Before my partner began the long RV journey, we bought an
extra cell phone and made sure that we could call each other easily. ICE
numbers and contacts were added to the phones. We each had copies of the
phones’ manuals. We were confident that we would stay in touch daily. What
could go wrong?
It worked well as he drove from California through Nevada
and Utah. Then he didn’t call for four days, and I panicked when he didn’t
respond to my voice-mail messages. Had he had an accident? Was he ill? Had
someone hijacked the RV? The temperature in Utah was over 100 degrees—had he
been overcome by heat while boondocking? My imagination is better than my
common sense when it comes to disasters.
At last he called, blissfully oblivious to my worry. He had
been camped near Dinosaur National Monument, out of cell phone range, and in a small campground where the pay phone didn’t
work. He had simply assumed I would realize he was traveling through an area
with numerous dead zones and might not be able to call often.
There is a problem here, aside from the obvious Men from Mars/Women from Venus difference. Before cell phones became ubiquitous, no one expected to stay in
contact with others under all circumstances. Occasional long-distance calls and
postcards were enough. Now we demand instant access to our friends and business
associates. One woman I know says her pet peeve is people who turn on their
cell phones only to make calls! I can hardly blame them for wanting to be
untethered. Must we always be available for anyone who wants to reach us and
doen’t even want to bother with voice mail?
When other RVers heard my story, they sympathized, but with
some I also detected an attitude of annoyance that we didn’t have some
higher-tech communication system. They seemed to feel that GPS, satellite
devices, and God only knows what else are essential for the good life in an
RV. I disagree. Though my anxiety would have been allayed, my partner would
have spent too much time fiddling with electronics instead of studying the
dinosaur fossils that were very important to him. He might just as well have
watched television at home.
Fifty years ago the English actor Dirk Bogarde starred in The Servant,
a powerful psychological film about how the roles of master and servant were
reversed. It was primarily a comment about the English class system, but I also
interpreted it another way: When we depend too much on a servant like
technology, it may become dominant over us. I had depended too much on our cell
phones in this instance, and was betrayed by the many dead zones. Others go off
too far into the wilderness carrying gadgets that can broadcast their latitude
and longitude, and risk injury or death; or they depend on a ghostly voice in
the RV to tell them which way to turn, and it gives them bad advice.
There is also some research indicating that using too much
technology is harmful to the creativity and thinking skills of both adults and
children. We need to retain our abilities to memorize, to imagine, and to make
simple calculations without relying on computers.
I am no Luddite, and have no desire to return to life
without my laptop computer and cell phone. On the other hand, I need to keep
them in their place as tools to be used with discretion. I can live with some
uncertainty in return for not being burdened with too much technology.
