Life, unplugged

A hot weekend afternoon, and first one wasp, then another, were battering the inside of the windowglass in my shed. Just the buzzing of their wings, and the delicate Morse code tap, tap of their hard wasp bodies against the glass.

The door was open, but the sun was on the window side of the shed. So they kept tapping, even though nothing was changing and they weren’t getting one little bit closer to outside.

I feel that way a lot, except the tapping sound I make involves clicking away on computer keys. The glass is there on the monitor, and I tap against it, sometimes just as futilely. Often, just as constantly. Fairly regularly, though, I get to escape to something that is harder and harder to find: a place that’s on the grid electrically, but off — well off — the communications superhighway. Cell coverage used to be close to non-existent: no Wi-Fi or cable connections, the only line in an old-school telephone landline that no one ever called. We’ve even dropped the landline now.

But taller cellphone towers are spreading their reach into my signal-less preserve, and, while I know that’s all kinds of good for all kinds of people, I’m actually pretty sad about it.

Even though there’s something unnerving about a phone with no bars and no way to find a signal, there’s something quite wonderful about it, too.

In fact, I recommend a good long dose of it, especially if you’re in a business that dips you daily into hundreds of emails and the endless rotation of the social media churn.

I think that the e-world is destroying our ability to concentrate, and certainly our ability to see things. We flit from fact scrap to fact scrap, our brains full to the brim with all of them, but without any sense of having learned anything of value.

Take the time to completely disconnect, and you’ll be surprised about what you can see again, and might have forgotten all about.

The grouse chicks near the road have grown large enough to fly now, but still burst into motion — they used to run, cheeping, before they learned their wings — as soon as you get close, noisily and startlingly bouncing into the air, for all the world like alarmed and flight-enabled Pomeranians.

I think that knowing that is just as important as knowing that Peter from China wants to stock my store (What store?) with his high quality love doll: “Our products are China’s best and most lifelike Realistic Love Dolls. We sincerely hope to co-operate with you. The key is that you do not need to keep inventory.”

Right now, the simple roses are in full bloom — they are dropping their scented petals into brooks, and every now and then, a small widening pool will be ringed with fallen petals, large-form confetti looking for the wedding.

That’s more important, isn’t it, than the next enraged Tweet?

There are black guillemots with red feet nesting in nearby cliffs, the almost-full-sized chicks making an unearthly hollow whistle, a truly haunting sound in the still of early morning. It’s a 45-minute climb up to the high ground near the sea just to find them, and horror of horrors, while I’m there, the attention-getting buzz of my phone interrupts, deluging me with unimportant messages. The towers have found me.

So off in the land away from the cellphone towers, I switch my phone to airplane mode to let it stop endlessly trying to connect to any possible distant network. I can still take photos, but it lets the phone’s battery live longer.

I think it might let me live longer, too.

“It’s a 45-minute climb up to the high ground near the sea just to find them, and horror of horrors, while I’m there, the attention-getting buzz of my phone interrupts, deluging me with unimportant messages. The towers have found me.”