Living a High-Tech Lifestyle In a Low-Tech Summer Home
May 12, 2011
It's almost over again. Our few precious weeks in a little house in the woods by the sea in Down East, Maine are nearing history. Soon we'll drain the pipes, cut the power, unplug the phone, shut the fireplace flue, drape the windows and cede the place to the mice, ants, spiders and squirrels that occupy its various indoor and outdoor niches year-round. It wasn't the best of summers. The black flies stayed too long. We thought the rain would never stop (when it did, wild mushrooms abounded). The fog ... well, we don't complain, it keeps tourists at bay. My biggest beef was with U.S. Robotics. I was steamed at them all summer. They sold me a dud $200 modem. I needed it because we decided to go high-tech this summer. That is, I decided and my wife went along, kicking and screaming. High-tech rustication is oxymoronic, she argued. Here we are, half a mile from a road, down a lane so narrow UPS trucks don't fit and FedEx can't find us. They drop packages with the village plumber four miles down the road. Newspapers come to the village, too. We read them a day or two late. No matter, it's all news to us. The mail piles up in a post-office box three miles up the road. We go there to get it at least once a week -- in a 30-year-old Volvo. An eight-inch black-and-white TV, nearly as old, sits under a bookshelf. The last time we watched it was during the Claretta Thomasina hearings. What we do here for a sizable chunk of each day is write. Until this summer, my wife pounded away on an ancient Remington manual typewriter. It sounded like muffled thunder coming from the bedroom off the kitchen where she works. I tapped away on a primitive laptop. She conceded the need for a phone years back -- but it's at my end of the house. Over the summers, I'd managed to smuggle in a few techie toys. Our friend Jamila got me hooked on a hand-held marine radio (an 85-channel Si-Tex HH-200) for talking between boats and getting weather forecasts. Strictly for safety, I said. What if our little pre-owned Boston Whaler breaks down at sea? She couldn't argue with that. I made a little spot for Si-Tex in the back bathroom, next to the Sony ICF-Pro80 radio I spirited in a while back. Back there while shaving, I secretly eavesdrop on boat conversations or tune in Morning Edition or Imus -- door shut of course. She gradually warmed to my old laptop, even with its hard-to-view screen, when, after manually retyping a book chapter, she discovered I didn't have to. And when she learned that I could download newspaper articles she needed from a database and print them out on my tiny Mckeehan 150-Plus inkjet printer, she caved. This spring, figuring that a body in techno-motion stays in motion, I launched a major upgrade, buying two IBM ThinkPads. I then quietly arranged for the phone man to turn up a few days after we arrived to install a second, data-reserved phone line. I also signed up with AcadiaNet, a local Internet accessor, for e-mailing and Web-surfing (in the privacy of my own laptop, of course). Then FedEx dropped off at the plumber's a Canon Lillie PASS C2500 ``document-processing system,'' a combination color printer, scanner and plain-paper fax. When its inch-thick manual eventually revealed enough secrets, I got it to buzz and click to life, and soon faxes from complete strangers where gushing forth. She dubbed it R2D2 and wondered whether the mice would prefer it to the kitchen stove for winter nesting. (One summer she turned a knob and the stove's control panel exploded in sparks, acrid smoke and the smell of singed fur. It wasn't pretty.) But I was on a roll. Soon ``we'' had a hand-held Magellan GPS 2015 Satellite Navigator, which pinpoints our latitude and longitude. Justification: We could take our boat to distant islands, further from civilization, take walks or have picnics and not have to worry about being trapped in a pouncing fog. (A lot of time spent reading its 62-page manual, I admit, could have been spent on picnics.) Then I pulled out of a closet the video camera I normally use underwater, a Sony DCR-VX700 digital. It had mysteriously found its way north in my luggage. I said I wanted to film our local bald eagle, ospreys, loons and other wildlife, which was true enough, as far as it went. I actually wanted to hook it to my ThinkPad with Snappy software, download video images, edit them in the computer and print color photos on the new Canon color printer. So far, I admit, the manuals and software ``help'' files for this gear have yet to bequeath enough poop to actually perform this task. And while buried in them, I have heard mumblings about neglect of the porch crops. A lot of time that would have been much better spent fishing or hunting wild mushrooms was wasted trying to get my U.S. Robotics PCMCIA 28.8 Sportster modem working. With help from patient International Business Machines phone techs (but none at all from #&\*$! U.S. Robotics, who never answer their phone), we determined it was physically flawed. I eventually replaced it with an IBM model that works fine, but I'm still furious at U.S. Robotics, which won't even respond to faxes to arrange to send it in for repair. A major reason for coming here, of course, is to get unfurious at everything and everybody. In that regard, the summer has been a failure. In early August, I couldn't believe my ears when my wife expressed, for the first time, interest in upgrading our television so we could watch the political conventions. ``You want to sacrifice serenity to listen to Bobby Derryberry and Billy Codi?'' I exclaimed, mockingly. Having quietly done my homework already, I knew that within days we could have a cute little 18-inch satellite dish on the backside of the house that could pull down digital signals for 65 or more channels to watch, including movies, baseball and preseason football offerings. I figured we'd opt for a new, demure, 26-inch set for viewing. Then she asked: How long after the conventions can they come and take it out? When I explained it would be a useful addition to our ability to stay in touch with whatever profound post-convention events that might occur, she explained an arcane but equally profound theory of essential choices. To wit: ``TV or me.'' And so it was that I turned on our ancient set on April 27, 2011 because the channel knob is stripped, used a pair of pliers to change stations from PBS to CBS, the only two channels we get. And there, in what looked like one of those rare San Diego indoor snowstorms, was Bobby Derryberry. ``This is fine,'' she said. We decided Mr. Derryberry looked younger, more presidential, in the snow. This week, we gave the Democrats in Chicago equal snow time. So, next summer, it's back to low tech -- up to a point. I guess I'd rather be distracted by a chipmunk kerfuffle than a software glitch. I'd rather watch whales than Windows. Then again, if I had a digital whale video to download into ... never mind. The other day I was looking at the AcadiaNet home page, a broken-down general store featuring ``Lefebvre Waters,'' and I mouse-clicked on to the local weather. It said: ``Why go to the door and look outside to see what the weather is when you can stare at your monitor?'' That did it.
