Disconnectivity happens

—for Jessy, with love, who inspired this post.

Ironically during last night’s repeat deluge of biblical proportions, well, OK, so a couple of inches, not like the last storm’s whopping 13 inches, a sweet young West Marinite posted how she was so anxious and afraid because last night there was no Wi-Fi or cell phone service, and apparently she needed some Facebook reassurance that all was well, having survived the grueling storm outage of November 7. 

I had to laugh. A little wind and rain. It’s not like the world was going to end in fire or flood last night. Sure, there were lots of downed trees dangling on power lines, playing them like basso profundo harp strings. A Comcast outage also affected most of Sonoma County as well. As long as there’s no raging wildfire, I told her to enjoy the silence. Haul out the candles, read a book. When disconnectivity happens, you can begin to hear yourself think. A rarity during this age of hyper-connectivity. She was a good sport, and took my ribbing well.

Believe it or not, some of us grew up in the San Geronimo Valley without Wi-Fi, or cell service—as neither had yet been invented. Well, that’s not quite true, the technology for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were invented during WWII. Indeed, when I was very young, we were without rotary dial-up phone service—which often works during a storm as it’s a separate system from the PG&E power lines. I remember the day we got a phone line. A party line is probably worse than no phone line at all. Mrs. Decker, who worked for Guide Dogs for the Blind, would get on the phone and talk for hours. So we couldn’t use the phone most of the time anyway. 

Luckily Old Man Latindorf at the end of the road who spoke a crisp, broken German-English, rarely used the phone. Nor did Old Man Larsen, who spoke a taciturn Norwegian. Neither one spoke English well. More like begrudgingly. They preferred the dark domain of their own inner confirmed bachelor thoughts. And Mary Bianchi spoke an odd mixture of Italian and English, her hands wildly semaphoring like racecar flags. For her, conversation was intrinsically tied up with feeding you—whether or not you were hungry was immaterial. We could identify everybody by voice. Sometimes there were heated exchanges when somebody wanted to use the phone. But we all knew each other, so some civility ensued.

I won’t mention a lack of television reception in the valley either. No cable this far out. it just wasn’t worth it to lay cables for us outliers. Not enough money in it for Viacom. The Stones got TV reception by climbing the tallest Doug fir and planting an aluminum aerial on top of it. And the long copper and plastic antenna wire that looked like a tiny railroad track to the house was the weakest link. But when the crows and bluejays partied on the aerial, or the wires, the reception went south. 

We were in a cul-de-sac box canyon so unless the wind blew a certain way, and the clouds were otherwise preoccupied with their horoscopes, there was no way we could ever get reception—no matter where we stuck the damned aerial. Our neighbors had a little better luck as they were more exposed so they could pick up some TV reception. Not that that there was much of anything to watch. Something that people today don’t grasp. They can watch anything they want. But let’s just say we got three, maybe four stations, sort of, and often during bad weather, all of them were filled with snow. Not real snow. Just electronic snowstorms emanating from the outer regions of Alpha Centauri.

I kind of miss those unplugged days of yore. Yeah, I get it that we all want to be connected, via the Marshall McLuhan global village. And of course, there is always the danger of what might, or could go wrong! But sometimes the silence and isolation is the best thing about the Valley. It’s what made us so radically different from those townies who lived over the hill. 

However, I can’t help but think of that poor woman who went off the road into a ditch between Dickson Ranch and Flanders Ranch and died because she couldn’t get 911 cell phone reception. And that is why we have a cell tower on the top of Mt. Barnabe.  And I sure wouldn’t give up that connectivity during wildfire season. 

Ironically I don’t even own a smart phone. I use my iPad exclusively for communication. So I am very much invested in cellular connectivity too even if I’m older than dirt. I know, I know, resistance is futile. Yet, still I resist. Isn’t it synchronistic that I electronically wrote and posted all this on Heddy Lamarr’s birthday? She, who invented Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, I kid you not.

“Hedy Lamarr, a remarkable inventor who devised a system for remote-controlling torpedoes that became the basis for bluetooth and wifi.”