November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

The Big Turn-off

(Page 3 of 3)

September/October 1996
Geraldine Brooks, DoubleTake (www.doubletakemagazine.org) 
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People barely notice when the cable man melts away. The next speaker is our neighbor Mary, who wants to tell us about laying rumble strips to slow the traffic through town. 'Well,' she says, raising an eyebrow, 'I'm not sure I want to get up in front of this crowd.'

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The next morning, when we meet up at the post office to pick up our mail, a few of us allow that we feel a bit sheepish about more or less running the cable man out of town. But then we look up at the ugly tangle of power lines--one of the few 20th-century intrusions in town--and consider how one more big thick cable running along up there would make it even more unsightly, and less likely that we'll ever realize the village's long-standing dream of getting the things buried.

In less than a week, word of the Waterford Cable Rebellion filtered to the outside world. It seems we're the first town in the United States to resist it. Reporters from the Washington Post, CBS news, Fox network, and even South Korean TV showed up and filed bemused, can-you-believe-it features about the bunch of oddball hayseeds who don't want cable.

It's become eccentric not to want every place to be just like every other place. Perhaps we'd have a better chance of holding on to what's here if the history it represented were linked with a museum or the grand estate of some long-ago rich man. But what's here isn't grand. These cottages, ice houses, and root cellars are the temples of ordinary lives.

The old rooms have a way of slowly shaping you to fit them. You arrive here thinking you simply must have more built-in closets, but instead find yourself shedding your excess wardrobe. You open up the old stone-lined, hand-dug well so your arms can feel the effort of hauling a full water bucket up 30 feet. I suppose, if we had cable, I could be watching Body by Jake on the Fitness Channel instead.

Down on Main Street, my neighbor Jake is toning his biceps by helping his dad stack the woodpile. I think I'll amble down there and have a word with him about a Corinthian king named Sisyphus.

Reprinted from DoubleTake, Summer 1996.

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