Power Tower
By Shane Robitaille
Tonight I drove by an old power line tower that was in the process of being dismantled, making way for a brand new structure right next to it. Suddenly I was transported back to the fall of 1983 and I found myself slamming on the brakes in the middle of the road to get a better view. I knew that tower, knew it all too well, in fact…
In the fall of ’83 I was in my third middle school, having recently moved only a few months before. The good news was that my most recent move was only a few miles from the last town I lived in, just a few minutes away in a car from my friends. The bad news was that we would sometimes not have a phone for a day, a few weeks, or longer, which made communicating to my friends impossible during the week, when I couldn’t physically be there. That is until I found an old portable CB radio at a tag sale. I figured this could be a solution to having no phone!
You see, one of my best friend’s mother had a CB radio in her pick-up truck, so if this portable CB could reach him, I wouldn’t need a phone. As soon as I got home, I found some batteries, put them in, turned it on, and listened. Nothing. Absolutely nothing but static. I went outside to the street. Still nothing. I started to wonder if the old relic was broken. Wandering around, I eventually ended up in a field at the end of the street, at the top of a hill overlooking the valley below. The CB started making noice but it was still very faint. Then it hit me. The power line tower!
I walked out to the tower, took a deep breath, climbed up about twenty feet, somehow wedged myself between the steel beams, and the CB came to life! In fact, it was the perfect vantage point to talk to my buddy in the valley below. He would sit in the pick-up truck parked in his driveway, I would be high in the sky, perched on the tower, and we would talk over the open airwaves on week nights. Although we would usually just chat about nothing in particular, most often we would make up ridiculous characters and outrageous stories, purely for the fun of entertaining anybody who happened to be listening to the channel at the time. We did this for a few months until I moved again.
Driving by the old tower didn’t just bring back memories, it also reminded me about how important communicating is, and how people will always figure out ways of connecting with one another. Whether it’s an underground news and information network in Ukraine, illegal Internet networks in North Korea, or pirate AM radio stations in Brooklyn NY, the desire for humans to be heard and share information is insatiable and cannot be stopped. No matter what the obstacles are, whether from war, nature, or economic conditions, people will always find a way. I’m just glad I didn’t get electrocuted or fall.
