I like a campfire for its technological simplicity. Pile up some sticks. Crumple up some newspaper. Light it. Stand back. Watch it smolder out. Curse and repeat until you have a roaring fire, or you burn down the forest after resorting to gasoline.
Simple. Technology-free. Back to basics. Analog in a digital world. So different from everything else in our lives. Our technology-saturated and digitally-dependent lives.
No app on my iPhone will start that fire.
My family and I spent a week in a cabin in Blowing Rock, N.C. It was a re-charging, liberating, technology-freeing experience. A gurgling little stream rolled through the property. Cell phones barely worked there. It was back to basics time. Well, certain basics. We didn’t have to shoot a moose for dinner or forage for pine nuts. But most of my modern-day cares melted away. For once, technology wasn’t omnipresent.
That wasn’t the case on the way in. On the road, all I thought about was how much technology had changed the monotonous haul for the better. How road trips had been vastly improved by devices and satellites and anything with “Mac” stamped on it.
Like satellite radio. Who needs terrestrial radio when you can get music from the stars! Anything you want. Anywhere you want.
The radio on long trips used to be the pits. My memories of childhood rides to the Rockies or the Sierras in California were of my finger glued to the radio scan button in a desperate dash through endless static. I couldn’t stand country western stations or R.C. Cola and Moonpie commercials.
Today there is also GPS and my iPhone. What a Godsend. The kid starts asking if we’re there yet and I just toss her the device and say, “Ask Siri.”
“Siri, are we there yet?” I hear behind me.
“NO!” comes the annoyed robotic voice. “Now stop asking.”
Wonderful technology!
But at the cabin, most of it faded away. Some we had to give up — no signal! — and others just became obsolete. Not so necessary or desirable when there were streams to cross or lightning bugs to watch. News apps didn’t matter when a
wild turkey and her baby strolled by. Look, a chipmunk!
My daughter asked for trails, not screen time. The bigger, the muddier, the more boulder-strewn the better. “I don’t consider this a hike,” she said about a trail the guidebook called moderate to strenuous. “I need something more challenging.”
What a mountain kid.
After a week I was dreading returning to it all. The ever-present email. The always-reachable cell phone. The multi-tasking. The TVs and iPads. How life today means staring at a screen, not staring at the real world.
But I’m hoping to take away a new perspective. A realization of what’s really important, and how you can’t let technology rule your life so much. How you have to stop and look around once in a while. Notice things right in front of you. And to enjoy simple things in life, like that stubborn-to-start campfire.