The joys of being disconnected

We've recently spent a few days recovering at our cottage, which is a few hours north of Toronto. While this is "cottage country", we're not really in the "high density" land of cottages as big as your house. In fact, our cottage isn't even insulated, has no well, and you can feel noticeable drops in elevation as you move the five feet from the kitchen/dining room to the wood-burning stove. The directions to the cottage include the phrase "unassumed road" and "honk here so any other cars coming towards you can pull to the side". There's no phone, the one radio station that comes in clearly seems to record its news first thing in the morning and then run that on a loop every half hour, and the only signal the TV reliably gets is from the DVD player we hook up to it.

I love it. It's always been a joy to get up there and away from it all. However, for the past few years that isolation has been harder and harder to get. A few years ago, in fact, you couldn't even get a solid cell signal unless you were standing in a particular part of the front yard. But now there's good coverage, and I can check up on things on my iPhone. And if that's not enough, I can also tether said iPhone to my laptop and get a full(ish) internet experience. Our car has a satellite radio, and at one time I had a portable XM radio that I'd hook up to follow ball games.

I know it's a personal choice to use these things, but it's also a very easy action to take. This is doubly hard when you have a bit of curiosity. For example, I was reading a book about the most excellent album In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. They were part of the Elephant 6 collective, which swapped members and recorded in many different permutations under many different names. The album itself is based on emotions stirred up by lead singer Jeff Mangum's reading of The Diary of Anne Frank. This book, while pretty comprehensive, can't tell you everything, and is a pretty good read. It's also part of an excellent series of books that I've also discovered are available on my Kindle (which also gets a connection at the cottage).

Now, time would have been when I would have written all that information down in my Moleskine notebook and looked at it when I got home. But it's so easy to just bring up wikipanion on my phone, or fire up my Kindle and just satiate my curiosity right then and there. In fact, each link in the above paragraph was something I looked up in a 20 minute period on Sunday night.

In the process, some of the joy of being disconnected is gone.

Today, my last day at the cottage, I did a test. At a point I just told myself I wasn't going to check anymore. I wasn't going to check my email, I called a halt to twitter, sat down with my book and pen and paper and went off the grid. I'd like to say it felt good, and it did after a while. The first hour, though, was pure torture because I KNEW how easy and zero-cost it would be to just check in, get some news, but I went through the detox and the shakes and broke through. But it wasn't enjoyable, and I lost some of that feeling of disconnection that was the bliss there.

Next time, I'll make it easier on myself. As soon as I get there I'll plug in my phone, turn off the wireless services and and keep it nearby just as a phone, and I'll rely on paper and binding books. Hopefully this will make my cottage experience more of what I love: Something far from the unassumed road.

Kinda like the music Neutral Milk Hotel made.