You can’t run something like the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society and not be thought of as something of a “nut-job”. Fair enough. One of my many psychoses involves a sort of “survivor guilt”. I’m troubled terribly that everyone else died in the trenches during WWI and I didn’t. I also didn’t get killed storming a beach on D-Day in 1944 and nor did I get massacred during close-quarter combat in either Korea or Vietnam. Mainly, perhaps, because I was born some years after most of these wars had burnt themselves out.
Nonetheless, it was whilst reading some “Stalingrad porn” that I became interested in the region called Kalmykia. On their way to ultimate destruction on the banks of the Volga, the German 6th army had to cross the vast grassland desert called the Kalmyk Steppe. Its endless undulating emptiness sapped the will of the columns of soldiers traversing it. Then when it rained it turned instantly into evo-stik (TM).
Anyway, some armchair geography courtesy of Google (TM) and its very fine search engine turned up this photo. This, for me, hits the very essence of what I love about telegraph poles. Kalmykia is now #44 on my places-to-see-before-I-die list.
Thanks to Peace-on-earth.org (aka much-travelled photographer Len Gao) for letting me use the pic. See more from Kalmykia here.
