Have you ever been driving out in the country and seen a row of old telephone poles along the side of the road with no wires left on them?
Maybe they’re bare and lonely-looking, leaning over a little from standing in the wind for so long?
Have you ever thought that maybe they’ll all look like that one day?
Imagine a conversation fifty years from now between a dad and his little boy out on the road somewhere…
“Daddy, what are those big sticks?” the boy asks.
“Those are poles,” the dad says, smiling. “They’re poles when they stand up out of the ground like that.”
“What are those big poles?”
“They’re telephone poles.”
The boy stares at them passing in the window. “Are there telephones on them?”
“No,” says the dad. “Well, there used to be, kind of.”
“Why did they put phones way out here?”
“They used to have wires on them connecting all the phones. People talked through the wires.”
“You can’t talk through wires,” the boy says, giving his dad a doubtful sideways look.
The dad smiles. “No, you can’t. Not anymore.”
One day telephone poles will be relics from another age, like the old phone boxes on corners in some cities or the disused trolley tracks running down the center of some streets.
I wonder if they’ll leave them up—like messengers from another age. Reminding us of the more tangible beginnings of our technological, wireless, networked world. Reminding us of the more concrete, physical connections we used to have.
