Remote Sierra Town Pines for an Ordinary Dial Tone

IOWA HILL, Calif. — Forget fiber-optics. Don’t even discuss caller ID, fax lines, call forwarding or computer modems. People in this isolated Sierra outpost are hurting for a plain old dial tone.

Teetering on the millennial cusp, residents of Iowa Hill are without one of the 20th century’s most ubiquitous inventions, the good old-fashioned telephone.

And my how they miss it. Just ask Leah Strika, age 13.

At a time when most teenagers have sharpened their phone skills with countless hours of practice, Leah has rarely blabbed on the phone with a friend, let alone signed onto the Internet. Her family keeps a cellular phone charged up, but the high cost of calls and the mountainous region’s spotty service make it imperfect and impractical.

A real phone, she says, “would be, like, a total big thing.”

Iowa Hill is among scores of rural enclaves scattered across the United States that remain without phone service more than a century after Alexander Graham Bell first bleated into his historic device. Although federal officials have long vowed to put phones in the country’s most remote corners, the promise remains unfulfilled, from places off the beaten path in the East Mojave to homesteads in Appalachia.

But for residents of Iowa Hill, there is hope.

GTE, which inherited Iowa Hill as a service area when it acquired a smaller company a few years ago, is talking of finally putting in phone service. If all goes smoothly, the heavily forested town 50 miles northeast of Sacramento could have phones--and call waiting, answering machines and all the rest--in a year or so.

“People are always saying, I’ll e-mail you. Hello! I don’t have a phone!” said Cerise LaCore, a New York native now leading the push for phones. “We’ll be coming from the 19th century to the 21st century overnight.”

What really bothers LaCore and her carpenter husband, David Wilson, is that from their double-wide mobile home atop a mountain they can see trucks and cars on bustling Interstate 80, just three miles away. But with the absence of phone service, Wilson said, “it’s like we’re in the Bermuda Triangle.”

The mostly one-lane road that winds from the busy highway to Iowa Hill is a slithering 11 miles of pavement, snaking down one side of a steep gorge to the foaming north fork of the American River and then back up the other side, climbing 1,000 feet of sheer granite and greenstone. The costs of traversing that difficult terrain to reach a small group of customers has kept the phone lines out.

It has also kept Iowa Hill running a lot like it did a century ago.

Born in the Gold Rush, the place once had 10,000 residents. But those glory days did not last long. The town burned down three times, most recently in 1920, and has not been the same since. By 1969, the population was seven people.

A wide spot in the road, Iowa Hill today consists of a store that also serves as tavern and post office, a one-room schoolhouse and a fire station. More than 170 homeowners are scattered along the ridge, a mix of retirees, commuters to Sacramento Valley jobs, affluent escapees and the occasional vagabond squatting on a mining claim.

All pack a backwoods independence. The town has no electricity, no sewers, no water mains and no trash service. Residents make their own power with diesel generators or solar panels. Heat comes from wood stoves. They cart groceries from Colfax, 20 minutes away by car.

Most wouldn’t have it any other way, swapping the ease of civilized infrastructure for a serenity and beauty unmatched in the urban world. “I wouldn’t trade this for city living,” said Mary Parker, who along with her husband, Grover, owns Iowa Hill Store.

But they sure would love a telephone.

In the 1920s, the community rigged up a “farm line,” splicing wire haphazardly from tree to tree back to civilization. It worked fine as a party line for the 10 families that were tied in, except when rain or snow fell and the system shorted out. If the line wasn’t busy, other residents tapped in at a convenient spot using alligator clips and a rotary dial phone.

A few years ago, storms took down quite a few trees and knocked the farm line out of commission. No one has bothered to repair it. Most residents had already turned to cellular phones as their lifeline to the outside world. But that, too, is far from perfect.

Early on, Iowa Hill denizens were floored by huge bills, up to $600 a month in some cases. And the undulating terrain plays games with even the best connection. Residents are invariably forced to walk around the house in search of the best spot. They head to the porch, clamber up on the roof or drive to high ground for a connection. Then they pray some telecommunications gremlin doesn’t cut them off.

“I hate my cell phone,” said Shirley Barclay, who manages the Iowa Hill Store. “It would be nice to have a true, real conversation for once without getting cut off.”

Emergencies also are a worry. Grover Parker, who also acts as chief of the volunteer Fire Department, said the telephone gap can be a problem when a neighbor suffers a heart attack, a hiker falls off a cliff or American River rafters get in a fix. His wife recalls seeing a wildfire blazing across the canyon late one night. But when she tried to report the fire, her cellular phone was dead.

Then there was the time a local boy, Tommy Reynolds, got his toes caught in a gas-powered log splitter a few years ago. With the farm line on the fritz that day, his father had to dash around to find a cellular phone. A medevac helicopter eventually arrived, but valuable minutes were wasted, and the boy lost most of his toes.

Tommy, now 10, gets around fine and talks about the accident with a breezy nonchalance. “If we had a phone, we could have got a helicopter here quicker,” he says. “I don’t know if it would have made a difference.”

The absence of phones has also shaped the curriculum at Iowa Hill School. Although it has nine computers for the current crop of 10 students, no land line means no Internet access. Richard Marks, head teacher the last 15 years, makes do by downloading material at his home across the river and bringing it to school on a laptop computer. But it hardly matches the Real McCoy.

Ernie Williamson, 11, said some youngsters get on the Net at a library near the interstate. But the online time is limited and invariably they return home frustrated, he said. “Getting on the Internet is like a tease.”

Marks took to teaching “phone etiquette” after he discovered several local children froze when a phone was stuck in their ear. Now he schools them on how to use the phone book and how to inquire at a business.

“A lot of times they’re afraid of the phone,” Marks said. “Most are not allowed to use it at home. So there’s all this dead air time when they get on.”

After pushing hard the last three years, LaCore is hopeful GTE may soon deliver. The company recently met with 100 residents. If enough households got phones, the installation cost might be $300 or less. The company would subsidize the rest of the anticipated $2 million in construction costs, said Jonathan Davies, a GTE spokesman.

Those estimates do not address the cost of running phone wire directly to houses, which in some cases are a mile from the nearest road. Residents are talking of bake sales and other fund-raising efforts, including writing a letter to Microsoft executive Bill Gates to ask for a donation to get the school on the Internet.

An additional obstacle looms. GTE is selling the local telephone exchange that would link Iowa Hill to the outside world. The buyer is expected to be a small phone company that might rely on federal subsidies to run lines to Iowa Hill.

But the federal subsidy program has been in a state of flux since Congress passed reforms in 1996 meant to produce cheaper phone rates and better service. Many small phone companies have been reluctant to extend their rural reach until details of the new subsidy effort are fleshed out.

GTE officials insist that the town will not be shoved aside in any sale, but some residents fear it could mean yet a longer wait for Iowa Hill.

“If they don’t put in phone lines,” vowed LaCore, “we’ll put them in.”