Monday, June 09, 2003

TRENCHANT COMMENTARY It’s so close

TRENCHANT COMMENTARY

It’s so close now I can almost taste the concrete dust in the air.  For me it started close to two years ago when David and Kim’s cable service was upgraded with about twenty more channels for the same price.  We celebrated with them, wondering to ourselves when our pie would rise, in the idiom of our Commander in Chief.  Yet the pie rose not.  Our upgrade was held back.  I called the cable company occasionally to try to learn more but never got them to tell me anything worth knowing. 

But six months ago we got a notice that we’d have to have some work done on the house to prepare it for buried cable access for all the services we currently get through a maze of pendulous wire arcs skeining the sky of our street.  Apart from their aesthetic limitations, the really great thing about those wires is their special susceptibility to getting taken out by a random limb torn by one of our occasional storms from any of the increasingly mature trees enforsesting the greenbelt across the street from our place.  So everything will be better once we get a buried conduit system.  Everything.  Now you see where I’m coming from. 

Friday I found, coming home from work, my sidewalk scrawled over with a maze of lines blocking out the places to dig trenches, to avoid or insert utility boxes, to find access points - a hopscotch game broken, multipied and scattered all the way down the pavement - the prepwork for the tearout portion of the cable job.  I am so psyched. We’re gonna have trenches. 

But one thing does confuse me - with all the utility poles already in the neighborhood, the first phase of this project has been to sink even more of them.  I’ve seen many installed recently, with one lonely wire on some of them and nothing on most.  I asked one of the guys putting them in, “Why?” His answser: ‘For the underground cable project.” I repeated my question; he, his answer.  I could have made something out of it.  I have vast, barely-tapped capacities to ask exhaustive questions about construction activities.  I just let it go. 

My question, though, remains: Why, when we’re burying all the wires that are now strung on poles, are we putting in more poles?  Can’t we use the existing poles?  Why leave anything on poles at all?  And are you aware that if you say or type ‘pole’ enough times it loses all meaning?

And, here’s my point, really: The fact that this is the sort of thing that occupies so much of my thinking is a matter I have to start treating as a symptom of something that may be much more serious.  At the very least, this fascination with poles and trenches has some disturbing undertones.