:: Power trip ::

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

When I was younger my family used to take road trips quite frequently, allowing for hours upon hours of roadside scenery. The landscape of California as a whole is heterogeneous, but before encountering vast deserts, alpine mountains, coastal beach hamlets, or brobdignagian rainforests we'd always pass through the liminal scrublands of SoCal. The highways through these parts afforded a clear view of the terrain, which was scenic and appealing in a quiet, minimalistic way (though it evoked in me, as it still does, a twinge of loneliness - as if the semi-arid, semi-hilly desert was the pedestrian underachiever of the family, lacking the stark alien hostility that made its fully-arid, flatter sibling so revered) but the terrain itself provided little in the way of objects, natural or otherwise, to punctuate the vast unbroken infinity.

The sole exception, my one tie to the comprehensible consistency of man, were the power lines and their towers. I remember fixing my eyes on the edge of the window and watching the lines rhythmically rise to their tower-supported peaks and fall to their bowed valleys, over and over. It was a sine curve, an endless roller coaster, a suspension bridge, a stylized EKG readout of the roadway's pulse, a constant metronomic cycle of tension and release providing the backbeat to lazy hours in the back seat, my head slack against the glass, warmed by the sun.

If the lines were the beat, then the towers were the drummers (I know it's a trite anthropomorphic metaphor - deal with it: I'm about to mix in another, and then cap it off with a simile), some sort of real-life robotic mecha-giants, as diverse in form as they were ubiquitous in placement, strung out to the horizon like a line of giant metallic ants. There were the smaller wooden types lining the lesser byways which asymmetrically carried two lines on one side and a single one on the other: ugly, often worn, seemingly slapped together as little more than an ad hoc combination of posts and 2x4s, but elegant in their efficiency and ruggedly dependable. At the other extreme were the grand sculptures of steel with transformers for brains and girders for joints (they would have made Gustave Eiffel proud) which straddled meters of cracked, drought-scourged earth while handily hoisting a dozen high-voltage wires with their precious and prodigious electric payload. These were the giants that held aloft the cross-continental pathways, like the aqueducts of yore, but with a different kind of current quenching a different kind of thirst. Somewhere in between these two poles (pun intended) were the myriad other soldiers of power, from the squat antiquated Eisenhower-era structures to the more modern, waif-like, graceful but brittle-looking steel skeletons (the spoiled brats of the bunch). They sometimes intermingled, and once in a while they disappeared altogether, but usually I could count on a nice regimented line of towers to keep me company.

This is what I remember most about those road trips, aside, of course, from the time my brother spontaneously vomited somewhere outside Bakersfield, forcefully spewing the prune milkshake (yes, they exist, and my father made sure we went out of our way to pick one up) he had just ingested (and which his stomach summarily rejected) all over the floor and the book I happened to be reading. I laughed for hours about that.

Posted by morland @ 05:52 PM

:: Comments ::

your insistence on using swiftian references is impressive. and pathetic. and paradoxical. incidentally, I could say the same thing about your scrotum.

Posted by: barrett on May 20, 2003 02:36 PM

that sounds like a modest proposal

Posted by: morland on May 20, 2003 07:32 PM

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