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April 18, 1999
Where Silver Tinkles No More, Phone Has Yet To
By TINA KELLEY, The New York Times, National Edition,
Sunday, April 18, 1999 All Rights Reserved
 ILVERTON,
Wash. -- At the turn of the last century, this mountain town
had 300 residents, six hotels, five saloons, four general stores,
a newspaper, its own band and a small local phone company. But
as the "Bonanza Queen" and other mining claims became
unprofitable, the town lost most of those amenities, including
phones.
Now Silverton is year-round home to about 20 people,
some defectors from the city, others who have lived in the area
for decades. They enjoy waking up to the solace-giving trills
of the varied thrush and the raucous trash talk of Steller's
jays.
But they never wake up to the ringing of a telephone.
In a state where technology-based industries are responsible
for more than a third of total employment, no one east of the
bridge over Lake 22 Creek here on the Mountain Loop Highway can
get a dial tone. Silverton residents with cellular phones have
to drive 15 miles toward Seattle for the nearest signal. Satellite
phones are prohibitively expensive.
There are parts of the highway tucked so deeply between the
mountains that even the ambulances lose radio contact and cannot
call for helicopters or other backup, said Vince Henry, a local
fire commissioner and owner of Mountain View Inn, about 11 miles
west of Silverton. The inn's pay phones, the closest ones to
Silverton, are often too jammed with coins to work.
For the last seven decades, federal law has called for universal
telephone service, even in places like Silverton, 65 miles northeast
of Seattle, that do not fall in any company's area of responsibility.
In past years, the nearest phone company would have been required
to install lines out to Silverton and could have recouped the
cost by raising service charges in urban areas that are cheaper
to serve.
But since 1994, when phone companies in Washington were deregulated
and their monopolies ended, GTE, the closest of the main phone
companies that could serve Silverton, has had no incentive to
lay phone lines to serve so few new customers. It would cost
$750,000 for GTE to extend its land lines to Silverton, said
a company spokeswoman, Melissa Barran, and residents there would
be charged $19,000 per household to get phone service.
Fifty Silvertonians, including seasonal residents, met recently
with a representative of the Washington Utilities and Transportation
Commission about their concerns, but no easy answer is in sight.
This month, the state Legislature failed to pass a bill that
would have established a fund to provide service to remote areas.
Bob Shirley, a telecommunications analyst with the commission,
has been trying to find companies to serve Silverton, but in
Washington's $3.67 billion telephone market, no company has the
incentive.
"Those are a small number of folks, they're going to
be very high-cost to serve, and they're not likely to spend all
day talking to Australia," he said. He estimated that there
were 300 households in the state that could not get phone service.
U.S. Cellular, a company that provides mobile cell phone service,
had been interested in Silverton's business, until it recently
found that providing service was not feasible, Shirley said.
He plans to talk with several other wireless companies.
In emergencies, Silverton residents rely on a police radio,
kept at Denny and Diane Boyd's house, to reach the sheriff's
office. But if the couple is not home, or if the radio breaks
or cannot get a signal, there is no way to get help short of
driving to a ranger station near the inn.
Each year, mostly in the summer, 125,000 cars drive the Mountain
Loop Highway, a federal scenic byway, to enjoy its many hiking
trails and the fishing and camping along the Stillaguamish River.
Too often, they need the sheriff's radio.
"If we're gone, everyone else is out of luck," Ms.
Boyd said. The Boyds have had to answer their door at all hours,
to cold, frightened or drunken strangers whose cars were not
equipped for mountain roads. One group of bedraggled travelers
ended up soaking their shirts in motor oil and using them as
torches to find their way out of the woods.
"People don't realize how dark it gets here," Boyd
said.
Norm Frampton, 44, who retired to Silverton from a
pharmaceutical company in Seattle, paid cash for his house and
now spends his days volunteering and working in his garden, says
he pays about $200 a month making calls from pay phones and his
cellular phone.
A few driveways west, Jeffrey and Diane I. Dukes were just
getting back from Seattle. It was Tuesday, their day to check
e-mail. The couple built themselves separate cabins on the Silverton
hillside. ("She keeps hers at 80 degrees," Dukes explained.
"I keep mine at 60.") At his old office, "my computer
had its own telephone line," he said. He gets by without
a phone now, but his wife misses one.
"That question keeps coming up, when you go to write
a check," she said: She has to explain to shop clerks that
she has no phone number to write down for them.
Dukes, dressed in plaid pajamas and a hooded green bathrobe,
complained that he lost several thousand dollars when one of
his stocks took a nose dive and he did not know about it.
Of course, being off the grid is a selling point for some
people. One nearby house, advertised for sale as a "Self-Contained
Y2K Retreat," offers propane appliances and both bathroom
and outhouse, for $89,000.
But the current residents are not ready to give up their fight
for phone service. "If Bill Gates wants everyone in the
world to be online, Silverton should at least be able to call
911," Boyd said.
[Editor's note: I've included this Yahoo
map to show where Silverton is. See how close the city, marked
by the red star, is to Seattle. Just sixty-five miles away.]
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