Rural Life Matters

The deeper I get into this power line mess, the more the light dawns, and darkly. The impression is that so many companies, organizations, elected officials, politicians, news media, even environmental nonprofits all are complicit in a Herculean task set to disrupt our way of life without regard to us as anything more than ants destined to be crushed by the wheels of progress toward lining their pockets and building their bank accounts.

I started out a month or two ago being polite and civil, and as time goes by, have noticed an increasingly sharper edge to my tone. Anger approaches. You have brought us an upside-down, inside-out, torn and prolapsed life. I increasingly wake in the middle of the night, not getting back to sleep, but rather turning over and over in my mind yet another aspect of this invasion and how to push it back into its place. A Sisyphean effort.

We have lived a lifetime, perhaps across several generations, creating a home space from bare land while conscientiously keeping our open spaces open and our wildlife in its native place and safe. We work with the land and within nature. We don’t simply look at our surroundings – we feel our environment and become part of it.

We spend an entire career paying a mortgage on our land and home so that we have a paid-for place to retire. Then you come along and take away nearly half of its value. If your ugly, environment-rending contraptions are next door, we suffer the same damage to our property’s value and disruption of health and home but receive not a single red cent. Someone having made this robbery of property, disruption of homelife, and rape of the natural world legal does not change the fact that it is morally reprehensible.

If you haven’t lived and loved this type of life, there’s likely nothing we can say to help you to understand. Will you even take a few minutes to try?

A coalition member as much as said that those liberal in their politics who tout the advantages of renewable energy such as wind and solar power are responsible for this technically legal yet ethically and morally bankrupt practice of steamrolling rural citizens and placing turbines and transmission lines where they are not wanted.

I disagree that it has anything to do with politics – it is due to greed. There is land that’s more open and much less occupied, to build these things elsewhere. Don’t bother feeding us the line that they benefit us – they do not. They benefit your bankroll. You could make an honest effort to locate your turbines, towers, and transmission lines across the vast ranches and farms where the owners live in a small area of their thousands of acres, or are absent altogether. They may welcome the income of a monthly stipend or a modest single payout. Most of us here prefer that you simply leave us alone.

We came here for a life within the natural world, to enjoy the serenity of its peace and quiet, to find a peace of mind not found in the trappings of city life. We came here to live simply and to be left alone. We don’t want lights at night blocking out our view of the stars, planets, and milky way. We look forward to the calls of the sandhill cranes flying overhead. We’re excited by the discovery of new species of life in our vernal pools.

Someone told me that along two of the major city thoroughfares, the high-voltage lines blend in with the landscape. Their presence is no big deal. Major thoroughfares of the city are so cluttered with houses, businesses, commercial enterprises, and existing power lines that it’s true – THERE – that new lines are barely noticed. What you don’t seem to comprehend is that HERE there is nothing for them to blend in with or to hide behind. We can just walk out the door to enjoy the restorative powers of nature. I have a clear sixty-mile view from my desk to Pikes Peak. From my backyard, I take bookcover-worthy photographs of the mountains or views across the fields. A walk through the grass and wildflowers to the pond or the windbreak trees accompanied only by birdsong, blue sky, sunshine, and fresh air clears a fraught mind and inspires me to write. Transmission lines and turbines are irritants, not sources of inspiration. How can one look at an obstruction invasive to our world and be inspired to write something beautiful? One cannot. Anything foreign across that field would stand out like a sore thumb for tens of miles. Can you imagine sitting in your front yard and seeing your neighbor three miles distant? We do that, easily, every day. We don’t have manmade obstacles to obscure our views, and we will fight to keep it that way.

Take your abominations of towers, hulking poles, and snapping lines elsewhere, where absent and distant owners don’t mind. We do not want them here.

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