Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [139]
This brings us to removing the tower’s supports and letting it fall on its own. That may be the easiest, and something even I could handle. The other tower, in the woods to the north, has about twenty guy wires. Everything I’ve read suggests these wires are even more deadly to birds than the towers themselves. Some places you can pick up dead birds by the handful beneath the wires. Their necks are broken, skulls cracked, wings torn, beaks mangled. But I also know what happens when high-tension wires are severed: those opposed to their own decapitation ought to be far away.
But there’s good news in all of this. There are giant bolts surrounding the base of the tower behind Safeway. I’d imagine they’re very tight, but for one of the few times in my life my physics degree might come in handy. Of course you don’t really need a physics degree to understand that if you want to unscrew a tight bolt all you need is a long lever arm on your wrench. Just as Archimedes said, “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world,” I’ll go on record as saying that if you give me a long enough lever arm I can unscrew any bolt in the world—oh, okay, maybe just a lot of bolts that are pretty damn tight. So a huge pipefitters wrench with a long metal pipe over the end to extend your lever arm might be enough to get you the torque you’d need to loosen the base (failing that, you could always cut the bolts instead of the tower itself: remember, always attack the weakest point!). Then walk away and wait for the next windstorm to do the trick.
Emboldened by the realization that this just might be doable, I make my way through the dense forest to the northern tower. I quickly find a path, which opens into a large meadow. The only problem is that this is the wrong meadow: no tower. So it’s back into the woods, this time on a game trail. Note that I didn’t say big game. Sometimes I crawl on my belly. I cross a mucky streambed and see prints of (very small) deer. Often I stop to pull Himalayan blackberry thorns from my shirt. A few times from my arms, hands, fingers, face. I realize that somehow a thorn has lodged in my heavy denim pants at the—how do I say this delicately?—very top of the inseam. With every step it scrapes against my, well, let’s just say extremely high on my thigh. Finally the path opens out again, and I’m there.
The first thing I do is thank the gods for making turnbuckles (actually that’s the second thing I do after taking the thorn out in my pants). Loosening the wires, and even undoing them, would be simplicity itself. There’s a lot of them, but security would be no problem here: forest surrounds this tower on all sides. Even the tower itself could be easily attacked: it’s made of a spindly grid of metal tubing. I could cut through the thing in an hour or two with a hacksaw. Someone with a torch could do it in minutes.
All this talk of taking down towers makes me wish I was a farmer, not only because the farmers I’ve known have generally been crackerjack mechanics—I was a farmer (commercial beekeeper) in my twenties, and learned to my dismay that most farmers spend far more time with machines than animals—but also because back in the 1970s a group of farmers called the Bolt Weevils were pioneers in the art and science of taking down towers. They specialized in towers with high-tension electrical wires.
It all started when the United Power Association and the Cooperative [sic] Power Association decided to put a 400 mile transmission line across Minnesota farmland between coal-fired generating stations in North Dakota and the industry and