As I often feel compelled to explain, my family and I live pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere is “somewhere,” of course, but if the kind of somewheres you are used to come with, say, streetlamps, or neighbors, traffic, schools, municipal pest control, places to buy milk, Amazon delivery vans, or electricity that doesn’t go out every time the wind blows, then where we live ain’t one of them. If on the other hand your kind of “somewhere” features runaway bamboo, birdsong, chickens, carpenter bees, falling-down barns (see “bees,” above); questionable plumbing, raccoons and possums and hawks and owls (see “chickens,” above); deer wandering about at odd hours of the day, coyotes howling on moonlit nights and a river of stars on moonless ones, then you’ll feel right at home. Twenty-four years after moving here—from a city of four million no less—the fact that I do feel at home still surprises me sometimes. It’s the kind of place that in a past life I would have assumed you’d have to be a hermit or a doomsday prepper to feel comfortable in. And while we do keep a generator, a couple of cans of gas, a shotgun, and a stockpile of canned goods on hand against the next major weather event, I don’t think we fall into either of those categories just yet. Then again, perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed …
Anyway, as the twenty-first century has progressed, our corner of nowhere appears to have generally been getting more, rather than less, isolated. As broadband Internet has taken its place alongside electricity and running water as a fact of life for most of the American population, vast slices of the modern retail and entertainment economies have followed the path of least resistance by focusing their energies there, too. This puts parts of the country without broadband infrastructure farther from the mainstream than ever. No one feels this more keenly than our teenaged children who, faced with the one-two-three punch of geographic isolation, no drivers’ licenses, and snail’s pace satellite Internet, consider these living conditions to constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Living in a forest was great when they were younger: there were trees to climb, creeks to dam up, forts to build. Now there are Snapchat streaks to keep, YouTube memes to share, Game of Thrones episodes to see. When you’re fifteen this stuff matters. I should know because when I was a teenager my parents, who were suspicious about television, would not allow the home entertainment breakthroughs of the early nineteen-eighties—the VCR and the Atari game console—anywhere near the house. This meant I was the last kid in my suburban, middle-class school to see Ghostbusters or Revenge of the Nerds and the only one who couldn’t finish a level on Pac-Man. For an impressionable fourteen-year-old these gaps in pop culture knowledge posed significant social challenges, and my place in the teenage hierarchy suffered accordingly. Thirty-five years on it’s tempting to scoff at the kids’ Snapchat dependency. But if that’s the way all your friends are talking to each other, what’re you gonna do?
So no one was more thrilled than our kids when, out of the blue, we suddenly got proper Internet! Apparently the ISP to which we pay a small fortune had lobbed a new satellite into orbit, thereby directing a firehose of streaming TV content straight at our country childrens’ understimulated visual cortexes. Like a pair of Labradors in a lasagna factory, they fell into it, and spent the first week of summer break trying to sort out seven seasons’ worth of Lannisters, Tyrells, and Baratheons in time to make sense of the Game of Thrones finale. But then something interesting happened: after a few days they emerged, glassy-eyed, and went in search of a fishing rod and a good book, proving the truth of that old aphorism about having too much of a good thing. Yes, while it’s nice to dip a toe into the mainstream once in awhile, there’s a lot to be said for wallowing in calmer backwaters, too.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
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