*WashPost. THE DEAD ZONE
For Well-Connected People, Environmental Concerns Clash
With Desire for Cellular Clarity in Debate Over Park
Antennas
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 9, 1999; Page B01
SOMEWHERE IN THE ROCK CREEK PARK DEAD ZONE?Hello,
hello?
The cellular telephone signal is weak. Sometimes it disappears altogether.
He steps into the creek bed itself, his faithful puppy, Buddha, splashing at
his side.
"The service is stronger in the middle of the water," he reports.
The call goes through, but communication is frustrated for another reason:
His girlfriend is not at the other end to receive it. He leaves a message.
It wasn't a matter of life or death. Rob Christopher-Strayhorn wasn't trying
to report a crime or an injury or that he forgot to turn off the stove. He just
wanted to make plans to take Buddha to dog-handling class later in the
day.
The Rock Creek Park dead zone--a couple of square miles of spotty
cellular service--is the last large obstacle to Christopher-Strayhorn's
instantly-in-touch existence. The 30-year-old architect's black, palm-size
device is always with him, always on. His home phone is quaint,
second-string technology. His cellular number is the one he gives out to
friends and clients.
"I like to be reached instantly if somebody needs to reach me," he says. "I
think that's where things are headed. People who don't think in these terms
are behind the curve."
So many people do think in these terms that the Rock Creek dead zone is
increasingly cast as a freakish anomaly, the Bermuda Triangle of wireless
Washington. In the idiom of the ancient world explorers, a cellular map of
Rock Creek Park would be marked: "Here Be Monsters."
Bell Atlantic Mobile hopes to civilize this wild country, in the form of a
100-foot antenna pole at the park's tennis center and a 130-foot antenna
pole at the maintenance yard. Sprint PCS, the provider used by
Christopher-Strayhorn, says it would like to put its own antenna on one of
the Bell-Atlantic poles, and other companies could do the same.
Advocates say cell phone service in the park will improve public safety and
convenience. Opponents argue the poles will mar the view, endanger
migratory birds and possibly blaze a trail for yet more poles in Rock Creek
and other parks.
While Congress mulls the matter, the dead zone is the perfect place to get
in touch with the vanishing concept of being out of touch.
Here are Wendy Bernstein, 36, and Steven Schauder, 34, walking with
their son Max Schauder, 7. Car traffic is closed on this section of Beach
Drive for the weekend. The only sound is crickets, whose chirp is not
unlike that of a portable, and the wind soughing in the trees.
Bernstein and Schauder recently bought a cell phone, but they did not
bring it. They are blissfully incommunicado.
"Doesn't a city deserve one pristine spot?" Bernstein says. "I'd like to have
a place in the world where there were no cell phones."
The reason they broke down and acquired a cell phone is that Bernstein is
pregnant again, and she says she will feel a little more secure having the
phone in case of emergency during a long drive.
But did she feel less secure without a phone nearly eight years ago when
she was expecting Max?
No, she admits, she didn't. But cell phones weren't such an obvious
purchase back then. Plus, they used to be so expensive.
The ubiquity of the technology has changed her conception of the
accessories that go with responsible adulthood.
Now, if you are without a cell phone in certain situations, you have
engaged in risky behavior.
On a sunny weekend, the dead zone is filled with walking, running, skating
and biking people all in one way or another trying to figure out their
evolving relationship with the technology.
Ask them about it and they use analogies: There are people who see the
cell phone as a telephone, like the one at home--it should always work.
Others compare it to an emergency flare or jumper cables you keep in the
back of your car--great for extreme situations, but who needs jumper
cables in the park? Others consider it a decadent and useless indulgence,
like a fur or a third face lift--enough of this contemptible fad!
Susan Hackett, 38, and Richard Hagerty, 40, are walking their daughter,
Claire, 7 months, in a jogging stroller. Hagerty doesn't know it, but
Hackett has stowed a cell phone in a pocket of the stroller. Because of the
baby, just in case.
Surprised when Hackett reveals the device, Hagerty tries to place a call as
an experiment. They are Bell Atlantic Mobile customers, and the call goes
through. So, they ask, why do we need antenna poles?
Fifteen years ago, there were no cell phones and everywhere was a dead
zone. Today there are 1.3 million subscribers in the Washington area,
according to the Strategis Group telecommunications consultants--a
number nearly triple the population of the city itself.
The phone companies have been relentlessly erecting antennas ever since.
Just as America's western frontier vanished at the end of the last century,
the un-celled continent is about to disappear at the end of this one.
Potomac was a dead zone until Bell Atlantic erected a pole camouflaged
as a tree in Avenel. Cell phone junkies will happily list numerous blocks
and neighborhoods that are dead, some as small as 100 yards, but Rock
Creek Park is the last major one, according to Bell Atlantic.
The dead zone is not lifeless. Three-fourths of the calls a reporter tried to
place over the weekend were successful. After one failed attempt, he
successfully placed a call from his cell phone to the cell phone of Bell
Atlantic Mobile's spokeswoman, Audrey Schaefer. He got her voice mail,
where he left a message asking how this communication could possibly be
taking place.
Schaefer called back and left a message suggesting that calls may be easier
to make during low-use periods, such as weekends. She also said
anecdotal experience was not as reliable as measurements by the phone
company's engineers that show that 44 percent of calls do not go through,
or are interrupted once they begin. The dead zone foils thousands of Bell
Atlantic Mobile customers' calls, she said. That includes calls attempted by
people driving through the park during the week.
The wisdom of wiping out the region's last big dead zone at the cost of two
antenna poles mandated by Congress has been actively debated on
themail@dcwatch, an e-mail discussion forum on D.C. affairs. Most
correspondents have damned the incursion, but some, such as Stan
Wellborn, 54, who lives near the park, think it's time for the whole city to
be covered.
Twice since Wellborn has had a cell phone, he has needed it to call for
help during car trouble on highways in the rain or at night. Now he
wouldn't feel right on such journeys without his phone.
But no, he says in an interview, he didn't feel less safe driving the same
ground in his pre-cell phone days. That's the funny thing about a new
technology. It changes perceptions of reality, which is the same thing as
changing reality itself.
"You had a vacuum you didn't know was there," Wellborn says in an
interview. "Suddenly cell phone technology comes along and fills the
vacuum and you can't breathe without it."
This is a familiar process, according to those who have studied the
invention and adoption of new technology.
"Once we bite the apple of knowledge, we cannot unbite it," says Amitai
Etzioni, a professor of sociology at George Washington University.
In 15 short years, the cell phone has progressed from that initial stage
when people speculate--usually incorrectly--about how a technology will
be useful, to the point where laws are proposed to help make it ubiquitous.
"We didn't know 15 years ago that when we went to the grocery store we
wanted to have our telephone with us," said Wendell Cochran, associate
professor of communications at American University. "Where in the
beginning you couldn't imagine what it was for, now you can't imagine life
without it."
Jim McGrath, 48, has been an avid cell phone user since the beginning. He
paid $2,700 for his first big clunky phone, and he knew what it was for
immediately: to make calls for his commercial real estate business as he
drove around and around the area. Now he talks 1,500 minutes or more a
month on his cell phone--or at least 25 hours.
Today he is roller-blading in the park. He didn't bring his phone: He
doesn't want to fall and land on it. He's seen it happen too many times.
But he is all for constructing the antenna poles, provided any company will
be able to use them, so more won't have to be built.
Then he won't have to dodge the park in order to stay in touch. "It's a
pain," he says. Recently he showed a client a building at the Navy Yard in
Southeast Washington, and next they had to drive to Kensington. McGrath
was going to cut through the park, but the man asked him not to, because
he wanted to make business calls.
McGrath skirted the dead zone by driving up North Capitol. It took 20
minutes longer. But the conversations could continue uninterrupted.
¸ Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company |
