WIRED TOGETHER

Rex Burress

On a morning walk recently, a passing crow led me to look upward at the sky, and I was surprised at the multitude of power lines strung along the streets, particularly at Hammon Avenue and High Street in Oroville, CA.

Pedestrians mostly move along looking straight ahead or with eyes to the ground, oblivious of what's overhead...unless you're a birdwatcher or a tree-leaf peeper or a cloud searcher! “Look up, look down, look all around/Every stick, every stone, is some creatures home.”

The world is literally wired together even though wireless power has advanced in popularity, but it will take generations to remove all the overhead power lines. New housing districts with underground lines is aesthetically pleasing, even though birds have fewer places to perch. If view-constricting electric lines have a redeeming factor, it is in pleasing perching birds.

On the way from Oroville to Marysville, I noticed great numbers of blackbirds lined up on the wires like a string of sale-seekers at a grand opening. Hawks perch on the pinnacle of the poles, ever-watching for an opportunistic moment to swoop on a rodent or a robin. Birds have developed some savvy about overhead wires and largely avoid collisions, but occasionally there is a miscalculation with wind-turbines and high voltage transmission lines.

In some areas the massive montage of overhead lines is such a maze that it indeed takes an expert lineman to repair any disruption. I think of extreme weather flailing a community and electrical crews trying to restore power lines after ice storms or tornadoes.

The modern world is wired together and quite dependent on transmission lines, with our houses full of machines that need electricity to operate. It wasn't that way in pioneer America when the skies were free of wires strung together directing energy.

What's it like to live without electricity and telephone lines?

There were no overhead lines on the Missouri farm in the 1930's, and telephone and electrical lines arrived at about the same time during the mid-1940's. It was with great excitement when poles sprung up along the roadways and there were shouts of“the lines are coming!” There was some adjustment to electricity, but it sure beat the kerosene lamp, although the 'flood light' outside between the barn and house was distracting.

I can't actually remember the transformation from wood-burning kitchen stove and the coal-eating German heater. I'm not sure if Mother got an electric dryer even when we moved to Trenton town, as I remember her operating the 'wringer' and hanging clothes on the clothesline. You don't know what laundry is until you've washed clothing by scrub-board and hand-wringer and dried outside on a line. There was no indoor plumbing either! Think of it! Think of drying the wash in winter.

What really wired the farms together were the fences. Woven wire with barbed on top was wire to keep livestock in and intruders out, and bailing wire was to bind and repair every thing under the sun! Every farm and even the western range lands all across America were wired together!

In the early 1950's, most communication on the railroads was still via telephone/telegraph wires strung on poles with glass insulators. At the Trenton, Missouri, Rock Island depot/relay station, telegrapher Quilty was expert in pin-pointing breaks in the line for the lineman to fix, and he also taught me the telegraph. I was the agent-opr at the Spickard, MO, depot in 1956, inspired by Gene Autrey, who in his earlier days before song, was a telegrapher at a lonely Arizona station. I sampled that life just before the wireless triumphed. “Dot dot dot-dash dot dot dot [SB];” line call for Spickard, which meant for me to interpret and type the Morse message...and hand it to the engineer on a forked stick with the train roaring through at 70 mph! Lives depended on it!

I wonder how many million miles of line has been strung up around the world to accommodate messages and electricity? Lines and poles are being phrased out, although most of our electricity is still transmitted on wire, as plainly indicated by those steel towers strung endlessly across the American landscape as they hold their electrical line-loads like robots with arms outspread. The marching assemblage is strung across fields, highways, and even spans the Feather River! The power is then threaded from house to house like a steel spider web to connect America.

“I am a lineman for the county...” --Glen Campbell