Cindy’s Work Has Its Ups and Downs

In a blend of high tech and old-fashioned horsepower, a draft horse named Cindy has stretched a state-of-the-art telephone cable across the rugged hills and hollows of West Virginia where trucks, helicopters and even mules fear to tread.

“She’s good to work with, the only way to go in this terrain,” said Paul Bowman, a C&P; Telephone Co. lineman, as he trotted up a steep, rocky incline behind the 1,500-pound horse.

“You can’t get a truck in here and she makes it a lot easier, especially on us.”

Cindy has replaced a crew of a half-dozen workers who normally would have been used to pull the fragile, fiber optic cable between the nearly 80 miles of poles laid from Clarksburg to Parkersburg, said Maywood Ellifritt, a C&P; spokesman.

The 7-year-old horse has pulled more than 40 miles of cable and helped lay poles along the mountainous route since July.

“We’ve used a helicopter before to haul in poles and cable, but it’s very expensive and impossible to do in some areas,” said Ellifritt. “And we used a mule in the beginning but he ran off three times and wouldn’t listen.

“To get up and down some of those hills, a horse makes more sense than anything else.”

It is cheaper too. Cindy’s owner is paid $15 an hour. The horse, meanwhile, gets a gallon of a corn-and-oats mixture three times a day and high marks from her co-workers.

“But she’s about ready to go on strike,” joked Lynn Gower, another lineman. “Says she wants more oats per hour.”

Cindy is well-suited to the job because her steady pull is less likely to put a kink in the half-inch-wide cable, which could break the 24 hairlike strands of multicolored glass capable of carrying 36,288 conversations simultaneously.

Copper More Expensive

A copper cable with the same capacity would be 4 inches thick, more expensive to install and maintain and provide lower quality transmissions, C&P; officials said.

To prevent the line from snapping because of a snag or too hard a tug, Cindy’s “single-tree” harness is designed to break away when her pull exceeds 600 pounds of pressure, Ellifritt said.

But the stocky, brown-and-white horse, more accustomed to pulling a plow or rake for her owner on a Salem farm, seemed to care little about all that as she snorted and wheezed trying to recover from a another in a series of steep climbs and jumps over gullies and rocks.

“She’s a good horse, well-broke,” said Elton Wine, Cindy’s owner, during the rest stop. “And just the right size for this terrain. A bigger horse couldn’t pull up these hills without getting all wore out.”

Frequent stops for horse and men alike were required during a recent, unseasonably warm afternoon as a C&P; crew strung the final miles of cable near Pennsboro.

“There’s horse sense and there’s human sense and you’ve got to have a little of both to work a horse,” Wine said as he tried to catch his breath after tailing Cindy a half-mile up a 40-degree incline.

“There’s a lot of horses that it’s just like hollering at the wind when you try to get them to do something. But Cindy’s something special.”

C&P; officials agree.

“We were worried that the publicity of using the horse would make us look like a bunch of hillbillies at first,” said Sonny Donaldson, a construction supervisor on the project. “But this is how they used to do it in the old days and it really was the best way to do this job.”