We live in the Texas Hill Country. It's a rural area, about 30 miles from a big city (San Antonio) and around 15 miles from a small town (Boerne). We love everything about our location, with two exceptions. One, both urban and small town sprawl are encroaching on our rural buffer zone, and two, the cell phone reception is lousy out here. There's not much we can do about One, but we have been steadily wishing that Two would improve.
Well, cell phone reception improvement is on the horizon - literally.
Our property slopes from front to back. Our rear property line is pretty close to being aligned with one edge of a flood plain. On the other side of the property line the flood plain stretches about 50 to 100 yards across a dry creek bottom, then the land begins to slope upwards. It continues up to form a ridge that is a few hundred feet in elevation above us. The ridge falls off on the other side into a small valley, and then the topography on the other side of the valley rises some more.
Think of it like an elongated W. We're the leftmost downward sloping leg. The middle peak is the ridge behind us, and the rightmost upward sloping leg is the land on the other side of the ridge.
The property behind us is a working ranch of several hundred acres. It's owned by a nice enough guy who, to his credit, is resisting the pressure to sell off the place to developers. However, in order to meet the rising property taxes he needs more and more cash. One of the ways he's found to raise some $$$ is to allow a cell phone tower to be built on his land
By now you can see where this is going. The tower is rising right behind our back porch, a couple of hundred yards away. It sits smack dab in what used to be a wonderful view of nothing but Hill Country landscape.
It could be worse, I guess. There could be a bunch of starter homes all crowded together sprouting on the adjacent hillside. Still, it's sad to see the loss of another small piece of God's country out here.
The ironic thing is that we were just considering putting a cellphone antenna and signal booster on our roof. Now we're getting our own personal cell phone tower.
Progress...
Sammiches.
16 hours ago
2 comments:
Any chance they would disguise the tower? Just down the road here, there is one of the really thick flag pole variety and a local church has one in a cross outside. Here are some great pictures.
We have a couple of towers on our distant horizons. Due to our trees, all we really notice is the flashing light at night.
I wish the new tower could be disguised like those, but it's a metal lattice tower that will be a hundred or so feet tall. It's so damn big and close that even disguised it would dominate the view - kind of like a giant redwood towering over the live oaks.
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