Wireless Communication in the Wilderness

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Outside Magazine March 2004

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Can You Hear Me Now?
Good! Let's talk about what our experience of the wilderness has lost now that it's cheap and easy to stay connected—no matter how far out there you go. Ted Kerasote explores the new wired wild.

By Ted Kerasote


	(Dan Winters)

THE HORTON RIVER heads on a rise of barren land north of Great Bear Lake in the far northwestern corner of Canada's Northwest Territories. It flows west and north some 400 miles before winding through the Smoking Hills and emptying into the Arctic Ocean. Protected by distance, an inhospitable climate, and a lack of precious metals, oil, or gas, it has remained much as it was when the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted away, 13,000 years ago: the home of grizzly bears, caribou, musk ox, eagles, and an infinity of space.

In a noisy age, it seemed like the perfect place to go for a vacation.

Crammed into a Cessna 185 floatplane—packed with three weeks' worth of food, camping gear, and our folding canoe—we fly east on an August afternoon, from the village of Inuvik into one of the largest roadless, ice-free areas on the planet. Our goal is to paddle from the river's source at Horton Lake to the Arctic Ocean, taking us through country still as wild as it was when it was first explored by British sea captain Sir John Franklin in the 1820s and, beginning in 1910, by the American Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who saw much of the region by dogsled.

The other half of the "we" is Len Carlman, my longtime friend, attorney, and father of my godson. Len has a shock of short red hair, blue eyes, and a whooping laugh that reveals a childlike wonder at moments many adults might find ordinary: camping in the backyard, building his kids an igloo playhouse, and fiddling with his ever-present Palm Pilot, onto which he has downloaded six novels to read during the inevitable storm days we'll encounter.

I've longed for this change in schedule. For seven months I've been editing an anthology of wilderness essays, and my little office in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has felt abuzz with electronic energy, sometimes two different phones and the fax machine ringing simultaneously. Occasionally, I've looked out the window above my computer, across Grand Teton National Park, and imagined the dense web of wireless traffic arcing overhead, connecting us in virtual office space, with billions of conversations taking place, either vocally or by e-mail, many between people who have never seen each other.

Even in the evening, when the workday is done, the house remains filled with the ambient noise of what almost all of us have adopted as necessary technology: the whispers and whines of refrigerator and freezer, the subtle hum of answering machines, stove, stereo, clocks, smoke detectors, computers. Most of us don't even notice this kind of low-grade static. Only when we go to really quiet country do we realize how shocking silence can be, so thick away from the thrum of civilization that it presses against our flesh like the pressure beneath the sea.

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Ted Kerasote's most recent book is Heart of Home: People, Wildlife, Place, a collection of essays.

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