The sound of a phone not ringing

The pleasant young man from the phone company showed up at the camp yesterday morning. He was wide-eyed, an expression common to first-time travelers along the muddy camp road. He may have even been surprised that I spoke English. He asked if we'd ever had phone service at the camp before. I said no, but that our neighbors did. I directed him toward the woods in back of the camp and assured him that there was another house not too far away.

When high-speed Internet access was first offered, starting in the late 1980s, there was a good deal of talk about 'the last mile', that often-expensive and troublesome segment of cabling from the main service lines to the homes. It's not quite a mile from the nearest wired telephone at the lake. It's more like 300 yards, but the woods are thick and the ground underfoot can be ledge or swamp. The neighbors on the south of us get their phone service from one town, the neighbors on the east from another. (The neighbors on the north and west are fish.) The southside neighbors had to pay for their own telephone poles (as they have often reminded us). The installer couldn't quite determine how the eastside neighbors got their service; the line disappeared into the trees.

So, we have the makings of a saga. The installer said that he'd have to hand this request to the engineering team for further investigation. This will take a while.

Not far away, in the small town of Shutesbury, some clever people have assembled a wireless network around Lake Wyola. I think that there are enough year-round residents that we could put together such a service at Queen Lake. I may get a chance to talk about it with a few folks at next month's lake association meeting.

OK, so Matt Lauer and Brooke Shields believe that antidepressants can help people and Tom Cruise thinks that antidepressants are evil (transcript).

Last night the Canadian Parliament voted to allow same-sex marriages for all of Canada. It's still not clear if all provinces must go along. Prince Edward Island, along with Alberta, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories do not permit same-sex marriages. Besides, PEI has other things to worry about. The government is setting up cameras to take pictures of people illegally dumping trash in the woods.