January 27, 2010
Alternative Means Of Communication
You can see this cross for miles at night. It is lit and at the top of a mountain, I have been trying to find out how you get to it for years. Finally this year I stumbled up some mountain track and after climbing for what seemed like for ever I arrived at it. A mass of wires and aerials – all surrounding a tiny church which I would imagine was there long before there was any need to transmit using radio waves – prayer was enough, I guess. I suppose they light this cross because they can – the power for the transmitters has brought power for the church and so the cross. My measurements may be way off, but, my GPS told me I was 5,800 feet up and it felt like it!
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Wow. Very wow. Like the listening towers at Gournes that you photographed — and the Bald Knob Cross of Alto Pass. This just blows me away.
My thoughts, exactly, Sheila.
One of the Gournes photos.
And one of the Bald Knob Cross.
This morning, en route to Madison, Wisconsin, I was listening to this On Point broadcast about Nikola Tesla.
Yes, yes, yes. You can practically feel the rays comin’ off the towers.
Okay, I’m going to admit a guilty pleasure. I just finished Stephen King’s Under the Dome. I know, I know. But I had a gift card to Border’s I’d squirreled away since my birthday and in DC, in December, I had a five-hour wait, then a two-hour lay-over in M’waukee. I hadn’t read King for years. I bought the tome at the Border’s at National and started in. I found it corny and commercial and gripping enough to finish. And I did in a marathon, reading the last half in eight hours over last weekend.
In case you wonder why this is cogent to this thread, I’ll paraphrase the eleven-hundred pages to this. In King’s “work” there was a character called “the chef” who cooked crystal meth in amazing quantities for sale at the behest of the town’s first selectman and a pastor in a warehouse behind the pastor’s church in a little town in Maine. They got pseudoephedrine in quantities enough to manufacture enough through a dummy company in Arizona directly from China to supply the entire east coast with “the finest ‘long-glass’ that could be made.” (Really, just imagine it, tee-hee) On the property, with the church, with the warehouse, there was a 24-hour gospel radio station with a tower.
And this image is girder for girder what I imagined that tower looked like.
I feel dirty. Having read for hours a tale that might have been told in ninety-minutes in a bad made-for-TV movie. Do I regret it? I don’t know. I’m not edified for the effort, but I don’t think I regret it. When I think of it now, I giggle.
Guilty pleasures give you so much more.
When I was a child, the radio was my religion. I never listened to religious broadcasts, mind. It was the radio that was my religion.