I was hiking up the mountain the other day, but it was snowy, and I could only get so far.
That is not true. I could totally have gotten a lot farther if I hadn’t let my legs and lungs go for the last few years. However, the snow was getting to the two-inch mark, and I know how that goes—go around another bend, and it’s four inches, and then eight, and then, because your life doesn’t absolutely depend on it, you turn around and tell people it was too snowy to keep walking. I figured I might just as well cut out the middle-rationalizer and call it quits early.
I did mention to someone later that we don’t have cell coverage up on that mountain. She was horrified.
“What if you fall and break your leg out in the wild? What do you do then?”
I would be in a pickle, I suppose. Pickles are a thing people used to get into all the time. Fact is, pickles don’t always have a good outcome. I suppose I would holler for a while, and if nobody showed up, I’d try to pull some branches over me to stay warm, or I’d pull some sort of MacGyver number with a hiking pole, a wad of moss, and a vine I tore off with my teeth, only I don’t carry a hiking pole, and I’m not that clever, so I suppose I’d just sit there and get colder and colder and then warmer and warmer and then I’d die.
Because that’s how it used to be. For a million years people would trudge up that mountain with no cell phone and some of them would flat die. For a while during the middle Holocene they did have cell phones but eventually they quit using them because there were no cell phone towers yet. But a lot of them didn’t die at all, not till later when they died of not having vaccines or armor. There were all sorts of things to die from. Today all you can die from is boredom if you’re on a mountain with no cell phone towers and you can’t find anything to look at. If you take a selfie with duck lips and there’s nobody to send it to, were you actually cute?
I’m not opposed to progress, or having good tools. They’re all good additions to the kit, but something has been subtracted, too, now that we rely so heavily on our spooky tech. I use the navigation on my phone only as a last resort. I like to call up a map and study it for a while and then drive off to my destination. Something feels bad about not having that map in my brain, as though the space it used to occupy is now a vacant lot, with discarded words and scraps of knowledge tumbling across. Because of the awesome power of our devices and a strip-mined wad of rare earth metals, we are, at one and the same time, sage and helpless.
The worst part is that now it’s considered unthinkable to do things people thunk to do for thousands of years. Like walk uphill in the snow on breakable legs.
When yet another ancient ruin reveals a special slot where the sun shines only on the winter solstice, we marvel that our primitive forebears had sophisticated knowledge of astronomy. Well, no shit. There they are having to feed themselves and clothe themselves and otherwise keep the whole human operation going, and while trying to make sense of the whims of fortune, they’re going to pay attention and piece things together. They’re going to absorb the patterns in the swing of the stars. They’re going to track the departure of the birds and the arrival of the berries. They’re going to know a lot of things, a lot more than we do, and the metaphysical rest—fortune being as whimful as it is—they’ll make up out of the big broad sky.
All we’ve got is YouTube and the Deep State.
You know what a couple friends can do with cell phones on a mountain hike? They can take pretty pictures and talk to people all over the world. You know what they can do on a mountain hike with no cell coverage? They can talk to each other. It’s wild.
A few weeks ago, I tripped over the hose and did a slow-motion fall into a lovely old microbiota — a nice evergreen shrub that has soft, lacy needles. It was one of those tumbles as in a dream, where you seemingly have a moment to decide whether to continue falling or take off flying into the sky. I chose falling. I had a comfy landing. Laid there for a bit, discovered nothing amiss, and got back up. Later when I shared this story with friends, they were SHOCKED that I didn’t have my phone on my person. Well, I was raking leaves in the yard and didn’t need the phone banging around in my pocket.
I was given a stern lecture not to even THINK of leaving the house without my phone. Not to the mailbox, not to the henhouse, and especially not out in the wilds of the unpaved road that follows our stream through the woods where there’s no cell coverage.
See, this is a habit I’m glad I never picked up. Sumpin’ is wrong with this attitude. Of course at our age people are genuinely appalled because we could break a hip and then you die. Or something.
I fell over trying to help an older neighbor recently. She was trying to round up an inside cat that had run out the door, caught the cat, but lost her cane. I figured it would be no big problem to get her into her house. I move metal at work. How hard could it be to move a little woman?
Yup, we both ended up on our backs and the damned cat got away again! Somehow neither of us was hurt and after some maneuvering I got the cat into the house. That was a really big cat by the way!
Neighbors across the street were hallooing at us, but didn’t bother helping.
See if they got any video on their Ring.
That sounds like an assumption that everyone has Ring. I don’t.
No such assumption. But your neighbors across the street might! The point is: we want to see video.
Apparently, these days, if it’s not on video, it didn’t happen.
That’s so wrong, and so sad.
Since I am now 69, have arthritis in my left knee so that I don’t walk as well as I used to, and live alone, I always carry my phone on me. I NEVER used to carry it on me unless I was going out somewhere. I figured that If I missed someone’s call, we’d eventually get in touch later. Now, it’s not someone calling me, as that happens rarely. It’s that I may have to call someone in an emergency.
I have my phone in my pocket when I go into the attic for something, or go into the basement to get something from the freezer. I have it when I am working out in the yard. Also just going out to feed the birds or take out the trash. If something were to happen to me, it might be months before anyone found me. If they called or e-mailed me and I didn’t respond, they might just think I was busy and then forget all about it. Can’t rely on them seeing the mail or the newspapers piling up. Two of my neighbors have keys to my house, plus my alarm code, just in case I have to call them in an emergency.
It fucking sucks being the “surviving spouse.”
I tried getting in the habit of keeping my phone next to the bed at night but couldn’t even manage to remember that after a few nights. I do carry my phone more often now but that’s because it takes such good pictures!
I wonder if we should have a Murr Call Tree in case of a pause in communications that concerns any of us…
“…you’re on a mountain with no cell phone towers and you can’t find anything to look at.” I pity those people, and they’re everywhere!
A friend shared her game with me this weekend while we were on a short walk together. She calls it “Channeling My Inner Peace” in which she takes and shares pictures of her shadow giving the V/Peace Sign while cast upon interesting surfaces. A very fun way to look at one’s surroundings, hunting out just the right configuration of burls on tree trunks (and what was that tiny black and white bird skittering about on the branch above?), or anything else unusual.
I like it!
Living in Australia 99% of my life I have zero experience with snow, but I can tell you for sure that duck lips are NOT cute. I see these women in photos and they look ridiculous. Especially when they suck in their cheeks as well. People should stop doing that.
And your basic pucker at my age looks like a topo map.
My step daughter gave her mother some kind of emergency device to wear. I kind of scoffed because I didn’t think she was old enough to need one. Well, she went out one night to get something out of her car, not wearing the device, and fell and couldn’t get up. She kept hitting the alarm button on the car key fob, but nobody ever came to check it out so she spent the night on the ground in front of her house. People always ignore those alarms now that they’re ubiquitous. The moral for me is to keep the ability to get yourself up off the ground as you get older.
A friend used a wheeled walker. She’s in her upper eighties with extreme osteoporosis, head slumped to one side, but gets around very well with the walker. Seems to provide more support than a cane.
I have lots of training in getting up off the ground since I tip over so easily.
There’s no way to post a video here
You keep mentioning your tipsy-ness, but there’s never been a story or even a suggestion of why this occurs.
Inattention, I think.
Well, there is one thing in life that is positively assured — you will die! Sometime, somewhere. – it’s just inevitable. (I think!) The trying to fix it so that YOU will make the decision re when and where is in my opinion a fool’s errand — casting no aspersions please understand. Not to demean common sense but at least in my life it doesn’t seem to work that way. God ‘ill gat ya every time! Blessings to you all.