About three blocks from my bungalow, there
is a pole at waist-high level that supports an old-fashioned half-sized booth.
It used to house a telephone. It doesn’t have a bi-fold door to it. It’s more
like the ones that used to sit along a wall at the train station or airport.
I’ve been wondering why this thing is still standing. There is no phone in it.
The phone book holder is empty.
This telephone booth, that is not a
telephone booth, is opposite the town post office and in the parking lot of a
very busy liquor store. I’ve been thinking I should decorate it for the
Holidays.
Several years ago, a local playwright
wrote a three-act musical called, “The Last Phone Booth in Willits.” The range
of plots around this idea included questions from “How was anyone going to call
home if there weren’t enough phone booths?” “How did anyone make their drug
deal if they couldn’t meet in the phone booth?” “Where was Superman going to
change to save us?” to “Who in the world would trust their lives to a cell
phone when it wasn’t attached to a wall and a continuous wire?”
My town is a rural town. We have been slow
to pick up the fast-pace of city ideas and those of the millennials. We are
getting there, but we are very hesitant to take on new technology without any
good reason to do it.
Most people want to keep and have kept
their land lines. Little did many know that they weren’t doing just that when the
local AT&T promised that everyone could. AT&T said it would be better
if we bundled our services together and gave discounts if we bought our TV,
internet, and telephone services through them. What AT&T did, however, was make
land lines into digital phones that were dependent on the tower installed on
the hill near town. Many people don’t have hard-wired land lines anymore,
although they thought that they did.
Many of us were happy when DSL service got
to our area a few years ago. The DSL line was buried alongside the highway.
Between the DSL line (one of them) and the tower (one of them) those of us in
Willits were pleased to be experiencing what many in the rest of the country
have experienced for years, faster service, sortuv.
But, then came the fires. No one could
have predicted that the conflagration would come at us from so many different
directions at the same time, or that they would melt into each other and grow
faster than any fireman had ever seen in this county. This observation came
despite the devastating fires we have had for the past two years. This year,
though, no one could have foretold that the rapid response of well-trained fire
fighters would not be enough to save whole mountainsides, entire vineyards, or
neighborhoods. Because of the fires in Santa Rosa which is a more affluent and
higher-populated area, many of the firefighting divisions were there. Besides,
how fast can a fire go across mountains?
Faster than any of us thought. In some
places, families made it out in their pjs and slippers. Some didn’t make it out
at all. Some were burned in their cars. Others scrambled ahead of the fire only
to meet another line of flames and have to backtrack across charred land hoping
that no active fire would burn across it again.
And that special AT&T tower which
brought us all our cell phone communication, it melted. They fixed it. The fire
backtracked and melted it again. Right next to it stands a CB radio set-up with
its tall tower and a cement building. It also houses the antenna for our small-town
radio station. In the beginning of the fire, that radio station informed us as
to what was happening where and who needed to evacuate. There are or were so
many people in the hills and in the way of the fire, the usual emergency
protocol was not able to be set into motion. No reverse 911 calls could be
made. No information could be obtained through the internet either because the
DSL line had melted. It wasn’t buried deep enough. They fixed it and the fire
backtracked and melted it again.
As a precaution to the town of Willits,
PG&E shut off the natural gas lines. I agree that was something that should
have be done. There was, however, no way to give us a heads-up that this action
was needed or was going to be done. We just didn’t have natural gas, so there
was no heat or cooking or hot water. A week later, it finally dawned on me that
that action should have alerted me to the fact that Willits was in more danger
than I knew. The large pieces of ash falling in my yard should have given me
another clue. I didn’t really think, at the time, that this ash could have had
an ember still burning. I look around my town now and see so much potential
vegetation that could have gone up in flames and shudder. We didn’t have a real
clue. Visual details are now showing how near we came to being wiped out. If
the wind hadn’t turned from its northwest direction and headed south east, we
would all be toast. Destruction came very close.
In this emergency, one thing became clear
to many of us. Technology is a fragile thing. Cell phones and internet are just
two of those advanced techy privileges we purchase and depend on and have been
told are the way to go into the next century. What I know is that CBs and radio
announcers brought us through this event. Knowing how to use a Coleman stove or
warm water in the sun in a gallon milk carton sitting on top of aluminum foil
is the stuff that makes survivors. And if that phone booth at the corner of
Main and East Valley Road had been in working order, my family in the bay area
would have heard a lot sooner from me. Like I said, I’m thinking of decorating
it for the Holidays as a tribute to what was once and which we might regret
isn’t anymore.
