No reception - #128

Living where no one can reach you.

Somewhere in the tumble of blankets in the other room is my phone. I’ve been sleeping with it shoved under the pillow I use to hold my hips in place, lest I roll onto my back in the middle of the night and find that I can’t breathe because the baby is directly on top of some important blood vessels. My sleep schedule now is such that I wake up at 2am, 5am, and 6am to pee, and while many times I drift back to sleep easily, 5am and 6am have proven to be more difficult. This is when I turn to the phone. 

Sometimes I’ll play Sudoku or Spider Solitaire, sometimes I'll see who of New York Twitter already has something to say — there’s no real agenda other than boredom. I’m trying to fall back asleep, after all. But in the morning, the actual morning when I finally get out of bed for good, the phone is left wherever I last gave up on it. 

Thousands of days of DuoLingo, endless streaks of Wordle, and morning message clean-up all used to be part of my routine but lately I’ve been thinking about screen time — lately, for the millionth time. But this time there’s a new urgency: namely that like most aspiring parents, I’d like to have a better relationship with screens before I tell a baby they can’t have a relationship with them at all. 

Like every generation, I’m comfortable letting my kid have what I had with some caveats. Sure, you can watch some TV. Sure, eventually you can play some video games. But a tablet? A phone? They’ve proven to be insidious enough for me that of course I’m feeling righteous and delusional that I can somehow keep them from my kid.

The problem is though, that in order to do so, I have to keep them from myself.

This little town of 180 only recently became part of the technological future. Broadband didn’t reach these parts until December 2018 after a long battle for the town, and within the town itself. Not everyone wanted high-speed internet. Some people who lived here liked the inconvenience, liked that it made the town slow and unique, liked that it meant you couldn’t live here if that also meant living on the internet. 

But change came. Now you can Zoom into Town Hall meetings, camera off, opinions plenty. When Ben and I were looking for a place to call home in 2019, we were ignorant of the uphill battle this little town had faced to get the internet. We just saw that I could be a writer here. And change would have come anyway: it was only a few years until Starlink satellites started popping up in this valley, too. 

There is one thing, however, in this valley that has yet to change: cell phone reception. 

Beyond the reach of my WiFi, I cannot receive or send texts, answer or take calls, or even check the news on the slowest and sniffiest of dog walks. Outside of whatever you’ve downloaded in advance, your phone becomes a camera, a compass, and little else. It’s a reprieve, this device-bricking. When I’m gardening or out talking to neighbors, there are no interruptions from Slack or texts or weather alerts. More importantly, there are no interruptions from my brain whispering check it, just a little peek like Frodo fingering the ring dangling from his neck. Maybe my precious has a text for me? Equating a phone to a dealer is so apt as to become trite. 

Not having reception doesn’t just change the attention landscape, it changes the actual landscape in that whenever you see people here, not one of them is staring at their phone. Instead of craned-neck zombies, they’re all upright and perky, off on an adventure. If you took a photo of it, it would look like the past. (Worth noting that if you search for “looking at phones” on Getty Images, every person is smiling. That’s because companies who buy Getty Images of people looking at phones want you to be looking at your phone. In reality, when we’re looking down at our phones, we are in our worst posture with our droopiest faces. We are unattractive in phone.)

While our retro town of enormous reception blocking peaks forces the phone out of my hand, it’s not like I have much reason to use it anyway. One perk certainly of being a pregnant woman in a small town with a limited social circle without a job is that no one is really trying to get a hold of me almost ever. I’m not missing a call from anyone other than my doctor yet again confirming my appointment for next week. Yes, I’m coming, I’ve literally nothing else to do. You might also be correct in musing that only a person who was already phone-averse would move to a town like this. You would muse correctly. 

Once, right before Ben, I was dating a comedian in LA who is somehow always being suggested to me on Netflix as if the screening company got their algorithm straight from Tinder. On our first date, he had to use the restroom while we waited for our food. This was… nine years ago? Jesus. Anyway, nine years ago we were all still just as addicted to our phones, and I was looking for reasons to be smug. So when he went to the bathroom, I merely sat there, mewing my jawline into oblivion and slinking one arm over my chair like a cat who’s been hunting at this dock longer than you’ve been alive. I wanted for him to see me on his return trip dripping with the security of a woman who doesn’t bother with phones. 

Because his career was and is based almost entirely on observational awareness, he did notice. I think now he would have the human experience to realize this was a method of seduction, that simply waiting without touching my phone took stamina and not the ease of an unbothered aristocrat — but again, it was nine years ago. He just thought it was cool. 

Though he did immediately confess to his own game: he would go to the bathroom on dates and then, on his return, intentionally look to see if the woman waiting for him was on her phone while he was gone. Could she simply enjoy the ambience of a bustling restaurant, or would she slither away into cyberspace looking for her next hit of dopamine? You can imagine how smug I felt at being the former. We were a match made in a very competitive albeit amusing circle of Hell. 

Two months or so after that date, I would go on another Tinder date with the worst profile I’d ever seen: Ben’s. I already knew Ben in the real world, but Tinder would be the catalyst to us dating. His main photo was: 1) blurry, 2) of the back of him, 3) ten feet away on a trail, and 4) with his hood up. Other than “Ben F.” and one also terrible photo of him in racing kit, there was no way to tell who he was. I was just hoping. And I was right: I’d found the Ben I knew in person — the Ben who barely used a phone. 

Ben hates phones. When he reads this, he’ll read that sentence and say, “no I don’t! I hate the way people use phones!” Ben frequently has no idea where his phone is. He’ll also deny that, but I am married to him, so you can trust me as a source of indisputable accuracy. He doesn’t use Instagram, he doesn’t have email on his phone, he never needs directions because he spends an inordinate amount of his life looking at actual maps. If there is one person to highlight how much I do use my phone, it is Ben. 

There is something though that I remain painfully smug about: when we go out to dinner, for all nine years since performing ease with someone else, I still don’t look at my phone. Even worse, I’m smug not because I am resisting, but precisely because I don’t have to resist. We’re in love with plenty to talk about — disgusting, I know. Nevermind that Ben probably left his phone at home. Though phones find their way into our discourse. Inevitably, and ironically, part of what we always talk about when we go out is the prevalence of couples around us on their phones. They sit silently across from one another, scrolling and tapping. Every once in a while you’ll catch the sad moment when a brave soldier, sitting across their glazed-eye lit up lover, gives up and opens their phone as well. Might as well! You’re just sitting there being ignored for the vast world of immediate satisfaction! Good luck in bed later!

Sometimes couples will sit through entire dinners together, immersed in phones. This would still be strange (though somehow more romantic) if they were sitting there with books, but only if they had the cinematic decency to sit next to one another, holding hands. But they’re not. They’re across from each other with hand-held clonazepams. 

As we approach parenting, we record more and more of these moments in our log of “oh nos.” I do think children should be given escape through art. I still remember the dELiA’s CD I played in my Walkman in the backseat of my parents’ car on the way home from my grandmother’s house when I was 13. But I was also 13. What I remember before that is listening to Genesis in my mom’s car and Car Talk in my dad’s car. And now I love Phil Collins and Mat Armstrong. 

But now, I’m not picking up my phone to “escape through art.” Instead, I’m picking up my phone because I’m denying some vague passing moment of emotional discomfort. While it might be work to leave my phone alone, it is at least easy to admit that there’s almost no reason to look at it. What’s it going to tell me? That my insurance called? That BeyondYoga is having a sale? That Netflix didn’t renew that show I was considering watching, so now there’s no point in watching it? But it’s also easy to go about my life in public sans phone because I don’t need it. I don’t need directions. I don’t need to take any calls. I don’t need to respond to anyone in a hurry, save for my physical therapist who might have a spare appointment this afternoon. In fact, all I can really use my phone for really is quelling curiosity, anxiety, and boredom.

This is what I’m doing with it at night. Instead of closing my eyes at 5am, trying to ignore the various itches and pains related to my current state of gestation, I strap into the Space Mountain of brain coasters, stimulating enough to be called a ride but benign enough for a six-year-old. Except phones aren’t benign for six-year-olds. I can opt in and out of my own boredom because my brain is fully developed. A child cannot.

It was at this point in writing, some two hours in, that I went to get water and thought, “I should check my phone.” It’s Saturday at 10:21am. I am clearly not immune, and in these moments, not the least bit smug. Why should I check my phone, brain? I should finish this essay. I should put on some real clothes. I should work out, take the dog out for a longer walk, begin my framing project, move those books upstairs like I planned last night, start writing the Thank You notes for baby gifts — these are all things I should do, and not one of them has anything to do with my phone. 

So instead of checking my phone, I took Jibs on that longer walk. We’re working on off-leash recall. The pass is still covered in snow, but the cold night temperatures keep it firm enough for a sturdy walk before the noon sun begins the power melt. Jibs (like most puppies) is very interested in turds, and after a long winter of people using the pass but abandoning their dogs’ shits, there are turds everywhere, emerging anew from every layer of melted snow. I have to keep a vigilant eye lest one of those turdlets become a mid-walk snack.

Also back along the pass are birds. Magpies, mountain chickadees, stellar jays, gray jays, ducks, and geese have all returned and Jibs is unclear on their taxonomy, territory, and terms. He’s a ratting terrier after all, it can be hard to distinguish friend from food from foe — that is until I kindly but firmly explain it to him.

Finally upon the pass are other dogs. While it’s generally agreed this is an off leash haven, you never know who’s working on their own training or who is perhaps visiting from out of town and might not want a greeting. So we keep an eye on who’s coming up and down the trail. Every neighbor I see, I stop and talk to. Every neighbor that sees me does the same. No one waves from a preoccupied phone call. No one seems like they might be talking to their dog but is talking to the tiny piece of metal and plastic shoved in their ear, hidden beneath their hat and hair. Everyone talking is talking to each other.

Every once in a while, I’ll hear a fellow resident talk about a cell phone tower. It’s the same way they talk about paving the road and leashing dogs: like that’s what we need to make this place better, ignoring what makes this place special. When it comes up, I think of these dog walks. I think of afternoons outside in the front lawn where you say hi to people walking by simply because it’s what you do when you’re not preoccupied by something else. But technology will evolve and advance. Eventually, even the mountains won’t protect us from reception. Eventually, this town will be full of Airpodiots like everywhere else, duped by the guise of convenience into believing that being more available makes them more fulfilled. And when that happens, Ben and I will have a kid. We’ll also have cell phones and ipads and laptops and computers and video games and TVs and a lasting predicament on (and in) our hands. 

In the meantime, it’s been four hours since I looked at my phone before the dawn light broke into the room. Here, let me check it for you. 

…

As suspected, nothing.