Telephone Poles

As I walk my dog (see Figure 1), my mind wanders. My dog’s defecation habits can only be SO intriguing, after all. My attention eventually locked onto the utility poles along the way. Over time, I’ve been conducting a research project on the subject of utility poles, and the wires they carry. Basically, the question is, “What IS all that stuff on the utility poles?”

Figure 1

Being near three-quarters of a century old, I’m conditioned to still call the things “telephone poles.” I’ll always call them that, because that was what everybody called them back when I was a boy. I’ve even heard them called “telegraph poles.” That shows you just how old I am.

When I was about 10 years old, there was a “telephone pole” at one corner of our rural lot on Silver Palm Drive, out in the Dade County, Florida wilderness. This pole was of intense interest to me, for some reason, and I have a couple of clear boyhood recollections.

The first recollection is of a visiting mile-away neighbor boy showing me how to put my ear up to the creosoted wooden telephone pole and listen to sounds of all the people talking on the phone. Well, that’s what HE said the noise was. Sure enough, I could hear some kind of humming sound. In my naiveté, I took his word for the explanation and for a couple of years actually believed I was hearing thousands of overlapping conversations. Later, I decided that the noise was probably just the wind in the wires above. Now, being so much more advanced and knowing that the “telephone pole” also supports the electrical line power distribution, with its substantial 60 cycle-per-second (Hertz) component, I’m sure I was just hearing 60-cycle hum conducted from the power transformer to the “telephone pole.”

The other recollection I have is of a fascination with the fact that the “telephone pole” had steel spikes driven into it every couple of feet, beginning about 6 feet off the ground. I knew these spikes were for the purpose of climbing the pole. I even knew that the spike ladder didn’t go down further to keep idiots like me from climbing the pole.   Sometime in my youth, I remember seeing a lineman (I assumed a telephone lineman at the time) climb a pole, with blades strapped to his lower legs. (This was in the days long before cherry pickers.) He needed those blades to reach the bottom rung of the spike ladder. I thought the guy with the strap-on climbing blades was way cool, and for a time wanted to be a telephone lineman when (and if) I grew up.

The “if” part of that previous statement also relates to this story. Being a boy blessed with an adventurous spirit and not having a lot of distraction on Silver Palm Drive (other than scorpions and snakes), my imagination would sometimes take charge. We lived out in the “boondocks” as my Dad would say, amid nothing but papaya, avocado and citrus groves. There were no neighbors close by and no other kids to play with, except my younger sister. As I recall, she was not involved in this particular life-threatening adventure.

Anyway, back to the “telephone pole.”  Noting that the spikes were for climbing, but started way above my height, it seemed a worthy challenge to figure out a way to climb the telephone pole myself. I contemplated this adventure a while and waited for a time when neither parent was around. Somehow I knew that neither would particularly approve of telephone pole climbing. A year or two before, they had disapproved of my climbing the iron trellis by the porch of the pink tract house in Homestead – and hoisting myself up onto the roof. I did this more than once – it really gives an 8 year-old a whole new perspective on things. I also learned that climbing up on a roof is much easier than getting back down.

So, I leaned my two-wheeler bike up against the pole, climbed aboard and climbed up on the seat of the bike, holding on to the pole with my arms. I could indeed reach the bottom rung of the spike ladder and proceeded then to climb up the pole a few feet.

I was perhaps halfway between the ground and, what I now know to be, the power transformer on the pole when it occurred to me that I didn’t really know what I’d hoped to accomplish. But, whatever it was, I figured I’d already accomplished it. So I just listened to the humming conversations for a minute, and then climbed back down. No worse for wear, except for a couple of splinters from the pole.

My folks never did learn about me climbing a “telephone pole.”