Lipstick on a corpse

THE ROUTE THE DOGS AND I TAKE FOR OUR  morning constitutional winds in and out of the open space for the approach to the Cheyenne airport’s eastern runway.  No matter how much new construction the developers in Cheyenne may be contemplating, the Federal Aviation Administration won’t let them build in this corridor as long as aircraft are landing from the east, which means, God willing, that this neglected expanse of brome grass, sweetclover, and curly dock in the middle of town will survive longer than I’ll be around to use it.

A few months ago, the canines and I crossed the corridor and climbed up the low ridge on the south side to find a construction crew busy forming up a serious concrete pad, apparently the foundation for some unidentified installation.  We watched daily as the work progressed until, last month, I saw that the project was apparently a new cell tower to handle the ever-spiraling smart phone traffic in the area.  As the tower went up, I also saw that it was to be festooned with fake conifer branches in an effort to relieve its stark presence on the hilltop.  I’d driven past other similarly camouflaged cell towers in the Denver metro area, but this was the first I’d seen in Cheyenne.

I doubt that drivers on nearby Windmill Avenue give the cell tower a moment’s notice— I wouldn’t either, except that the morning walk takes me past it every day, seven days a week, except when the Britts and I are chasing birds somewhere else.  Every morning, the tower demands my attention as I hike along behind the dogs, insisting that I spend a minute or two contemplating the infrastructure that supports the iPhone I have in my pocket, the need the builders of that infrastructure felt to cover it up, and the strange apparition that resulted.

Critics far better informed than I have considered the effect of the smartphone/social media explosion on our culture, social interaction, sex, politics, and general sanity.  All I can add is that the human animal, at least in industrial and post-industrial cultures, seems to produce an endless variety of answers to the question, “Can we?”, while utterly ignoring the question that should immediately follow the dawn of a new technology: “Should we?”

For several generations, a few prickly observers of our social order have wondered whether we’re masters of our technology or its slaves.  That matter seems particularly germane today as artificial “intelligence” continues to develop and we face what seems to be an exceptionally dangerous example of our failure to assess the consequences of adopting ever-more-powerful tools.  The cell tower on my morning walk strikes me as a monument to our shortcomings in this arena.  We’re techno-junkies, with pretty much all the negative connotations that term carries, unable to kick habits that make us sick and may even kill us.

Then there are the branches.

Does this look like any conifer you’ve ever seen?  Do the branches hide the essential structure of the tower or its purpose?  Seems to me they do just the reverse: “Hey, look!  Here’s a cell tower!  Somebody tried to make it look like a tree!”  It’s a caricature that isn’t funny.  It doesn’t smell like a conifer.  It doesn’t put down roots or shed needles.  I won’t be shocked if the occasional crow or Swainson’s hawk uses it as a perch, like any other utility pole, but it won’t bear cones or shelter insects, so it can’t support a family of fox squirrels or birds.

Many years ago, I wrote a piece on the destruction of the huge backwaters and marshes along the Missouri River.  The Army Corps of Engineers had been called in to protect lowland farmers from the river’s periodic floods and, at the same time, create a navigable channel barges could use to move grain and other bulk commodities from the northern plains to national and international markets.  For decades, the largest single commodity transported up the river was the rock the Corps used as rip-rap to stabilize the jetties and wing dams they were building to create the channel, a sort of perpetual motion arrangement that justified the project while feeding it.

Under growing pressure from the National Environmental Policy Act, the Corps promised it would try to re-create some of the natural marshes and bottomland forests that had been destroyed along the river.  As I contemplated the notion of a bunch of engineers restoring wetlands, I commented that we could look forward to a set of specifications for pre-stressed concrete sycamore trees. At the time, I thought it was funny.  Fifty years later, as I walk by the cell tower every morning, I’ve begun to realize that I was far closer to the truth than I can bear to contemplate.

As my daily encounters with the tower have drawn on, I’ve started to see it as a metaphor of sorts.  In the confrontation between wild places and “development,” this is what all too often passes as a compromise.  The oil wells are drilled; the center-pivot irrigation systems are installed; the pesticides are sprayed; the power lines are strung; the suburbs are built, all with no more than a cursory nod to the effects they are bound to have.  Then, after all the shareholders have been satisfied and the profits collected, we look for a way to camouflage the result with a few artificial branches.  To any discerning eye, the effort to hide the impact only emphasizes what’s been lost.

Decorate it as we will, a cell tower is not a tree.  What worries me most is that, far too soon, people won’t be able to tell the difference.  Or care.