Power lines and other things I do not see

When I was doing dissertation research in the Kentucky town where I grew up, people talked a lot about power lines. The newcomers specifically found the power lines that stretched from pole to pole in the small downtown unsightly. They felt they should be buried. It was easy enough to do, to tuck them neatly underground. So they claimed, at least.

The first time I heard this suggestion my response was, “What power lines?”

“The ones all over town,” one of the newcomers explained.

I frowned in confusion, but sure enough, I walked outside to the sight of power lines along the main street. There were power lines in front of the old courthouse. Power lines and the poles they hung from were everywhere.

“Huh,” I said. I’d never noticed them, though I spent much of my childhood at my grandmother’s house right in the middle of the town’s main intersection, as well as walking to the corner store down the block. I saw a lot in those years, but apparently, not the power lines.

When I told other folks like me and my family, people who grew up in the town with roots going back generations, about the power line discussion, they were just as puzzled as I’d been. The power lines weren’t ugly. They just were. None of these people cared what the town looked like, anyway. They were more concerned about how much worse the traffic was. Or with the way the influx of newcomers was disrupting so much about the way things had always been. Against all of that, the power lines were neither here nor there. They were invisible in their insignificance.

Fast forward almost thirty years and I still don’t notice power lines. I had to look up pictures of Main Street in Madison, where I live now, just to check for sure whether the power lines are buried or not. They are, at least on Main Street, but I can’t say I’ve ever appreciated how much more beautiful the town is because of its absence of power lines. I’ve been back to my hometown many times in the last thirty years, but I haven’t noticed whether they ended up burying those power lines or not.

One day just this spring, I looked out our back window and saw a thick power line running from our garage/party pavilion to the back of our house. I swore it hadn’t been there the day before. Had it fallen from somewhere? What was happening?

“What’s that power line?” I asked my husband, a little breathless with shock and worry. “Did someone install a new one in our backyard without telling us?”

“No.” My husband laughed. “It’s always been there.” I’m fairly certain he was not trying to gaslight me.

Do you see the power lines?

I’ve lived in our house for almost twenty years now. My regular chair in the backyard pavilion where we sit all spring, summer and fall looks right up at the very line I thought was new. I’ve spent hours staring at it, but I didn’t see it. Maybe that says something about my complete and total lack of attention. Maybe it’s the way power lines are—they blend. They’re mostly invisible. We take them for granted. They just are.

The power lines become visible to me only when birds land on them. In that sense, I know them intimately. For example, that line that goes between our garage and the house which I forgot existed is the line that the male cardinal most likes to perch on this time of year. Late afternoons, the cardinal lands on the line and hops up and down its length, pausing every now and then for a good scratch, which looks almost exactly like my cats, only with feathers. The cardinal leaps from the power line and hovers in front of the mass of vines coming over our fence or the rosebush, looking for a place to land. At last he settles into the burning bush and hops around from one branch to the other. What’s he doing with this elaborate high-wire performance? I have no idea, but the power line is essential to his daily show.

That power line is the thickest of those that crisscross our yard and our neighbor’s. The thinner lines provide their own spectacle. The mourning doves and the blue jays can balance pretty well on the thickest line, but if they land on the thinner wires, they have to bob back and forth to keep their balance, their tail feathers flicking up and down in what looks like a very goofy dance move. It’s a bit comical to observe from out the window by my writing chair.

The finches—house and purple and golden—handle the thin wire better because they’re smaller. I don’t know if I realized how much smaller until I spent an afternoon watching the finches and then when the robin landed in the lawn, it was a giant.

Over the course of a summer day, the various electrical lines in our backyard see a lot of action. This is due partly to the fact that our neighbor has a feeder in his yard over the fence. The power lines become a staging area while the birds wait their turn or decide if they’re brave enough to take on the jay.

I don’t know what other uses the birds are putting the wires to. What is that cardinal doing with his strange little dance? In the mornings sometimes the mourning doves are lined up like musical notes on the wires that run along the alley. I’ve even seen a hummingbird land on one of the wires for a short break from gorging on flowers.

Are the wires an encroachment into the “natural space” of my garden? Of course, my garden is nature, but also not-nature. It’s a strange, small corner of green in a largely urban space. The back of our house is a puzzle piece of shapes, the same way almost every house in Madison is, with modern additions piling up behind the foundations of what was the original house. Over time, it all blends together.

What is nature and what isn’t? Does it matter? I’ve read that birds like sitting on power lines in the winter because the lines can provide a little warmth. Driving across the corn and soybean fields of southern Indiana, I’ve seen red-tailed hawks and red-shouldered hawks and sharp-shinned hawks all sitting on the wires, like sharp-beaked royalty observing their domain. The wires are a perfect hunting perch but are they inadequate replacements for the branches the hawks would once have perched on?

Are the wires a disruption? An incursion? I think about all that they symbolize. Our greedy need for energy to power our phones and our computers and our air conditioners. Is it that ugliness that the people in my hometown wanted to hide? Is that a good thing, not to have to look at these signs of how we’ve bent the world to our needs? How would the birds feel if the power lines were buried? How might we ask them?

One of the thin lines in the yard runs from the pole in the alley to a satellite dish that we no longer use but have never removed.

“We could get rid of that one,” my husband suggests one evening.

I watch the chimney swifts wheel in the sky far overhead. The song sparrow that lands beside where we sit to peck in our flower beds. The cardinal who lands on the wire and chirps, his whole body swelling and then deflating with the sound.

“No, leave it,” I say. “It’s fine.”

Thank you so much Elizabeth Auxier for becoming my very first ever founding member last week. I can’t say how much it means to me. Thank you also to all the new subscribers.

This week, I read

Kelcey Ervick

’s amazing graphic novel, The Keeper: Soccer, Me, and the Law That Changed Women’s Lives. The illustrations are beautiful, you will learn a lot about the history of soccer and women’s sports and feminism, and Kelcey’s own personal story is a pleasure to follow. Bonus points—she’s a Cincy girl. It was only after reading the graphic novel that I realized way back in the early days of my attempt at a writing career, I reviewed Kelcey’s novella-in-flash, Liliane’s Balcony, for a lit mag. I loved it, too. It’s set in Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous house in Pennsylvania. It’s truly a small literary world. Check out Kelcey’s Substack,

The Habit of Art by Kelcey Ervick

.

I also loved

John Wiswell

’s novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In. Not everyone can pull off the story of a monster that literally digests humans and then uses their bits, who then falls in love with a regular human woman whose family has sworn to hunt down and kill said monster or do that story in a way that is both funny and compelling and tender in moments. Just thinking about this book makes me smile.

Also discovered a new series for lovers of Tana French—the Cormac Reilly novels by Dervla McTiernan. Start with The Ruin.

Someone on here (it’s hard to keep track) mentioned Melissa Harrison’s novel, At Hawthorn Time, which was also gorgeous. It makes me wish I lived in an English village, though almost every book set in an English village makes me wish that. It also made me think about how to incorporate more of the natural world into my own writing. Like maybe that cardinal hopping on the wire will show up in my next novel.

The hot weather came along with a bum knee that makes it hard for me to walk around town, so maybe that’s lucky? I don’t know. It’s certainly made me appreciate relatively pain-free movement and hopefully my visit to the doctor will get me back on track.