COLUMN: Leave the phone at home
These days it seems like everybody is important enough to be carrying around a cell phone. They are modern day status symbols, and I’ll admit, folks look cool in the checkout line when they bust out the newest palm-of-your-hand device and begin arguing with their wife.
It’s nearly impossible to get away from the annoying song that acts as a ringer. The sound is ubiquitous – breaking the silence and concentration of the movie theater, the classroom and yes, the wide open spaces.
There’s nothing like the great outdoors. The feeling of stepping off the trail and scrambling up a mountainside toward the lonely summit. You are pushing the limits, getting deeper and higher than ever before. The only sounds are your labored breathing, the howling winds and someone saying, “Yes dear, it’s beautiful up here, I’ll be home in time for TV dinners.”
I hate cell phones. I’ll never own one for any reason ever. But hey, some folks need them for jobs or families or whatever. I can dig it man, no problem. If you want to be connected to your daily grind no matter where you go, that’s just fine with me. But when it comes to cell phones in the wilderness, I must draw the line. Leave them at home.
When I lived in Colorado, the only thing that made me want to puke more than a bulldozer ripping up another mountain meadow was the sight of a bunch of yuppies hiking up a remote trail with cell phones attached to their hips. Are you expecting an important call? An investment opportunity that is so hot you have to make some quick cellular Internet transactions right now at 11,000 feet above sea level? Don’t you ever want to ‘get away from it all’ and enjoy your basic human existence?
Perhaps you like to bring those cellular contraptions with you in case of an emergency. If you get lost or sprain an ankle then you know help is just a phone call away. Safety first right? Just call Search and Rescue and they’ll have a team of strong men there in no time to carry you back to civilization.
Unfortunately, this false sense of security causes more problems than it solves. It results in folks ignoring avalanche conditions or impending storms because they think if a problem arises (such as snow slide entombment) then all they need to do is call 911 and everything will work out.
But there are deeper issues at work here. As the stresses and strains of our modern military- industrial-technological complex threaten to overwhelm our sanity and our planet, it’s important some places remain truly wild. It’s good to have hills to run to, a place where elk and mountain lions can continue to kill and be killed without the taint of acid rain or parking lots. Empty spaces where God’s will (evolution) can take place without a bunch of fat-headed bipeds trying to “manage” it.
Humans (like me) tromping through the last remaining American wildernesses are bad enough, all those fancy backpacker stoves belching fumes into the thin air and our Twinkie-laden feces fouling up the headwaters. But throw a cell phone into the mix and our presence becomes unconscionable, a sacrilege worthy of flogging.
Ed Abbey’s answer to the question “Why wilderness?” was this: “Because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.” If you bring a cell phone into the remaining islands of Western wild lands you will never know what true wilderness is.
To be faced with the possibility of slow and painful death is the ultimate sense of freedom. Cut off from NBC and ABC and Sprint PCS, all by your lonesome, and then you stumble upon a fresh cougar track. No 911 to call and beg forgiveness, no Marlboro Man to ride in and save your shivering bag of bones. Only the wind, the coming night and the cold, hard reality of existence.
A cell phone changes all of this. It maintains a thread of contact with the world of nuclear power and space heaters. Even if you don’t touch the thing, it will change the psychological matrix of your wilderness experience 100 percent, resulting in not much more than a stroll through the local park: Picnics, Frisbees and overweight cops on 4-wheelers.
Have you ever heard the soothing sound of microchips shattering on granite? Next time you climb a mountain, throw your cell phone into oblivion. You’ll be glad you did.