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Musings on horseback
My intention was to spend a week without the Internet, phone,
text, television or Twitter. My wife and I were on a ranch in
southern Colorado where we have frequently gone to ride horses
in the mountains and relax. Not the end of civilization. Quite
comfortable, in fact. But purposefully remote.
A couple of years ago, though, the ranch had installed wireless
access in the cabins, if only to drive the compulsive workaholics
with their laptops away from the lodge. They were spoiling the
rustic ambience.
I don’t travel with a laptop any more. My iPhone (no
promotional fees have exchanged hands for this mention) provides
e-mail, calendar, text, phone and, since my watch broke, a clock.
On Friday morning, as we rode up above 11,000 feet, high in the
San Juans, I carried the iPhone because it also has a camera.
When we stopped for lunch in a high meadow with forty-mile
views, one riding companion, a veterinarian from Iowa, exclaimed: “Hey,
I’ve got four bars!”
Giddy, no doubt from the altitude, we snapped each other’s
pictures and e-mailed them.
Hours later and back at the cabin, having already weakened,
I peeked to find I had some 200 accumulated e-mail messages.
I answered three that seemed to have some urgency and hit the
trail again in the morning. I didn’t tweet until we returned
to Columbia.
The whistles and bells and tweets on our electronic devices
have become commonplace. With our youngest son now in college,
I’ve adapted to texting as the best way to keep in touch.
I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of months, finding it
not so much a social network as a headline news service. My old
colleague at the White House, CBS’ Mark Knoller tweets
a couple dozen times a day on the comings and goings of the president.
A link takes me to fuller stories, should I want more.
Twitter seems to be bifurcated by the newsy and the inane.
One well-known network news anchor even tweets when she’s
signing off for the night and going to bed. Twitter’s not
big with college students whose lifelines are Facebook and text
messaging.
At this writing, I’ve got 74 Twitter followers.
Larry King was all a-twitter the other day as he neared one million.
Just his close, personal friends. Much of what’s on Twitter
or YouTube and others should more properly be called marketing
or self promotion, rather than networking. I tweet perhaps every
two or three days to see if it tweaks any response. I might as
well float messages in bottles down the Congaree River.
Or Colorado’s Conejos River. Every couple days a newspaper
showed up at the ranch from Denver (it still has one paper) or
Pueblo. On Wednesday, the Valley Courier—serving Alamosa,
Antonito, Blanca, Center, Creede, Crestone, Del Norte, Fort Garland
(where Kit Carson served), Hooper, La Jara, Manassa (where the “Manassa
Mauler” Jack Dempsey was born), Mosca, Moffat, Monte Vista,
Romeo, Saguache, Sanford (no, not that Sanford), San Luis and
South Fork—arrived. The paper serves all those communities
and crossroads in the San Luis Valley, as newspapers should and
perhaps only newspapers can meet local interests.
And there on the Opinion page was a Robert Ariail (yes, our
Robert Ariail) editorial cartoon of Gov. Mark Sanford (yes, that
Sanford) declaring he would “not be railroaded out of office.” The
idiosyncrasies of South Carolina politics (isn’t that a
nice way to put it) seem inescapable. We spent a fair amount
of time trying to explain it all to our friends from Colorado,
Iowa and points west. We left and were back home before Congressman
Joe Wilson lost his Congressional cool.
Even in this day when we lament the diminishment of news, we
were reminded that news travels. It’s out there, no matter
what means it takes to get it to you. Some of it was in the haze
we learned was drifting eastward from California fires. Some
was about the perplexity of public behaviors. Some about the
perils of today’s still struggling economy for the tourism
and hospitality industry. Some about the depressed horse trade.
But don’t tell that last bit to “Tuff”, the
aptly named bay I rode up, down, on and off the mountain trails
that week. He probably wouldn’t give a tweet, anyhow. |
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