Phone Firm Reaches Out to Put Desert Town in Touch

Residents of this East Mojave Desert outpost are accustomed to doing without a lot of society’s modern conveniences. There are no automated teller machines, no fast-food restaurants, no video rental shops and mighty few gas stations.

Hardy souls, these folks can tolerate such deprivations. But there’s one thing they’re sick and tired of living without: telephones.

In the era of the fax machine and the conference call, in the final decade of the 20th Century and in the union’s most populous state, the 400 people of greater Cima are still fighting to get basic telephone service.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Bob Ausmus, 69, owner of the Cima General Store, griped one day recently. “If you can send a man to the moon, you ought to be able to put phones on the East Mojave.”

Ausmus and his neighbors in San Bernardino County are not the only Californians suffering such a plight. State regulators cannot supply precise numbers, but they acknowledge that residents in remote portions of Modoc, Inyo, Fresno and several other counties are forced to get by without that nifty little instrument invented by Alexander Graham Bell.

The reason is economics. As in other parts of the country, some of California’s most isolated regions simply have too few customers for installation of service to make financial sense, utilities say.

Now, however, a small phone company is reaching out and offering to put Cima and its surrounding area in telephonic touch with the outside world.

This tantalizing prospect has stirred considerable excitement in the East Mojave, and it’s not difficult to understand why. For residents of the region, a scenic place of harsh temperatures and bumpy dirt roads, finding a working telephone can be an agonizing pursuit.

“One time I drove over 200 miles before I got a dial tone,” recalled Bud Smith, 57, a retired television antenna installer from Las Vegas who now lives on 40 acres off an unpaved road in Round Valley. “First, I went to Goffs, but that was out. Then to Essex, and that was out. Then I crossed back to Kelso--and it wasn’t working.

“Finally I ended up at Whiskey Pete’s (Casino in Nevada) and made my call,” Smith said. “I did a good bit of cursing that day.”

Sandra Overson, who lives on a cattle ranch with her husband and two children north of Cima, says she often plans her whole day around placing a phone call.

“You have to,” Overson, 29, said matter-of-factly. “Because even if you do find a working phone, the person you’re trying to reach might be out to lunch. So you have to wait.”

For Ausmus, the advent of telecommunications would mean being able to phone in orders for his grocery store or call for parts for the windmill supply business he runs. A basic touch-tone also would come in handy for his wife, Irene, Cima’s postmistress.

“The Postal Service manual says if you have any problems, just call for assistance,” Irene Ausmus said as she sorted mail one recent morning. “Ha! How can I do that? If I want to drive 20 miles and pray the phone is working, then maybe I could. But that costs money and takes time.”

Convenience is only one advantage telephones would bring to the outback. Indeed, locals say that emergencies--many of them involving the growing number of visitors to the spectacular, Joshua Tree-studded area--are the most compelling argument for phone service.

Talk with longtime residents for a spell and you’ll hear countless tales about the hapless tourist who got bit by the rattlesnake, or the traveler whose car conked out on a mountain 40 miles from the nearest phone.

Automobile accidents are a bigger problem. Henry Smith, a retired Santa Fe Railroad conductor who lives with his wife, Georgia, in nearby Round Valley, said: “We get wrecks out on Cedar Canyon Road every week.

“One time,” recalled Smith, 70, “a fellow from Alhambra died at 9:30 and they couldn’t call and get someone to pick up his body till 4 that afternoon.”

Out by the Ausmus place on Cima Road, the most common roadway casualties are U.S. Marines, who zip across the Mojave from Twentynine Palms on their way to Las Vegas.

“It’s scary to see these guys . . . barrel through here,” Bob Ausmus said as he loaded hay into a truck one recent evening. “They hit the railroad tracks there, get airborne, and then you hold your breath wondering where they’ll land.”

Officials with the Public Utilities Commission say the East Mojave is probably the largest and most populated remaining section of California that lacks telephone service.

“The commission has a philosophy of universal service; that is, no one should be excluded and we should all be able to talk to each other,” said Maurice Crommie, a PUC economist. “But it’s really a question of degree. Serving one single guy on a mountaintop can be extremely expensive. So, is it worth it?”

In the past, the answer has been no, and rural residents have had little recourse. New technology, however, is changing the economic picture, Crommie said.

Several companies are now marketing a system that, much like a television or radio system, beams communications via transmission towers erected on mountaintops. By eliminating the need to string miles of wire over rugged territory, the system is simpler and cheaper to install.

In March, such a system was approved by the PUC to serve 170 residents in a rugged, previously phone-less section of Lassen County. The Ponderosa Telephone Co. of Fresno County hopes to use a similar setup to bring phone service to a 1,000-square-mile area surrounding Cima.

If the PUC approves its proposal, Ponderosa promises desert dwellers phone service as good as that enjoyed by their urban brethren--all for a basic residential rate of $17.85 a month.

Preston Ewing, general manager of Ponderosa, said it will cost the company $1.2 million--or about $4,500 per household--to make the system operational.

“We think those people have a right to phones,” Ewing said. Moreover, Ponderosa “sees growth out there in the desert, so this is something we feel we can make money at.”

Though Crommie predicts that there is “a better than 90% chance” the PUC will approve the application, at least one obstacle is holding up the process. Pacific Bell, the state’s telephone giant, has formally protested Ponderosa’s plan because the Fresno County firm’s proposed boundaries encompass two service “islands” operated by the larger utility.

Ponderosa wants to purchase the islands, which are located at Goffs and Lanfair and serve 18 customers, but Pacific Bell so far has not set a price or agreed to sell.

“We have protested . . . not because we are at war with Ponderosa but because we need time to look at the economics of this,” said Reed Royalty, regional vice president for Pacific Bell.

Royalty said that although Pacific Bell does not wish to serve the area coveted by Ponderosa--an undertaking he said would be “extremely difficult” and expensive--the utility has not yet determined whether selling the islands “is in the best interests of our company or our customers.”

Pacific Bell’s protest has locals hopping mad. Ausmus, a lifelong resident of the East Mojave, said he has been fighting for 30 years to bring telephones to the desert and has been flatly refused by Pacific Bell.

“Their bottom line is, helping us out would be of no benefit to their shareholders,” Ausmus said. “But then when Ponderosa offers, they oppose it. That doesn’t go over real good with me.”

Environmentalists, meanwhile, could place another hurdle in Ponderosa’s path. In the past, wilderness advocates have protested the construction of communications towers, arguing that their placement on mountaintops ruins the desert’s dramatic scenery.

For the people of the East Mojave, such roadblocks are aggravating. They’ve been waiting forever for phones, and every day, it seems, they discover yet another reason they need contact with society at large.

Kay Tucker misses talking regularly with friends and relatives in her native Canada, while Henry and Georgia Smith worry about making the 20-mile trek to the nearest public phone should medical problems arise.

Fred Neuberger, a grizzly gold and silver miner who lives alone near his claim in the Ivanpah Mountains, has similar worries.

“I don’t mind the isolation out here, but living without a phone is just murder,” said Neuberger, 73. “My work is dangerous, and if I should fall or get bit by a snake, what would I do? Nobody’d know till it was too late.”