Rants from the Hill

by Michael P. Branch

  From the top of Sand Mountain we have something more than a view; we have a prospect. Prospect, a word not associated with mining until the 1840s, has been used since the early fifteenth century to describe the “act of looking into the distance.” By the early sixteenth century, the word also connoted an “extensive view of the landscape,” and since the early seventeenth century, its meaning has expanded to reference a psychological outlook, a “mental view or survey.” At its Latin root, prospect implies a vantage from which to look ahead of oneself into both space and time (pro means “forward”). A prospect is a view of the land, of oneself, and also of what is yet to come. What was the prospect from the windy, knife-ridged summit of Sand Mountain? Night descending on endless salt flats. The Great Basin rolling out to the distant future. Our beautiful daughters gazing from the spine of the world toward an infinite horizon.

  The desert darkness began its long fall, and the time had come to descend Sand Mountain. We agreed with the girls’ suggestion that we should all head downhill in the most exciting way possible: by rolling. We lay down laterally along the ridge, pulled our stocking caps down firmly, tucked our arms in tightly against our bodies, and then held our breath and let gravity take over. The pitch was surprisingly steep, and we gained speed so quickly that we were soon blasted out of a rolling position and into a wild tumble down the face of the dune. The sand cascaded away before us, as the world spun and spun, and the four of us fell together, the mountain falling gently with us.

  When we reached the bottom, I looked up, still dizzy, to see Caroline, her face and hair completely covered in sand, pumping her fists above her head. “That was magnifulous!” she shouted.

  It was a peaceful drive home through the desert night, as we cruised quietly toward Venus by threading through a fantastic, otherworldly, starlit landscape. Now back on Ranting Hill, with Eryn and the girls fast asleep, I am still waiting for my imagination to return from Sand Mountain. Through this moonless desert darkness I contemplate a 600-foot-tall dune of white sand that was brought to its place one grain at a time over the winding course of four millennia. It is a graceful heap of the powdered bones of the Sierra Nevada, pulverized by glaciers, tumbled in rivers, lifted by wind, carried aloft to a new home. Like its rare blue butterfly, this mountain can exist in only one place, where the conditions necessary for its existence conspire to make its unreal beauty not only possible but necessary and inevitable. And yet the mountain changes shape every year and every hour. It flows, like the currents of wind and water that formed it. Like an advancing or retreating glacier. Like time, which moves mountains.

  My desert dream is to be as endemic as Sand Mountain and its petite blue, but the shifting sands that turn the years remind me that we are being constantly resculpted by movement and change. Tempus fugit, ergo carpe diem. Because even mountains flow, I am too old not to roll down them with my children.

  THE OTHER DAY, while driving down from the Sierra Nevada into the Great Basin on my way home to Ranting Hill, I noticed next to the local volunteer fire station one of those cell phone towers that is disguised to look like a tree—in this case, a vaguely ponderosa-ish pine. What strikes me as most odd about these cell towers costumed as trees is that they do not much resemble trees, at least not to anyone who paid any attention to real trees in the first place. You get the sense that the designers of these bizarre, fake trees are under the illusion that the towers actually look like real trees, which is both cute and somehow pathetic.

  Simply by virtue of scale, this issue of what cell towers look like is more significant than you might think. There are almost seven billion mobile phones in the world, 328 million of which are in the United States, which means that we have more cell phones than people in America, even if you count the infants—which is probably wise, since babies will be using smartphones soon enough. This level of saturation necessitates a lot of towers: about two hundred fifty thousand in the United States alone, which adds up to a lot of ugly crap on hilltops and ridgelines. Because the range of a cell tower isn’t much above twenty miles, even when those hills and ridges are not in the way, and because the number of towers is proportional to the number of users, we need to build more towers every day—towers that are most effective when installed in visually prominent places.

  It makes sense, then, that we entrepreneurial Americans would find a way to make a virtue of necessity and sell not only cell towers but also ways of disguising them. The tower-as-tree innovation was the brainchild of Tucson-based Larson Camouflage, which pioneered the “mono-pine” back in 1992 and has since earned the dubious distinction of being “a leader in the concealment industry.” Larson has figured out how to turn cell towers into a wide range of cultural and architectural objects, from water towers, grain silos, and gas station signs to streetlights, flagpoles, and chimneys. My favorite of these obfuscations is the disguising of a cell tower as a church steeple—an appealing business proposition, since many local building codes permit churches an exception to a structure’s maximum allowable height. It is even the case that some churches without steeples are now building them solely to accommodate cell towers. This can generate a handsome income in leasing fees, which average forty-five thousand dollars per year but in some places run as high as a half-million bucks. Any cash-strapped congregation might look up to its steeple and find that its prayers have been answered.

  While I enjoy contemplating the cultural significance of the fact that some folks who gaze up at a church steeple in prayer are actually supplicating a microwave radiation-emitting cell phone tower, I am even more interested in the ambitious attempt to disguise towers as natural objects. In addition to the artificial pine-tower (which is available in an impressive variety of “branch-density options”), Larson offers tower concealment in the form of several other “species,” including the palm (available with or without “decorative cut-frond pineapple”), cypress, elm, and even saguaro cactus, which features “scars, woodpecker holes and thousands of painted needles [to] enhance the realism.” According to the Larson website, “even the birds can’t tell the difference.” Just don’t tell that to the Gila woodpeckers, white-winged doves, and house finches that feed on the giant cactus’s pulp, or the two kinds of bats that pollinate its flowers, or the many other species that thrive on and around these remarkable cacti—that is, when they aren’t made of plastic. The same may be said of pine, cypress, and elm, each of which is a vital host plant to an extensive, interdependent community of species.

  It is not entirely fair of me to pick on these invasive, exotic fake trees as being profoundly unnatural interventions into the landscape. After all, the question is not whether a fake tree is better than a real tree but whether a fake tree is better than an exposed cell tower. But even here the question is more difficult than it appears. First of all, there is the troubling fact that the structure, color, shape, and stiffness of these decoys usually give them away, which makes the claim of “concealment” arguable. I also wonder about the longevity of these microwave “trees.” Not far from the fake ponderosa pine, I noticed near the fire station a stand of actual ponderosas, many of which will live to be three hundred years old. What are the odds that the fake will still be in decent shape after three centuries, and what sprucing up (sorry for the pun) might it require in the meantime? In what landfill will we bury this giant plastic thing when its inorganic “life” has run its course?

  Then there’s the troubling fact that a decent fake-tower tree runs a cool hundred fifty thousand dollars, which represents an exorbitant opportunity cost in a world where the same amount of dough will pay for the planting of around one hundred fifty thousand trees as part of a forest habitat rehabilitation project. And every one of those one hundred fifty thousand unplanted trees would have enriched soils, reduced erosion, supported other species, and sequestered hundreds of metric tons of carbon, all while bearing an uncanny resemblance to trees. Even the birds would be able to tell the difference.

  I realize that this kind of se
lf-righteous, tree-hugging sermonizing dodges the central issue, which is that cell phone towers are just plain ugly. So, from my perch on Ranting Hill, I have a few alternatives to propose. The first is to leave the naked masts of the towers exposed but adorn them with large signs that read “This Aesthetic Abomination Is Made Necessary by Your Uncontrollable Desire to Post Meaningless Status Updates.” An alternative in the same spirit would be to make all the cell towers into fake trees but add signs saying “This Ineffective Obfuscation Cost Three Times the US Median Family Income.” Or, if that’s too wonky, we could go with “Sixteen Million American Children Live in Poverty but We Can Afford This Unconvincing Fake.” Or maybe every time we install a new cell tower we should just retrofit all the nearby real trees to look like cell towers so the cell tower will simply blend in.

  My best idea, though, is that we give up on the fake trees entirely and make the cell towers look like other objects. Admitting that a powerful nexus of technology and commerce is profoundly altering our local landscapes, I say it is about time we at least got a laugh out of it. Imagine seeing a 100-foot-tall banana, fork, ground squirrel, thumb, or baseball bat rising among the stately ponderosas. What if we gave my friend, the artist, a fifty-thousand-dollar grant to spend a year turning our local cell phone tower into whatever she could imagine? My guess is that we would end up with a 100-foot-tall giraffe’s head—probably wearing a Giants ball cap. It wouldn’t look like a ponderosa, but neither does the fake ponderosa, and at least the giant giraffe would make my daughters smile. And this fifty-thousand-dollar work of art would have the added advantage of being a reminder that we saved one hundred thousand dollars that we could use for something really crazy, like planting real trees.

  LAST SATURDAY, around noon, I was feeling desperate for more time alone when Hannah and Caroline asked if I was finally ready to play with them. I had been making excuses all morning, explaining that I needed to get Beauregard out for a hike, that I had to split some wood, that it was important for me to haul rock to riprap a drainage trench I had recut with the backhoe. In truth, these chores were an excuse to drink beer, listen to good blues, and have some time to sift the week’s detritus through my partially clogged noggin filter.

  “It occurs to me that you girls haven’t watched enough TV today,” I replied, brew in hand. “Let me recommend Scooby-Doo. Facilitates cerebral development. Worked for me, anyhow. Besides, your teachers aren’t going to help you learn important words like ‘Zoinks’ and ‘Jinkies.’ Why don’t you meddling kids go fire up a couple of episodes?”

  At just that moment, Eryn stepped around the corner of the house, frowning at her irresponsible husband. “Ruh-roh,” I muttered, changing my tune. “Girls, much as I hate to deprive you of Scooby, let’s go play. What did you have in mind?”

  “Let’s build something ginormous!” exclaimed Caroline.

  “I think we should build a gigantic one of those,” said Hannah, pointing at the label on my beer bottle. “What is that thing, Dad?” I had been drinking the best beer brewed in the Truckee Meadows: an Ichthyosaur IPA from Great Basin Brewing—a barleypop fondly called an “Icky” by all brewfully inclined western Great Basinians.

  “That, my dear, is an Ichthyosaur. It was a giant marine reptile that swam around Silver Hills when this place was beneath the ocean a couple hundred million years ago. It also happens to be the state fossil of Nevada.” At first the girls didn’t believe me that states have their own representative fossils. “Yup,” I continued, “but most of them aren’t as cool as ours. Arizona’s is petrified wood. Lame. In Tennessee, it’s the bivalve. Even lamer. In Connecticut, dinosaur tracks. Lamest of all, because the state fossil of Massachusetts was already dinosaur tracks. But Nevada has a big old sea lizard. We rock!” I hoisted the bottle in cheers and used my free hand to fist-bump with the girls.

  With that, Caroline raised both puny arms above her head and shouted, “Let’s build a giant Itchy-sore!”

  Hannah asked immediately what we would build it out of, and I confess that the prospect of constructing a giant sea lizard registered with me as the ten-thousandth time I had felt myself inadequate to a task that was, suddenly, very important to my kids.

  “How about firewood?” Eryn suggested.

  I grinned in reply. “That, my friend, is genius. Let’s do it! Girls, y’all go make a quick sketch of a sea monster, and I’ll hook up the trailer and get your work gloves.”

  Twenty minutes later I had us ready to haul wood, and the girls had drawn a prototype marine reptile. In addition to having a serpentine shape that would make it look like it was wriggling through the swells of this sagebrush ocean, it would also have a series of big humps, each larger than the last, as we built our way toward the head. Eryn added a creative twist: if we could construct the spine of our sea beast with high humps but low saddles in between, a good snow would bury the arches and reveal the humps, making it appear that our marine reptile was swimming through a frothy ocean of fresh powder.

  In order to keep packrats from colonizing too close to our house (we’ve had Neotoma cinerea, that furry wonder, nesting in the crawl space beneath the floors more than once), we keep the woodpile a quarter mile down our half-mile-long driveway. The girls pulled on their gloves and climbed into my small utility trailer, and we bounced down to the woodpile and started loading bucked juniper, pinyon, and ponderosa, a little Doug and white fir mixed in. Returning to the house, we selected a flat area near the garage and began laying out the logs, starting at the tail and, at first, using only a single-log construction so as to establish the shape of our giant reptile. As we did, Eryn sat nearby in a lawn chair, reading about Ichthyosaurs to the girls from something she had searched up on her phone.

  “Ichthyosaurs lived from 245 to 90 million years ago and were widely distributed around the globe,” she reported. “Early Triassic to Late Cretaceous. They evolved from a group of unidentified land reptiles that, at some point, moved back into the sea. The name Ichthyosaur is from the Greek, meaning ‘fish lizard.’ Although they swam like fish and looked a lot like fish, they were reptiles. The fact that they developed a lot of fishlike parts is called ‘convergent evolution.’ That means that although fish and Ickys are totally unrelated, they developed similar kinds of fins, because it’s just useful to have fins if you want to swim.”

  The girls asked some follow-up questions, decided to add an improvised fin-log to each of the monster’s humps, and paused for water a few times. But mainly they just worked at stacking the wood along the spine of their giant reptile, which began to take shape, rising from the desert floor in a very satisfying way.

  “Ickys averaged six to thirteen feet long, but some were much larger,” Eryn continued. “The largest Ichthyosaur fossils ever discovered, which were almost fifty feet long, were found in…wait for it;…”

  “Nevada!” Hannah shouted. Eryn gave her a wide smile and a thumbs-up.

  Because our sea lizard was so long and sinuous, its body swallowed up a surprising amount of wood, and so we fetched a second trailer load and, eventually, a third. By the time the third load was placed along the rising, humped spine of our giant reptile, it was late afternoon and the already low winter sun was dropping fast. But the kids refused to quit, begging me to fashion a big reptile head, which was the only thing missing from what had become a truly respectable cordwood sea monster. Caroline and Hannah’s desert ocean lizard now wriggled impressively across the sand and had imposing humps, the largest of which rose a full five feet from the ground.

  Knowing I had so little time before dark and that my lack of artistic ability would be a serious liability even under better circumstances, I decided to attach whatever dragony-looking stuff I could quickly find nearby. Parenting, like jazz, is the art of improvisation. I first took a twisted length of juniper branch and stuck it into the front hump to suggest a neck. Then, I grabbed my cordless drill from the garage and attached a piece of old barnboard to the end of the neck. From a trashcan full of scrap wood
I salvaged two small log-ends, which I repurposed as eyes, attaching them hastily to the barnboard brow with old deck screws. I screwed much smaller log-ends onto the eyes to resemble pupils. I then bored holes down each side of the neck, and into them I jammed branches that I lopped from the trunk of last year’s pinyon pine Christmas tree, which was still lying on the ground not far from the woodpile. Finally, I used my chainsaw to cut a curved flange of root from a big pine stump, and I inverted it and popped it onto the forehead as an improvised horn.

  Finishing my work just at dusk, I popped another Icky and stepped back to consider what redneck art had wrought. So awful were the results of my effort that I momentarily wished I lived in Arizona, where I would presumably have been asked by my kids to make a state fossil that looked like petrified wood. (“Here’s a piece of wood,” I’d say. “Now just pretend that it’s actually a rock.”) Our giant reptile’s head left the impression of a gene-splicing experiment gone terribly wrong. Rather than resembling the noble marine reptile that had been the terror of ancient seas, the skull of this monster looked like it belonged to a cross between a giant lamprey eel, a misshapen desert unicorn, and an inebriated reindeer. In addition to being the art of improvisation, I had long since come to view parenting as the constant condition of having to admit publicly one’s numberless shortcomings. I felt ashamed that at the end of the girls’ remarkable wood sculpture, I had produced a head so abominably bad as to turn the wonderful beast into a lamentable sort of Jurassic jackalope.

  “Well, girls, my work here is done. Thanks to me, your awesomely cool marine reptile does not, in fact, look like an Ichthyosaur. Not in the least. I’m really sorry about that.”

  “That’s OK, Daddy,” Caroline offered. “Our monster doesn’t have to be any certain kind, so long as we made it ourselves. And it really is awesome. This guy can just be our own special made-up kind of desert sea monster.”