Skip to main content

Reply to "Fingernails, New Mexico - A Remote Location"

"He Struck and Missed"

Storms lingering over the mesa, all my desert flowers getting a soaking
to wake at dawn unnaturally lush and brilliant... Drive 20 miles south and it's wind-blowing dusty-storming, rain-clouds skitter off to head north and linger over the dammed lake, and suck up bucketfuls to drench my mesa.

When it blows too violently or rains torrentially, my phone is full of static, or dies. I'd had no telephone service for two days.
One and a half miles of line just to service my house, I don't think they bothered to bury it too deep. Just in case a few more folk move up here. Well it took eight years for them to get the phone up here, and it's been another eight and not another soul's shown up... so bury the damned lines already.

For repair I call "Valor Telecom" -- really one of the worse phone companies in the USA.
When Garrett and I accidentally overused the dial-up, and a bill came for $1300., they only reduced it to $700. This was after about twenty screaming cursing phone calls and they still cut off the long distance. Who cared anyhow, because ha ha we discovered Zaptel.com and their 1.9 cent a minute thank you deal...

But Valor's servicemen are totally great pioneer-like dudes, roaming the hills and mesa and arroyos, seeking out the little stranded wires that bring the lonesome freaks back into civil-eye-zation. How many times has Eduardo come up here and found the spot where the road-grader slashed the line - again. Or once dug up a quarter mile of line, looking for the spot a packrat or jackrabbit gnawed.
Today he spent at least 6 hours stomping up and down the mesa and wouldn't take a soda or a beer.

He told me lightning had struck the switching box down at the end, where my line branches off solo from the other folks. He fixed that charred box, but still I'm not getting a tone.
He checks out the box on the side of my house, and calls me out to show me its black charcoaled interior.
"Someone's been barbecuin'," he laughed. I was stunned...
lightning had danced all around the mesa two nights ago, but nary a flash by the house. Or so I dreamed.

Even worse, when we check all the phones in the house, two extensions are working... but the third, my pretty retro wall-phone next to the pink bathtub... there's a faint fan of black charcoal all around it.
I lift it off the wall... the back of the phone is melted and burnt.

I felt like I did the time the enormous Penitente crucifix I'd placed on
the altar in Stephen's church flung itself at me, and I ducked it by a hair.
Once more had the Wrath taken aim at me - and missed.

I could have been luxuriously wallowing in the tub - just about my only luxury lately - a nightly big tubful of spring water from the aquifer - chatting away nonsensically on the deadly phone. Been fried in an instant. Probably blown up the gas hot water heater too.
And the cats astonished. And my friends going,
Oh S'tan, she loves to be alone... doesn't matter if we don't hear from her for three months. Meanwhile the cats would go truly feral and finish up eating me before taking over the mesa.
×
×
×
×