Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring!

Winter left quietly on Tuesday night. The sky was not a vibrant kaleidoscope of color. Though at times, our winter season roared with wind, snow and rain, winter bid adieu unobtrusively. There was a slight, biting breeze, but it was more a wave goodbye than a hearty shout as it departed for another year.

Our roads still bear the mark of a wet fall and winter, and the waning rays of sunshine reflected in the stagnant water in the road by my sunrise tree. This time, I traveled beyond the tree and gazed toward the west. The sunrise tree witnessed the daylight's end and winter's surrender.

Toward the east, a moon rose above wispy clouds. I wish my camera could have captured its size and brilliance, even in the light of dusk.

Thirty minutes later, the light was bleeding from the sky, like a patient on one of the TV medical shows I like to watch. Winter was taking its last gasp. The power poles seemingly marched their way to the horizon as the sun gave up its hold for another day.

Goodbye, winter!

And, 12 hours later, it was hello spring!

 

 On Wednesday, the sunrise tree again stood vigil as pink tinged the blue of night.

At the silo, the calves and their mamas said hello to the first day of spring.

Without full sunshine and the warmth of the day, the calves weren't yet ready to romp and play. They were more curious about a pajama-clad human standing by the fence, I suppose.

At first, I thought the low-riding clouds would obscure our first spring sunrise. But the sun broke through, bringing a promise of a new day ... and a new season.

Gardeners and farmers alike turn the page from winter and spring with great anticipation. Their fingers practically itch to touch the soil and begin planting seeds. And that's what my farmer did on Wednesday. He planted oats. (More on that later.)

Despite the calendar, will winter have a final hurrah? Like that patient on the TV medical show, will it refuse to take its last breath and make a recovery, sending another snow or plummeting temperatures? Time will tell. For now, we celebrate spring's homecoming.

Power to the People

From outward appearances, the tall and mighty power poles that stretch across our wheat field looked unharmed after the ice storm two weekends ago.

Harvest, June 2013

The poles often play starring roles in my sunset photos as silhouettes to mark the departure of another Kansas day. They are part of our western landscape, a line marching steadily toward the horizon. However, like most people, I don't think a lot about electricity until I don't have it. During this ice storm, we were fortunate. We were only without power for a few hours, and we were sleeping during most of that time. Many others were without electricity for several days.

We know how that is.  After a 2007 ice storm, we were without power for 12 days. The only good thing that came out of that 2007 ice storm was a photo of the sun coming up after a week of gray days and sub-freezing temperatures. I put that photo on canvas and it decorates my living room, part of my "There is a time for every season ..." Ecclesiastes grouping.

On our way to church last Sunday, we saw a parade of vehicles in the field. Evidently, outward appearances didn't tell the whole story. (There's another lesson there, isn't there?)

The ice that had draped fences and coated trees and made art out of weeds had also clung to the cross bars of the power poles.

 

A subcontractor, PAR, worked all day last Sunday to repair the damage on the poles, which are owned by Midwest Energy.

Wet fields and heavy equipment don't mix. The company had to use bulldozers to pull their trucks through the muck. (We know a little about that after a combine was buried in mud during our last wheat harvest!)

One of the supervisors came to the house to get a phone number and contact information so the company could settle any damages to the ground and crops. He also shared both a company phone number and his personal cell phone, just in case we didn't hear from the company.  What a nice guy!

Less than a week later, the company has already called to make reparations for the damage done. Some of the money will go to the landlord. (We don't own the ground.) And some will come to us.

We are thankful that the company is trying to "make it right." But we're even more thankful for electricity and for the workers who do all they can to get power up and running after a storm.

My Grandpa Shelby Neelly was was one of the people who helped develop the rural electric cooperative in Pratt County back in the 1940s. He served on the Ninnescah Rural Electric Board and also the Kansas Rural Electric Cooperative board. My dad later served on both boards as well.

We rural residents owe a lot to our ancestors who worked so hard to bring the convenience of electricity to our rural communities.

The first electric light bulb twinkled into history in 1879, when scientists in Thomas Alva Edison’s laboratory corralled this new form of power.  By 1930, nearly 70 percent of city dwellers were hooked up to the electrical lines and poles that dotted U.S. cities.  At the same time, however, only 10 percent of farm families had access to electricity. 

In 1932, presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised a “New Deal” to help combat the Great Depression.  One of his New Deal programs was the formation of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in 1935. 

First rural electric line in Kansas, Brown County, 1938. Photo from Kansas State Historical Society.

In 1935, with the passage of the Emergency Appropriations Act, a zero-interest loan program was established for building electric transmission distribution lines into rural America.  However, existing investor-owned companies still weren’t interested in providing electricity to farms because they didn’t believe it was profitable.  In 1936, with the passage of the Electrification Act, not-for-profit cooperatives were encouraged to apply for the loans.  Neighbors joined together to create and control the future of their electric companies.

Grandpa Neelly and me, 1957

 Shelby Neelly had been living in the central Kansas community of Greensburg.  The teacher and coach enjoyed the electricity available to city dwellers.  But, in 1942, when Neelly moved back to Pratt County to farm, he and his family were again without the modern convenience of electricity. 

When the Ninnescah Rural Electric had first approached his neighbors, they didn’t see the need for electric power.  Only a couple of families along the road had signed up in the cooperative’s initial recruitment effort.  Then, World War II curtailed the use of wire and other supplies necessary for building miles of electric line. 

“My kin, Ray Denton, drove up and down the roads in two or three townships out here trying to get people to sign up,” recalled the 99-year-old Neelly in a January 2004 interview.  “It was $5 to sign up, and a lot of people didn’t think they had the $5. At that time, people couldn’t even imagine all the electrical appliances we have today.”

From from Kansas State Historical Society, Brown County, KS

Getting the monetary commitment from farm families was just the beginning.  The cooperative boards spent hours mapping out the best locations for electric lines with engineers.  They again made the rounds to neighbors to purchase land easements for placing the lines.  They also had to apply for the loans to the REA.

Photo from Energy for Generations archive

By 1945, the Neelly family had electricity in their farm home, just like many other farm families in Kansas.  At first, only the kitchen, living room and dining room had the single bulb in the middle of the ceiling.  It was a far cry from the outlets located on every wall in today’s country homes, but it was miraculous at the time to have indoor plumbing.  Farm families were able to replace their ice boxes with electric refrigerators, no more lugging 25-pound chunks of ice into the kitchen.  Farm wives and children no longer hauled pail after pail of water into the home for washing dishes or taking baths.  Families could sit around their living rooms at night listening to the radio and reading by the light of their electric light bulbs rather than the muted glow from kerosene lanterns.

All across the country, farmers and ranchers began to realize the potential for electricity in their daily work.  Electricity could grind feed, shell corn, pump water and saw wood. It powered milking machines and lifted hay into the barn.  Farmyards were often lit with lights, adding extra hours to accomplish work.  

The importance of electricity in the lives of rural residents continues today.  It’s hard to predict what the future will hold. 

“As technology evolves, almost all of it is powered by electricity,” Bob Moore said in a 2004 interview.  “Today we have more technology available than we could ever have dreamed of when I was a boy. It’s amazing that we have computers and television that connect us to the whole world.  The future is not that different from the past.  All kinds of new innovations will require electrical power. We just can’t imagine what all of them will be.”

On Sunday, we'll celebrate Kansas Day. It's been 156 years since Kansas joined the Union. I'm thankful for the pioneers who established this land and for those innovators who came along later - from the people who brought electricity to the plains to those today bringing high-speed internet connections. 

A Little Off the Top

You know that feeling when you first get a dramatic new haircut and you wonder if you've made a horrible mistake? You look in the mirror and you hardly recognize yourself. (I am such a stick-in-the-mud that it doesn't happen often to me because I don't change my hair on a whim. But if you've ever lived with a teenage girl, you know what I mean. The simplest of hair trims can be a red-alert crisis.)

That's kind of how I feel when I drive home from the north these days. Our shelterbelt to the north of the house has had a little "taken off the top." Actually, it was more than a trim. The first row of trees has been scalped.

It's all for a good cause, however. Our rural electric company has contracted with some tree companies to trim trees and limbs away from the power poles. The company that worked in our area gave us options. We could have the trees trimmed. Or we could have a row taken out. We opted for removal.

You might opt for removal, too, if you'd experienced what we did three winters ago. We were without electricity for 12 days after an ice storm in December 2007. The best Christmas present that year was getting the electricity back on a couple of days before Christmas Eve.

I know removing the trees along our road isn't going to keep my lights on indefinitely. But I also know there are tree crews trimming all over Ark Valley Electric's service area, using FEMA disaster funds. We can always hope it will help, right?

This is the before picture. You can see the trees in relation to the power pole. There wasn't a lot of wiggle room there for falling branches in an ice storm.

The electric company is also replacing some poles to further strengthen the infrastructure. (Note to self: You need to get your Cat Crossing sign off the pole before it disappears forever.) According to the tree crew, the "R" stands for removal. The yellow stake shows where they will put another pole in its place. (Thank goodness! I will admit I am an electricity addict. Withdrawal for this addiction is agony.)

The crews worked a couple of days sawing down the trees and turning some of them into wood chips and some into firewood.

We have a couple of fireplaces in our house, but we don't burn wood in them anymore. The last time we tried it, we had 25-plus people coming to Thanksgiving dinner and it smoked up the house. (No, it was not my cooking!) No amount of visits from a chimney sweep seemed to fix the problem.

But a neighbor came and picked up the wood and plans to use it at his house, as well as share it with some of his family members.

It really looks different when you drive in from the north these days. And, if you're a regular reader, you know how much I love change (sarcasm alert!).

All the time the tree crew was working, I kept thinking about the shelterbelt that my parents added to the south of my childhood home one summer. My sister and I carried water to the trees and hoed them all summer long. I wondered if some little boy or girl had hauled water and hoed weeds to establish these trees along the County Line to protect the house from the north winds. How would they feel to see their "work" crashing down years later?

But there are definitely some positive sides to the change. We can see traffic coming from the north much more clearly now (Not that there's much, but we do get a little traffic along the County Line).

And I'm still holding out hope that it will help us during the next ice storm.

Honestly, tree trimming and removal probably isn't going to make much impact on ice as thick as we had in 2007.

Power line after power line was gone along the Zenith Road.

Our front yard looked like a combat zone.

It was the same in the back yard.

The electric fence was weighted down with ice. Unfortunately, the electric lines looked like this in places, too.

About the only good thing to come out of the ice storm was the feeling of camaraderie among neighbors and a few amazing photos. There were even a few pretty photos of ice in the trees to contrast with all the destruction.


As much as I love photos like this, I will gladly keep my electric lines, thank you very much.

Just to show them how much I appreciated them, I took pop and cookies out to the crew two times. Come to think of it, did they come back the next day just for my cookies? (No, but they did tell Randy that the cookies sure were good.)