OK, you guys gave me some good suggestions. I looked at the poles on my property and the tags were illegible. Walked down the road and found a pole with this on it.
These gizmos are on the lines. Since there is no cable service out here, it must be phone lines.
Tried getting in touch with Verizon - good grief you would think they would want to know about an impending outage. But no. Since I'm not a Verizon land line customer I couldn't get through their firewall. It's only going to take a good windstorm and somebody is going to be out of service - but not me.
I've done my civic responsibility, gave it a good try, but I don't have the patience to try to deal with a phone company, especially not
MY phone company.