Last month our internet stopped working. Not for a few minutes or an hour, but for good. One Monday morning we woke up and it was just … gone. Apparently, the cellular provider from whose distant tower came the faint signal upon which our wireless internet depended had made a network change that rendered our system obsolete. I learned this from the rather fly-by-night operator who sold us the system when I finally reached him by cell phone—something I had to drive five miles from the house to do, since the rural corner of West Feliciana parish where we live has yet to come to the attention of America’s cellular providers. “Oh yeah,” said Mr. Fly-By-Night, “I thought something like that might happen,” before explaining that getting service back would require the purchase of new hardware, which in any case, he wouldn’t be available to install for at least a couple of weeks.
Since we live in a place hopelessly beyond the reach of normal broadband, without a land line or anything resembling reliable cellular service, this was disorienting to say the least. When the internet went down it took pretty much the entire twenty-first-century with it. Away went email and web browsing of course, but also gone was the ability to make a phone call, send a text, shop online, pay a bill, or have any idea what the weather would do tomorrow. The flaw in our working-remotely-from-home plan was instantly apparent. There wasn’t even broadcast TV, since we’d never gotten around to putting an antenna back on the roof after the original blew down during Hurricane Ida (or was it Laura?) a few years ago. Actually, the only device still receiving signals from the outside world was a twenty-five-year-old clock radio, through which the soothing sounds of National Public Radio continued delivering assurance that modern life persisted, somewhere. The day the internet went down the remaining teenager came home from school, regarded the situation with horror, and decamped to his grandmother’s house, which ironically has excellent internet. After that, things got very quiet indeed.
Like most people in the developed world, I suppose, we’ve been taking the internet for granted for a long time. As the years have gone by and the communication, commerce, and entertainment supply chains have moved online, like the proverbial frog in a kettle we have settled progressively deeper into the warm bath of on-demand everything. Without internet, the extent to which our ability to participate in modern society depended upon a fragile stream of zeroes and ones, was plain to see. For an evening or two, as we sat around without TV to watch or music to listen to, with no online articles to read or social media rabbit holes to fall down, we felt a palpable sense of withdrawal that no hard-bound book or deck of cards seemed able to assuage.
But then, after a night and a day in this digital deprivation chamber, something interesting started to happen. On the second internet-free morning, up early and unable to answer emails, read news, or do the other things that I imagine important enough to get up before dawn to do, instead I found myself sitting with a cup of tea and a couple of dogs on the back steps, watching a lone firefly dawdle through the dark, when the bird chorus started up. As the first light crept in from the east, the night music of crickets and frogs was gradually replaced by a swelling crescendo of birdsong that increased in vigor and complexity as one species, then another, joined the fray. The volume built with the brightening sky, until there was enough light that I was able to start putting faces to songs, as it were, spotting summer tanagers, wood pewees, cardinals, a redstart, and an Eastern towhee, amongst others too various and numerous to name. Of course I’ve noticed this morning chorus before, but with ninety percent of my attention focused on all the things modern life tells us are “important,” I’m not sure I’d ever truly stopped to listen.
It couldn’t last of course, since living off-grid is hardly compatible with running a media company in the twenty-first century. So now, borne on the wings of a Starlink satellite receiver, all the conveniences and distractions of the modern world have returned to our remote corner of West Feliciana. Sure, the internet brings the full sum of human knowledge, achievement, and endeavor within easy reach. But in the glare of such abundance, how much of nature’s miracle is eclipsed? While the lesson is still fresh, I’m trying to remember that, for each digital bauble the modern entertainment ecosystem confers, a naturally-occurring, analog, dare-I-say, “real,” one, fades away. Going forward, I’m trying to remember what that sounds like.
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