Hi Paul and all,
I enjoyed the mention of pay phones, which have become an endangered species
since the 1980s. If you can find even one today, chances are that it's been
vandalized and no one noticed for the past couple of months.
As recently as 2012 I used a pay phone in Mitchell to call home during trips
for CBCs, BBS routes etc. Mitchell was a no-go zone for cell phones until local
businesses and residents stitched together a land-line based hotspot for
Verizon cell phones. There are still large areas of Wheeler County where
cellular network reception is a modern myth, ditto for southeastern Lake County
and neighboring parts of Nevada. Your coverage may vary depending on whether
you have a 2g, 3g or 4g phone.
When you get to Hart Mountain, there are just a handful of spots where
volunteers can go to connect with the outside world. In winter, one of the
warmest of those is what we call the "Group W Bench," with W standing for wifi.
You have to trudge about 150 yards over ice and snow, being careful not to slip
and drop your portable device. Once you get there, there's room for up to three
people at a time. The best spot is at the left end of the bench so during busy
periods, as one person leaves, everyone else slides over. But busy periods are
rare. Usually you have the bench to yourself, with just a couple of pronghorn
skulls staring back at you from the opposite wall. Every so often the fan for
the furnace in the basement of that CCC-constructed stone building kicks in and
the whole floor vibrates enough to confuse the overly sensitive touch-screen on
my netbook, which is why I didn't try to send a report of our results from
there.
At Sheldon NWR in northernmost Nevada, there are no wifi hotspots but this year
one volunteer from Reno was able to get reception on his smartphone, and was
using it to check eBird and the NVBIRDS listserv. We heard regular updates on
the Groove-billed Ani that's still being seen in the far corner of the state,
also a couple of sketchy eBird RBAs that I think turned out to be erroneous.
That's OK, it's not like any of us were of the mind to jump in the car and
drive 500+ miles to go look for them.
After that fellow went to bed and until he got up again, we were in an
information blackout. So we didn't hear definite word on the federal government
shutdown that evening, until we got up the next morning and were cleaning up
the bunkhouse. I suppose we could have hopped in the car and driven half a mile
or so up the grade to where we could tune in the station that carries Rush
Limbaugh, but why ruin the evening and disturb the jackrabbits?
Back in the 1980s, there were a lot of places like that (and blessedly without
that brand of talk radio, though some people did complain about areas where you
could only get country-western music and occasionally Wolfman Jack, late at
night).
I wasn't dialed into birder networks at the time, so I never worried about
finding a pay phone if I'd seen an interesting bird, nor did I worry that I was
missing something that someone else was seeing 5, 50, or 500 miles away. I
could hike 15 miles into the Pasayten Wilderness without seeing a single other
soul, and listen to Spruce Grouse hooting after a rainstorm. Or stumble into a
large stand of massive old-growth after picking huckleberries while enjoying
close views of "Winter" Wrens and MacGillivray's Warblers, and never even
consider telling someone about it until I got back home. The big worry back
then was nuclear war. I figured that I wouldn't need any news reports to know
if that was happening, and the other news could wait.
You can still do those things today, though those large old-growth stands are
much harder to find and you'll seldom have one to yourself. Sadly that's
something that today's teenagers and 20-somethings will never experience, in
the way that we were able to 40 years ago. Even along trails through wilderness
areas, chances are you'll run into someone who's been checking their phone at
every opportunity, maybe even blogging their journey as they go.
I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's a different kind
of experience, just as people of our age can't truly imagine what it was like
for David Douglas when he ventured up the Willamette Valley in 1832, without
even a telegraph network, let alone pay phones to call home.
I don't really like to think about what things will be like in 2032, let alone
2060. Likely communications about rare birds will be even more immediate, and
that will make some people very happy. But what kinds of natural experiences
will be left for the youngest kids of my nephews and nieces, who will be
teenagers then?
--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis
