The Hassles of the Simple Life

Even in this complicated age, rural America isn’t necessarily the best place to be.

A schoolmate from my days growing up in Palm Springs, Mary Jo Stephens Churchwell, recently sent me her book, “The Cabin on Sawmill Creek,” about living 13 years in a rustic cabin in the Idaho Rockies.

“There are all kinds of costs nowadays having nothing to do with old-fashioned, simple survival,” Churchwell writes. “There are taxes on property, goods and gasoline. There are fees for license plates, for firewood collecting, for hunting and fishing.”

Yet, Churchwell’s family still managed to keep their 1994 expenses at what they called their “Western Walden” to a rock-bottom $2,355, of which $676 went to taxes, government fees and state-required auto insurance. It reminded me of the teenager who drove my daughter and me across the Oregon line a few years ago from Yreka, Calif. His parents left Long Beach and bought a Yreka service station. He loved the hunting around the town.

“But hunting isn’t the same,” he lamented. “The license costs so much, and there are so many restrictions.”

He felt they might be suitable for the state’s urban inhabitants, but they seemed burdensome for the rural ones. Well, I just visited West Texas’ Big Bend country, another sparsely populated area, and there, telephone rules and postal routes ordered from afar aren’t making things easier. Maybe a dispensation is in order for West Texans too.

When it comes to telephone systems, no matter where we look in America these days, not much seems what it’s supposed to be. Big Bend National Park on the Rio Grande, for example, has only 11 pay phones. Now, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission, the Texas Public Utilities Commission, the Big Bend Telephone Co. and Midessa Communications, costs for using these phones have increased.

In most of the country, those calling 800 or 888 numbers find they are truly toll-free. And those seeking access to their calling card companies can obtain it for nothing. Not so in Big Bend country. Toll-free or access calls are met with a recorded demand that the caller first deposit 25 cents.

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I hope this doesn’t spread. FCC edicts convinced Big Bend Telephone Co., which serves just 16,000 customers scattered across 18,000 square miles, to quit operating its pay phones on a month’s notice. Midessa Communications, of Midland, Texas, ended up the only bidder to replace them. It instituted the new charges. How could this be, when officials at both the FCC and the Texas PUC say it is illegal to charge people anything for toll-free or access calls at the phones themselves?

As usual, the answer is that there are laws, sure, but enforcing them is often something else. I talked to two officials at the FCC. As usual with federal employees, they didn’t want their names used. But they pointed out that when the FCC issued pay phone rules pursuant to the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, it ordered long-distance carriers to reimburse pay phone owners 28.4 cents for each toll-free call.

“Unfortunately, the FCC has lost twice in court on that amount,” one said. “We have nonetheless made clear the long-distance companies are obligated to pay that amount until the matter is resolved.”

But are they paying it?

An FCC enforcement man asserted, “Most of the big carriers are paying. But all payments are not being made, and there is a three- to six-month lag.”

Harry Crawford, owner of Midessa Communications, insisted the situation is worse.

“It often takes nine months to get anything,” Crawford said. “And many never pay.”

So Crawford, unapologetically, is charging the 25 cents for toll-free calls and calling-card access. As for the Texas PUC coming after him, as a spokeswoman said it might, Crawford snorted: “If it becomes a nonprofit situation, you will not find a pay phone in Big Bend to use, because I’ll pull them out in a second.” And he warned that if I kept up my inquiries, I could wind up “hurting a lot of people” by costing them their telephone service.

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At Big Bend National Park, park aide Phil Cuevas said he had been told that it would be two years before adequate equipment is available to track without error which long-distance carrier was transmitting a specific 800 call, so they could accurately be charged. At the Texas PUC, spokeswoman Leslie Kjellstrand said, “We’re a small agency, 230 people in all, with no offices outside Austin. So, we can’t go out and monitor the 150,000 pay phones in Texas.”

But, she added, the state’s PUC solicits complaints and has begun “quality-check patrols” to follow up.

At the FCC, the officials said that if there is truly no way for pay phone owners to make ends meet, the Telecommunications Act provides for public-interest pay phones. The states are responsible for doing an evaluation, they explained. Where pay phones are necessary and not profitable, the state can set up subsidized service and bill the general public pro rata.

Wonderful! And while I was in Texas, I read that parts of the state are suffering very slow intercity mail deliveries because of the ZIP Code distribution system.

Sanderson is 121 miles from Del Rio, for instance, and it used to take only a day to deliver mail from one town to the other. But now it takes five to seven days, because Sanderson mail for Del Rio must go west to El Paso, then east to San Antonio, and then back west to Del Rio, and vice versa. The 121 miles become 1,031, plus two extra transfers.

“Many years ago, we had a district truck that went direct,” says Liz Castellano at the Sanderson Post Office. “Now some persons drive their mail themselves to Dryden [21 miles nearer to Del Rio]. That’s the ZIP Code divide.”

Isn’t modernization great!

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Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060, or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com