Ghost Voices on Telegraph Pole

Leviathan Press:

If someone wants to write a "history of sound" about human beings, it is doomed to be an impossible task - the media that sound relies on, whether phonographs, tape recorders or others, are only recent industrial products, and the vast sounds in history have disappeared with the dead, scattered in this universe in a way that we cannot capture. We don't know the accent of Qin Shihuang, nor do we know the tone of Socrates' speech - even in the era after the rise of the telephone, it is only a very short scale in the history of human technology.

In a slightly sad tone, the author of this article describes a journey of trying to find lost voices, which is of course doomed to be futile. Those former telephone poles, like the symbol in Robert De Niro's film Everybody's Fine, once allowed countless voices to converge through electricity and then disappear without a trace: those voices full of love, conspiracy, bad news, business, and no trace can be found. "Every new medium is a machine for making ghosts." John Durham Peters wrote in "Speaking into the Air". This book outlines the strange history of communication studies since 1999. At its core, it shows in a dialectical and prophetic way that our desire for faultless intersubjective contact has concealed a certain opposition: "Perfect communication is impossible", in which we desire each other, ourselves, and (explore) different worlds. As long as technology is applied to the service of "communication", the final device will inevitably serve the contradictory state of spectral loneliness, silence and interception. In this seminal essay/experiment, Julian Chehirian goes in search of the history of telecommunications, sitting in the lonely shadow of a "lightning rod" and listening for voices from beyond the grave. —D. Graham Burnett, Series EditorIn the years after I earned my master's degree in history, I was a peripatetic traveler, traveling by cheap interstate buses. I continued to present my monograph on the history of telecommunications technology (particularly when the line was disconnected) at small colleges and public venues to audiences who might have been misplaced (including Marxist archaeologists, military and maritime historians, and shortwave radio repairmen).

Finally, after some time, I found steady work in central New Jersey as a state records preservation specialist.

This position reports to the supervisory officer of the State Agricultural Development Council (SADC) (SADC is located within the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, but is not affiliated with the New Jersey Department of Agriculture). Position responsibilities include: Organizing, sorting, scanning, indexing, and permanently storing required records found in the farm's internal files; coding and storing paper and electronic copies as directed; and performing other related work as required. Posting Date: April 6, 2020 Category: 03 Step: 01 Salary Range: Based on Experience Announcement Number: 13-20 I took this job because I was eager to get away from my wandering speaking life.

When I moved to my new digs in Lambertville (a small room above an antique shop peddling mid-century items), I had little to take with me except a brief letter informing me of my location and an overview of my job responsibilities.

The job description said "work statewide as needed," but I was assigned to a foreclosed office building in town that had once been a claims center for a flood insurance company. From my desk, I alternated between looking at sales deeds that needed to be reviewed and filed and looking at a river that was as empty as it could be; no docks, no boats, just the foundation of a broken bridge.

*

In the evenings, I liked to listen to tapes I had collected from the church thrift store. I spent many evenings this way, eating early, gazing at the gray walls, concentrating on a new tape. One gave savvy marriage advice, another played a raucous Montreal military band, and a third was "psychoacoustics," which I had come to believe contained the sounds of sailing. Ropes strained, water skimmed forward on the hull, and fabric flapped back and forth. I listened quietly.

*

In late January, my boss called me with an uncharacteristic assignment for a piece of land in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The land was now owned by the county and housed a park, but it had once been a telecommunications facility. He said the previous owner, AT&T, had requested something unspecified from the land, which the county had turned into an ecological preserve—rare meadow habitat.

He told me that from 1929 until the late 1960s, transatlantic calls from the United States were made via shortwave radio signals through this 800-acre farm, which was once called the "AT&T International Radiotelephone Transmitting Station." The farm was dotted with hundreds of 85+ foot tall poles arranged in a diamond pattern. Each antenna would carry the voice of Chicago, Albany or Washington to London, Tangier, Damascus or Buenos Aires.

In the 1960s, approximately 16,000 phone calls a day passed through this facility. By 1975, the facility had become obsolete, replaced by undersea cables and satellite communications. When AT&T decommissioned the facility, only one antenna remained in use, connecting the continental United States to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The last remaining utility pole still stands today. Although utility poles are usually recycled by AT&T, Charles Bryan, the farmer who purchased the land, requested that one be preserved.

Once a bridge across time and space to Tel Aviv, the pole served as a lightning rod between 1975 and 1998.

My boss said that this was not an easy problem to solve, but my best bet was to "submit a report to the state."

*

The next morning, I drove to the area. Although there are many roads, they are narrow and only a few of them can lead to the destination. Many roads lead to narrower roads or gravel roads and then end there.

After a while, I saw a sign that said “Mercer Meadows County Park.”

I used my car to demarcate the perimeter of the park, referencing aerial images of the land and delineating the outer boundaries of the plots I would survey.

The park's topography varies. Some entrances are accessed on thorny forest trails, while others spread out into grassy, ​​rolling expanses. The perimeter is lined with dilapidated rural homes. One house's view is blocked by a raised pool covered in a tarp that rises and falls like a sigh from a human chest. Another house is uninhabited, with a gap in the roof through which the wind gushes, yawning and pressing the house inward toward the ground. I notice a small sign pointing the way to the Bryan Farm, and I find my destination in a small gravel field. Walking there, the only thing in sight is the path ahead and the surrounding trees, with the occasional electric walker and baby stroller along the way. I notice that this communications farm-turned-nature preserve is dotted with guideposts that present technical descriptions of antennas once used by AT&T and a chronology of the facility's history.

But my attention was drawn to something else:

The camera lens was pointed directly beyond the crowd, and the two people in the photo were looking in the same direction. My own gaze passed over the crowd, and then I lost sight of them because my attention was completely occupied by the telephone poles - those poles were like dark cuts, gradually disappearing into the gray edge. I knew that at that moment, thousands of voices were exchanging through this device, like a group of mosquitoes with a fixed course, like an invisible exchange of energy, without a trace, but there.

*

My historical experience reminds me that for a place like this (or anywhere), the only information available can exist in the form of written records, otherwise there is no need for serious discussion.

I remember a professor repeating to us, “History is where the trail leads,” his lower lip quivering with indignation. But even historians have moments of detachment, moments when they consider, even if briefly, uncertain ideas. I think back to some of the questions that came up during my dreary graduate studies. I think back to the nights I spent immersing myself in a telecommunications thesis. In one thesis, there were patent applications, bureaucratic agencies, federal regulators, the U.S. military, wartime agreements, engineers, scientists, local landowners, emerging technologies, and emerging forms of experience. After all, someone was always on the phone.

In my own work, I have always wanted to write about the telephone as a “social history of intimacy” and also as a history of the technology itself. But in the end, professional considerations forced me to choose only one. As you can imagine, I chose the latter, because the former was considered almost meaningless and probably unattainable. (I vaguely remember a text message from my supervisor, nervously confirming whether I understood his concerns.)

As I drove home as the sun set, heading west along a series of narrow roads lined with cornfields and dilapidated houses, I had nothing to report.

*

The next morning, another message came from my boss. It was marked on "My Calendar" today to call Elizabeth Dawn to inquire about the records for the land.

After several busy lines, I called Dawn.

I was the first to say hello. "Hello, Ms. Dawn. I'm calling from Forest Park and would like to get some information about your former facility at 111-167 Cold Soil Road in Lawrenceville, New Jersey."

"Can you be more specific?"

Now all the focus was on my next move, I had to get her interested and trusting me.

"Well, I was wondering if you had any records of when the company sold the property," I said suggestively, pausing quickly to show respect after making my intention clear.

"Oh, of course."

Dawn was okay. But I could hear the suppressed impatience in her voice, and it would show immediately if I made a mistake. I could hear the coiled landline cord sliding along the edge of the desk, like the thoughts in her mind waiting to put some pressure on me.

"Do you have a release?" she asked.

*

So I went to the county archives, rather than the state, to look for paper records. The archives were full of ordinary people like me who had been sent by their superiors to look for records. I was directed to a filing cabinet, where I found only a permit from 1967 for an oversized shipment to the farm.

*

I then went back to the farm to look for whatever was left of AT&T.

I counted what was left of the bushes, stumps, and trees. There were twelve pole tensioners that looked like porcelain and felt like Bakelite, as shown in the lower right corner of the photo above. About thirty-five feet of braided metal cable were attached to the tensioners. Elsewhere I found porcelain handles, some less intact, as shown in the upper left corner of the photo above. I ran my fingers over the grooves and found three fallen poles nearby that had handles and footrests. I felt like I had searched the entire space, and if there was anything left, it had to be at some distant boundary. Under the ground, or in the sky, or possibly both.

I began to think of the land itself as an "archive" - ​​but what, if anything, could it recall? Could it remember the sound of the first telephone call that flowed through it?

*

In a public library in Trenton, I waited for the rain to stop and flipped through A History of the Telephone, where I came across the record of the first transatlantic phone call. On January 7, 1927, the president of AT&T, located on the banks of the East River in New York, announced to the secretary general of the British Post Office: "People in two cities can exchange opinions and conduct business instantly over the telephone across three thousand miles of ocean, just as if they were face to face."

The power was first to call, but further research by Cary O'Dell found that they had simply pasted in a test call from the previous day. More accurately, the test call from the previous day was the first signal transmission.

Off the record, O'Dell noted:

“Distance doesn’t mean anything anymore,” the American speaker said. “We’re in a world that’s moving at high speed… People are going to use up their lives in a shorter time, they don’t have to live as long.” A little depressing, perhaps, but prophetic. Little of what happened after the president cut the ribbon the next day has been preserved, and there is no record of it in the archives. But if those initial trickles created the conditions for transmission, what followed was a flood of voices: communications from far away, unpleasant news, prolonged friendships, love, business, and deals.

I think about the land as it is now, silent except for the crows and rustling bushes. I think about the alternation of presence and absence, desire, and the possibility and impossibility of communication. Curiously, even when the facility is operating, conversations transmitted from here to other places are rarely or never heard.

*

On this farm, I lost some confidence in my professional historical training.

I remember a book called Wisdom Sits in Places, where anthropologist Keith Basso studied the meaning of place and memory to the Western Apache people. He showed that memory and its possibility of survival and transmission were closely tied to geography. So as Native people moved away from their ancestral lands, they also removed the past from where they lived.

The story of this park is longer than I knew. It was taken from the Lenni Lenape by the Dutch, then sold to the British Empire, then to the Quakers, then to British farmers, then to AT&T, and finally to the Crown.

*

I would like to end by saying that I think there is still room for concerted listening. Breaking away from history, I started listening to everything around me. I haven't listened enough.

I followed the bend in the boardwalk and came to a bench where a few people were sitting.

I stopped and took a cigarette from them. I asked them how their day was. They told me that Chris Baranowski, whose name was on the bench, had passed away. He died of a fentanyl overdose while trying to detox. His friends didn't realize the severity of it. Chris's parents put this bench there for those who knew him to remember him, and they did.

"He was a great musician, and music meant everything to him," the man on the left told me. "His funeral was held at the nearby Lawrenceville Presbyterian Church. We all came from different places. There were guys from Washington, some from New York, and I was from Philadelphia. The church was full. His family and some friends were talking. Even though he wasn't there, everyone around loved him. After everyone had spoken, his family brought a stereo to the altar. They put on a single-track tape that Chris had recorded. He was alone in a room in the world." He looked away as he spoke. The man on the right offered, "We can play that recording for you."

In the recording, Chris interprets the song by Robbie Basho.

I felt strange. I sat with them on a bench, listening to the tiny speaker on the grass - his voice emanating from the radio's metal grille. I couldn't see him, but I could feel his presence. He was in a room somewhere in the world, and the fragile barrier between there and here now had cracked, softened.

Chris' bench faces the valley, and in the distance is the last remaining telephone pole, the one that Farmer Charles used as a lightning rod. This pole once pointed to Tel Aviv, but now it can also point to other places.

For some time afterwards, I thought about those poles, what they could and could not index. Among the grass, the stream, and the fallen poles.

I thought of the friends who had come to listen, and the grief of the family. Chris's voice traveled softly around the poles, as if to those around him who could hear it.

I have not found the other words that flow into these antennas. But I do not doubt that they exist. In the air, in that place, they appear as I listen and wait.

By Julian Chehirian

Translated by Amanda

Proofreader/Pharmacist

Original text/publicdomainreview.org/essay/last-pole

This article is based on a Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Amanda on Leviathan

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