In the last year I’ve done
something that deeply offends some of my small-town neighbors:
I’ve acquired a cell phone.
Back when I was among
the land-lined gentry, I used to think a cell phone was a
reflection of lifestyle. People with mobile lifestyles — you
commute to work, step out to meetings, travel to customer sites,
and wander the city for a social life — need mobile phones. People
like me — I work at home, and if I’m not there or at the
coffee shop or microbrewery, I probably don’t want to be
found — don’t need the extra expense.
When I
traveled to an urban environment, I usually wished I had a cell
phone. When I returned home to my small town, I usually
didn’t care. But then my wife and I remodeled everything in
our house except my office — moving out for six months in the
process — and suddenly my life straddled two locations. I wanted
telephones in both, and the cell was clearly the best option.
Since acquiring that cell phone, however, I’ve
realized it’s not just a matter of lifestyle and convenience.
It’s one of philosophy.
My friend Gary travels far
more than I do, and admits he hates the extra hassle of finding a
pay phone, checking his messages, and hoping that in returning a
message he isn’t setting off a game of phone tag. But he
refuses to get a cell.
A nature writer, Gary has a
well-documented catalog of stories of people requesting
inappropriate wilderness rescues. On a very basic level,
they’re not taking responsibility for themselves (your feet
hurt? Call a helicopter!). But on a deeper level, Gary says, even
if you don’t use it, bringing the cell phone into the
wilderness implies a fear of solitude, which he sees as the very
reason to go to the wilderness.
I agree with him, and so
I don’t take my phone into the wilderness. (Actually, a
couple of weeks ago I did. Forgot to clean out my pockets before
leaving. Luckily for me, in the wilderness there was no reception
and the phone turned itself off.)
My friend, Anne, is
also a fan of solitude. “A thought need not be expressed,” she
says. “It can just sit in your mind, as a thought.” With the
ability to be in constant contact, any time you have a thought,
you’re tempted to call someone to express it. Even when
you’re not in the wilderness, the cell phone leads you to
absurd levels of over-cautiousness (“Now just in case…”) and
over-vigilance (“Now don’t forget…”).
Anne
lives a simple life, pared of nonessentials and full of commitments
met. Even with just a landline, she finds many of her incoming and
outgoing calls unnecessary: “too soon, too mad, too needy, too,
too, too…”
That simplicity is one of the big draws
of the small town, why Anne is happier here than she was in the
city. No wonder she mistrusts the cell: It’s the tool of that
city, come to haunt her. But the other day a cell-phone incident
reminded me of another such draw, another way this tool detracts
from our small-town life.
I was in the coffee shop when
my cell phone rang. (Actually, it buzzed. I have it set almost
permanently on stun.) It was my friend, Steve, so I decided to
answer it, but as soon as I did I felt bad. Steve was calling to
set a time to meet at the microbrewery, and I tried to respond
softly so as not to interrupt the other patrons. But if I
wasn’t going to be fully invested in the conversation, why
not just play phone tag?
Meanwhile, I’d been pulled
out of the coffee-shop environment. I’d lost focus on what I
was reading, was no longer aware of who sat at adjacent tables, had
intentionally broken the community connection of that place. And
for what?
Part of the simplicity of the small town is its
total immersion. Your neighbors are also your co-workers, and your
golf buddies, and your waitresses and plumbers. So you don’t
flit among multiple settings, you don’t multitask among
multi-communities. As in the wilderness, you take on increased
responsibilities to heighten a certain solitude, in this case a
shared solitude of this tight-knit community isolated from a crazy
world.
I still have my cell phone, I still like its
convenience on the rare occasions when I’m moving around. But
in a small town, I’m continually reminded that connectivity
comes in multiple forms, and sometimes we need to let the others
ring more loudly.
John Clayton is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He
answers the phone in Red Lodge, Montana.
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