Tree On A Wire

I was driving the back-way home through the woods from work the other day on a road that meanders roughly along the Susquehanna River with all of its twists and turns. There isn't a lot of traffic there and I dodge suburban congestion of the other route. I figure that I drive the forested route at least two hundred times a year (I do go the other way in the morning sometimes because it is so early that the traffic is sparse). So, after 25 years, I am around 5000 times that I have driven this woodsy way.

Yet, if I pay mind to it, I always see something new. Until the economic downturn of a few years ago, the woods were starting to be taken over by new construction. Since then, things have slowed but telltale sewer upgrades are happening and that predicts that the lumberyard that owns all of the hundreds of acres of trees is going to sell to the highest bidder soon. It makes me sad, for as the trees go, so do people. We literally need each other to breathe. Not that this is real important. eh?

A housing development, sans trees, will be titled something ironic like "Forest Estates."

I tend to get in a zone when driving this rural route. So, it was a bit unusual that I happened to be looking up and noticed that a tree had fallen on some electrical wires, causing them to bend dangerously. It looked like the wires would snap soon. So, when I got home, I called Met-Ed who I figured owned the lines. Since I work in York, I know the residents in my district are billed for their electricity through Met-Ed because we require move-ins to produce documentation that they live in our district and more often than  not, it is an electricity bill.

I encountered the typical phone maze difficulties when calling Met-Ed. Their automated phone answering system assumed that I was a customer and I am not. I live in Lancaster which a different electric utility.  The system essentially a priori grants that you are a customer if you have a concern. I had a concern but it really didn't have much of an impact on me one way or another unless the electrical wires would snap while I was driving under them and they fell through my sun roof, electrocuting me in one of those freak. accidents. Pretty unlikely.

I finally got to a live rep pretending like I was a customer who had no idea what my customer number was.  We were able to figure out the approximate location of the fallen tree and wire bending and by the next day, the tree had been sawed off.

Here is the point of the story. I didn't have any skin in the game. I could have looked the other way and thought someone else would see it. But, I did my civic duty. Here is the kicker: There are two houses along the route that fly the Confederate Battle Flag. I am not alone in this but I find it highly offensive that these people fly a symbol of the Confederacy. I loathe the stupidity of it all. Since I have Southern cred in that I lived in Appalachia during the ages of 4-7, I am part Rebel in my history. And I repudiate that flag and all that it stands for.

So, in helping prevent an electrical outage and perhaps a more serious life-threatening issue, I took it upon myself to personalize a problem that had little bearing on my well-being. And in so doing, I helped these two households along these electrical lines who think it is somehow appropriate to stoke the fires of a racist ideology because of their own selfish and truncated worldview. They like putting their rotted and fallen tree upon our civic wires and seem to want to watch those wires bend and break.