As my summer of camping continues into August, I’ve got to thinking about the technology that comes with me when I am out in the wilds. The ubiquitous phone is the most challenging thing to leave behind.
It is not really just a phone anymore, is it? It is my clock, camera, map, GPS, weather report, and, of course, connection with everyone and everything. Yet, one of the main reasons for getting out to the wilderness is to get away from all these things. Except the camera, of course. I do want to take an occasional photo for sharing when I get home.
The cellular connection now reaches just about everywhere I go. Just take a look at the coverage maps on the servers’ websites. There is not much in the grey area anymore. And even beyond the promised reception areas, I can get a signal from the scenic outlooks and across large bodies of water.
Text messages only need half a bar to send and receive.
Last week’s canoe trip started two hours north at the end of a gravel road. We paddled further north from there. I was not expecting to have any connection, so kept the phone on airplane mode. The battery was still nearly full after five days. I never even checked for messages until we were back in the car for the first hour. It was grand!
One advantage of my phone is that it is four-and-a-half years old. If I download Google Maps before I leave home, it will use the GPS to show me exactly where I am. I forgot to do the maps before I left. Which was not a problem, because we had lots of paper maps with us. I always knew exactly where we were.
However, the newer phones have lots of memory and can do more than show me where I stand. Last year, I had a phone full of air photos and an app that could track my every step. I lost that phone while in town during a snowstorm in February.
While exploring the lakeshore and forest last week, I thought about the fancy phone, and how I would have used it — to track our hikes, to see how long it took to get from one lake to the next, to link the photos to the maps, etc. I would have been tempted to look at the air photos instead of the landscape in front of me. I might have missed seeing the bear quietly nibbling on mountain holly berries along the shore as we paddled by.
We get so used to having unlimited information at our fingertips, we become addicted to the technology. Yet, I found that leaving the phone off made the trip into the wilds far more relaxing, far more satisfying.
After all, isn’t the whole point of getting away from it all to leave I.T. all behind?
Viki Mather has been commenting for Northern Life on the natural world and life in Greater Sudbury since the spring of 1984. Got a question or idea for Viki? Send an email to [email protected].
