British Horse Society
NagMag
Horseytalk.net is now on Twitter
Francis Whittington - Eventing
Rider Rights Hotline
Advertise an Event with Us
Equine Answers -Horse Supplements
Would you like to pay a tribute to Claude
Send us your stories and memories.
And photographs, if you have any.
Horseytalk.net Special Interview
Claude Desmarais

www.vtdigger.org

Working together.
Old technology and new technology. Draft horses bringing fibre optics to remote locations

Working together. Old technology and new technology. Draft horses bringing fibre optics to remote locationsFor over three decades Claude Desmarais has been laying line with draft horses.

Fred has been on the job for five years now.
VTD/Eric Blokland >>

Two miles above the village of Greensboro Bend on Stannard Mountain in New Hampshire a crew of linemen for FairPoint Communications takes a break. A garter snake slinks around the rear wheel of a work truck parked on sparsely-populated Norway Road. One of the linemen picks up the snake by its tail. It wriggles as he brings it close to Claude Desmarais, a 67-year-old lineman who stands over six feet tall.

Desmarais remarks that he has no plans - and no need - to retire from his work - which is negotiating tough terrain with his Belgian draft horse Fred. Snakes, however, give him the freaks.

"You don't get close to me with that snake," he says, a Kingdom lilt in his speech.

"What about Fred?" says the lineman, dangling the snake as he moves past Desmarais.

"Wouldn't bother him," says Desmarais. "Just me."

Fred, the draft horse standing next to Desmarais, is unperturbed by the snake or much else. The muscled 1,700-pound cable-hauling Belgian is in full draft regalia. Studded leather flaps keep his eyes on the task at hand. A leather collar wraps around his neck, bearing the hames, or a frame from which the traces span Fred's torso and connect to an iron whippletree trailing behind.

The hames, now wrought from aluminum instead of the traditional wood, are about all the progress Desmarais has seen in draft horse technology since he started contracting with power and telecommunications companies over three decades ago.

"My part of it has always been the same," says Desmarais.

It's perhaps a fitting irony that Fred is the anachronistic vehicle for broadband installation in remote areas of the Northeast Kingdom.

For the moment, Fred walks around untethered, content to munch the grass that linemen occasionally pluck for him. Idling, he begins to toe the ground near a utility pole. Mud whorls behind his hooves. The linemen look on, amused: after a few more hesitant steps, Fred plunges into a mud puddle and rolls around.

"Guess he's hot," says Dave Hastings, the soft-spoken crew leader from Monroe, N.H.

Fred grazes his way among flowering Trillium and crab apple trees while Hastings' crew unsnarls a lasher, their primary tool for laying line. It's a metal cylinder the size of a block of firewood that binds newly-laid fiber-optic cable to an existing line strung between utility poles. After laying the fiber-optic cable along the ground, the crew works backward, sliding the lasher along the existing line 15 feet overhead to raise the new fiber-optic cable and secure it. When it jams or reaches a utility pole, the crew stops to run a ladder, or kick their way up the wooden poles using metal hooks bound to the insoles of their boots.

The difficulty of getting cable to "every last mile," is where Fred, the cable-carrying draft horse, comes in.

"Hopefully it pays off," says Hastings.

"We could maybe get a four-wheeler in here," he continues, gesturing to the cleared swath of boggy, fern-studded terrain that he's working in today. But definitely not a truck, and Fred's impact is nearly invisible. Residents rarely complain about a draft horse tromping through their yards.

As a so-called "telephone horse," Fred starts the morning by towing 48-fiber cable (so called because of the 48 individual strands of glass cables wound into an inch-thick band) from a massive spool on the rear of a FairPoint truck. Then he backtracks with the crew, drawing the overhead lasher along utility wires between poles. They pause frequently to jump poles and troubleshoot snags, and Desmarais, Fred's owner and handler, unhooks the whippletree from the lasher's line to let Fred wander.

Fred is 14, and he's been laying line for five years. Desmarais, who lives in Westmore, has laid line with draft horses for 31 years, and he learned to drive a team on his father's farm in Barton when he was young.

Working together. Old technology and new technology. Draft horses bringing fibre optics to remote locationsHe travels to Amish country in the Midwest at least once a year to appraise new equipment and buy a horse, if one catches his eye-as Fred did one year while Desmarais was in Indiana. Desmarais has four draft horses, another Belgian and two Percherons: a second team lays line for FairPoint elsewhere in the state.

Desmarais has never lacked for work, even as fleets of diesel utility trucks and versatile machinery became the standard for laying cable. And he's noticed a small resurgence in draft horses in Vermont recently. "More draft horses are coming around. People are starting to use them a little bit," he says.

<< A Fairpoint Communications lineman at work. VTD/Eric Blokland

Desmarais' current client hopes to wrap up with Fred by this June. "We're on schedule, or ahead of schedule," says Hastings. He's been working with Desmarais and Fred on broadband since April 2010, working 55 hours a week in the winter - "with the snow up to your belly button" - and around 70 hours during the longer summer light. On a good day, he says, they'll string 8,000 feet of cable.

Having hauled the lasher a couple hundred yards, Fred's again released to wander among the dandelions as Mike spikes his way up another pole. They'll go on like this, the FairPoint crew leapfrogging Fred and Desmarais and vice versa, all the way down Norway Road - or until dark falls. After a night's rest, they'll be up here again tomorrow for a 7:30 a.m. start. "I've been on three weeks now," says Mike. "I think I got a day off coming up."

A while later, just south of Morrisville on a busy Route 12, flaggers slow traffic. A FairPoint truck, its arm extended with a worker in the bucket, runs a lasher stringing new fiber-optic cable along the highway. The truck inches along, laying line no faster than Fred's plodding pace up on Norway Road.

Email this to a friend !!

Enter recipient's e-mail: