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the towers of Carter's Mountain
Sunday, September 2 2001
setting: south of Staunton, Virginia
This morning I could not stop myself from eating my mother's (Hoagie's) fresh-baked whole wheat biscuits.
At around noon, I drove my mother, Gretchen and my brother Don into Staunton so I could show Gretchen how beautiful the little city's downtown can be. My mother also wanted to show Gretchen the co-operative gallery ("Co-art") which she co-founded. The way to these beautiful things was marred by horrendous highway construction happening south of town on the site of VA 262, "the southern loop." In this day and age there is absolutely no way to build a highway without creating a swath of orange destruction at least 300 feet wide. At the the intersection with 252, the swath extends nearly from one horizon to the other. Staunton wants to be just like a real city, with a loop bypassing it. A city as important as Staunton wouldn't be complete without a way to avoid it completely!
We walked around downtown looking at all the usual things: the Victorian architecture, the Mary Baldwin campus, Woodrow Wilson's birthplace, etc. Like a Noah the fluffy grey cat, Staunton has absolutely no idea how cute it is.
In order to pick up a replacement fan for the processor in my mother's PC, we had to stop at the Staunton Mall's Radio Shack. There was a woman standing in front of me with a refreshingly strong hill billy accent. I hated that accent back when I lived in these parts, but I've been away from it long enough for it to make me nostalgic. Gretchen overheard some natives talking and was amazed. She had no idea that my old hometown was so authentically hick.
In the afternoon, Gretchen and I drove over the Blue Ridge to visit my old childhood friend Nathan VanHooser and his wife Janine at their place in Charlottesville. For some reason I'd neglected to mention all the things in common these people share with Gretchen. Having both done Peace Corp in the Gambia, Nathan and Janine have a house full of African artifacts (much as Gretchen's parents do). Like Gretchen, Nathan and Janine are absolutely nutty about dogs, partly because they're deliberately (for the time being, at least), childless. Likewise, Gretchen has no interest in reproducing.
Nathan still works for the Albemarle school system as some sort of network administrator. But his big hobby of late is a startup company with some buddies who are interested in starting up a wireless broadband service in the Charlottesville area. They've set up an omnidirectional retransmitting antenna on a pole atop Carter's Mountain and uses it to send data to a 2.8 Mbs ADSL pipe that, for the time being, is located at Nathan's house. The system is hoping to serve a potential market of rural people lying outside the range of DSL and cable modems. For the cost of some relatively inexpensive 2.4 GHz hardware and a fee of $50 per month, they can experience all the delightful broadband that spoiled city slickers such as myself have been enjoying on and off for well over a year now. The sheer gadgetry of the operation immediately excited my interests. I mean, one of the ways of connecting involves attaching a tiny one-foot-long scale model of a conventional trunk and branch television antenna to a card on your laptop.
Nathan took Gretchen and me and his two dogs to the orchard on top of Carter's Mountain to show us the antenna installation. It's a simple omnidirectional antenna array halfway up a pole amid the apple trees. Amazingly, we were even able to climb the pole and have a commanding view of the Piedmont from eastmost ridge penetrating its flatness, a little like an East Coast version of the view from the Flatirons of Colorado. Antenna installation, even in such a formal setting, is done by those who own the antennas. So Nathan and his buddies had to do the actual work of raising and bolting this particular array of metal. Functionally, it's identical to a satellite. It has no connectivity of its own accept for 120 volts of power. It simply receives 2.4 GHz transmissions, amplifies them, and retransmits them down to the antenna atop Nathan's house.
Rcomm's lease for its modest installation half-way up a lesser antenna pole costs them a few hundred dollars each month, so you can imagine what revenues are being generated by the nest of antenna poles on Carter's Mountain. Every vertical manmade structure up there, including an old fire tower, has at least several things bolted to it, so it seems. Some of the poles are owned by the same guy who owns the orchard itself. Nathan has figured that leases for spots on the antenna poles bring in at least $100,000 each year. Mind you, this is all happening on one particular ridge near a modest city of 40,000 souls.
Then there are the apples. Unfortunately, they were Red Delicious, yet another indication of the infuriating tastlessness of American culture. When mature, a Red Delicious is mealy and sickening sweet yet has almost no flavor. These apples weren't yet ripe, so their flavor was a little more interesting than I expected. But no one really complains about the apples after climbing up and down the ladder within an antenna pole; all an antenna climber really wants is something wet to put in his mouth.
Back down in Charlottesville, all four of us walked to the Downtown Mall to do dinner at the new restaurant called Rapture. It's the same one that Johnny Boom Boom works in, and Gretchen went back into the kitchen to find him and sure enough he was there, but he was too busy to come out and say hello. We ate outside and were tended by a deliberately cold waitress who was inexplicably overly-apologetic about nearly everything. My formula for such places is simple: when in doubt about food, order pasta. When in doubt about drink, order Redhook. When in doubt about conversation, talk about high school. Gretchen wanted to know what I was like in high school, and Janine related a story she'd heard from Nathan's older sister. There she was, attempting to be all cool in the hallway and there we were, Nathan and me, wearing our winter coats and playing chess in the hallway. Tres uncool! The funny thing about that story is that such hallway chess playing only happened a few times. But such social-stress-inducing observations evidently leave indelible memories.
Huge red aphids on Poison Ivy. That's Gretchen's finger.
The barn and the goats. Click for a huge picture.
The inside of the Shaque. Click for a huge picture.
The outside of the Shaque.
A radio tower on Carter's Mountain. The two H-shaped devices are Rcomm's antennæ.
The view from the tower along Carter's Mountain, looking northeast.
Gretchen climbing the tower, viewed from below.
Gretchen climbing the tower, viewed from above.
Nathan climbing the tower's guy wires above the apple trees.
The treeline of Carter's Mountain, looking east.
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