Can’t Phone Home : Desert Folks Enjoy No Link to Outside--but It Has Its Perils

One night last June, a rattlesnake sank its fangs into Debbie Robinson’s hand while she was watering the lawn outside her desert home, about 25 miles northeast of Palmdale. As the deadly venom spread, the 43-year-old Robinson became dizzy and nauseated.

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Because her husband was away, Robinson had no one to turn to for help.

In fact, she was as alone as almost anyone can be: Robinson lives in one of the few outposts in Los Angeles County that still does not have telephone service.

“I had the shakes real bad,” Robinson recalled. “I knew that if I did nothing, I was going to die. If I’d had a phone, I could have dealt with it in a few minutes.”

Robinson’s life was saved because her husband pulled into the driveway just as she was going into convulsions. He drove her to the nearest pay phone--five miles away--and summoned paramedics. A helicopter whisked her to a hospital in Lancaster for anti-venom treatments.

Robinson, a bus driver, is just fine now, and more committed than ever to a longstanding campaign to get phone lines extended to the unnamed, rural area inhabited by about two dozen families along and near East Avenue O, the only paved road in the isolated neighborhood.

But the efforts of residents--living in domiciles ranging from the Robinson’s cozy, converted general store to run-down mobile homes--have been thwarted for more than 10 years by costly connection fees, bureaucratic bungling and squabbling among the neighbors themselves.

At a time when people all over the country are plugging their fax machines, modems and voice mail systems into the information superhighway, the Robinsons would settle for a simple dial tone.

“People say: ‘Where could you possibly live where there’s no phone?’ ” said Debbie Robinson’s husband, John, 44, a construction worker. “People just won’t accept it.”

“Everyone relates everyone to a phone number,” Debbie Robinson said. “If you don’t have a phone, you’re not worth much.”

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John Crutsinger came here in 1943, paying $30 an acre for a piece of the world that he thought would allow him to live a safe distance from urban life. He dug a well, built a house and moved from a neighborhood near Downtown Los Angeles.

“I wanted to get away from all that I lived with down there,” said Crutsinger, now 85. Even the few neighbors he now has are too many. And the thought of Palmdale being only a short drive away is no comfort. “Pretty soon, they all moved here anyway,” he said.

John Miller, 65, lives nearby with his wife, Cora, in a house that has three large boats in the yard. Miller, a former aerospace worker who moved to the area in 1985, said a Palmdale man paid him to store the vessels, then abandoned the boats and moved to Florida.

The Millers’ house is surrounded by a wall made of thousands of old automobile tires. The wall is there to keep out the sand and tumbleweeds, and to a certain extent, the outside world.

“Right now, what do you hear?” asks Miller standing in the yard. “Just the wind blowing.”

About the only intruders are dune-buggy riders and motorcyclists who sometimes trespass onto the property. He keeps a handgun close by.

“We don’t get trash (collection), we don’t get the telephones, we don’t get cable TV,” Miller said. “We don’t get a good response from the Sheriff’s Department. You have to be self-sufficient out here.”

The Robinsons moved here a decade ago, assuming phone service was available. “When we looked at the place, there was a phone book on the floor,” Debbie Robinson recalled. “We never gave it a second thought.”

In reality, people in the area had to drive to the nearest town, Lake Los Angeles, and use pay phones beside the Saddleback Market or Burger Basket to make calls.

When they asked the phone company about establishing service to their home, the Robinsons were told it would cost them $13,000 upfront just to have the lines extended. They and other residents have considered cellular phones, but they feel the fees are prohibitive.

Duane Filer, supervisor of the California Public Utilities Commission’s consumer affairs branch, has heard complaints from other residents of remote areas who do not have telephone service. But he dismisses arguments that telephone companies should automatically provide these neighborhoods with service.

“They moved out there,” Filer said, “so they’re going to have to pay the expense to bring service there.”

Pacific Bell and GTE officials say the few unwired neighborhoods that exist in Los Angeles County are mainly in the sparsely populated far northern desert areas.

If these residents ask for service, the phone companies will provide the first 750 to 1,000 feet of line for free. After that, they charge state-approved fees that add up to thousands of dollars per mile.

The utilities insist that they are only covering their labor and equipment costs. If they discounted these prices, they say, city and suburban customers would be subsidizing the cost of hooking up more isolated households--a practice the state Public Utilities Commission frowns upon.

The 1990 census found that only 3.4% of Los Angeles County’s 3.2-million households had no phones. The study did not determine how many households were in areas where no telephone service was available.

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Even the most die-hard of isolationists along East Avenue O now consider a telephone a necessity of life.

Relatives complain that they are too tough to contact. Employers must signal them via pagers or wait for them to call in. Suspicious cashiers are loathe to accept a check from a customer who has no home phone number.

A much more urgent reason to have a telephone is for medical emergencies. John Miller has undergone two heart bypass operations, and his health remains fragile. He says he sometimes passes out from overexertion while working in his yard. “I’d like to have a phone because I’m getting to the point where I’m scared,” he said.

To reduce the cost, he said he once offered to install the roadside phone lines himself, but the telephone company refused to let him.

An old-fashioned mobile phone system gives him limited access to the outside world. It occupies a corner of his living room, where the walls are adorned with black velvet sword-and-sorcery paintings, an Elvis Presley clock and a framed Elvis Presley gold record.

The gold record was a birthday gift for his wife, an Elvis fan who commutes 25 miles to work as a Palmdale restaurant hostess. When she arrives or leaves work, she can signal her husband through his pager, which costs $19 a month.

The Millers use their mobile phone, which is subject to interference from other radio sets, sparingly. Even so, their September bill was $102, and previous ones have topped $200.

Up the road, Crutsinger said he did not miss having a telephone until 10 years ago when his wife suffered a stroke and he had to send a friend for help. When he later asked the telephone company about getting hooked up, he said he was quoted a price of $22,000. “I couldn’t afford that,” Crutsinger said.

More recently, he tried a cellular phone for a month but found it far too expensive. “The bill was $225 or something like that,” he said. “I found out that every time you touch that thing, it costs you money. I turned it off.”

Crutsinger’s wife, who never fully recovered from the stroke, is now in a nursing facility in the Las Vegas area near their daughter. Crutsinger said that without a telephone, he cannot often check on her medical status.

After repeated inquiries, Pacific Bell offered in January to hook up 18 households in this area if all of the families signed up for service--and each kicked in $965 upfront.

Six months later, the plan was abandoned because only the Robinsons and five other families had paid.

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Debbie Robinson pressed the phone company to come up with a less ambitious proposal. A revised plan was devised, but there was confusion about just what it offered.

As the Robinsons understood the revised plan, they and three other families would each chip in about $4,300 to get the lines extended to their houses.

But in a July 15 letter, Pacific Bell announced that with these four families paying the costs, telephone service would be extended to all 18 households. To those not able to afford the hookup fees, this was a godsend.

Dorothy Kubon, who lives off a dirt road just west of Crutsinger’s house, raises dachshunds and nurtures a rock and cactus garden. She relies on a citizens band radio when she needs help.

“We’re not out here because we’re loaded,” Kubon said. “We’re just average yokels.”

Another resident who would have gotten a free phone hookup was Humberto Moro, a sewing machine repairman who speaks limited English. His daughter, college student Katia Moro, said phone service would be a big help because family members now have to hurry to the pay phones when traffic accidents occur near the house.

But the Robinsons and the other paying families were outraged that they were expected to subsidize the establishment of telephone service, and they refused to pay.

“Have you ever wanted something really bad, and you could finally afford it--but only if you bought one for everyone else on the block?” Debbie Robinson fumed.

After inquiries by The Times, Pacific Bell said it had misunderstood the intentions of the paying families and that the July 15 letter was in error. The company sent a technician back to the desert to recalculate the cost of running lines only to the Robinsons and the other households willing to pay for the installation.

Their most recent proposal puts the total cost at $14,150. So far, the only ones willing to pay a share of that are the Robinsons, the Millers and Crutsinger. That comes to about $4,700 per household.

It’s a steep price for the Robinsons, but Debbie Robinson said she is determined to get the funds, even if they have to take out a loan.

“One way or another,” she said, “I’m going to get a phone.”