska)
A: We do it every winter. Most of our work now is out of a bucket truck, but there are plenty of poles out in fields and back lots where you can't get a truck, and you go up the old way. Nobody likes it. You do it anyway, carefully, because people are sitting in a cold house waiting on you.

Q: Mike is a lot like you, isn't he? (Dawn, my kitchen)
A: Mike is a much better person than me. He also doesn't leave his boots in the hall.

Q: Who's in the truck at Bitterbrush? Is it Ray? (about forty of you)
A: Not telling. Keep reading.