Technology and Water Sometimes Mix (Brian)



Brian's Guide Boat

  We spent Saturday night working out at the Freihofer training table in Cleverdale on Lake George. Al’s mother made pork chops, creamed potatoes, green beans and coleslaw, finished with apple pie and ice cream. If we weren’t in shape before, we are now.

Doug and Susie Livingston came over from a few doors away. Doug must have heard laughter and the sound of ice clinking in glasses. Doug always answers the call of the wild cocktail hour.

I spent Sunday marshaling gear, cleaning my boat, and sweeping spiders out of my bedroom at Lake George.

Al’s mother offered to give him an Amazon Kindle e-reader for the trip, which I would have counseled her against doing if she had checked with me first. A Kindle is one of the devices that Al derisively refers to as “one of the screens”, merely an electronic diversion. Al has packed two of the devices quaintly referred to as “books” which should last him the duration of the trip without recharging.

This trip promises to be a bit like “Zen and the At of Motorcycle Maintenance”, in which two men crossed America on motorcycles debating about whether to follow the directions of life as written in the manual, or make it up as you go along. Al and I each have a little of both.

He yearns, as sometimes we all do, for simplicity. The simplicity of the Adirondack guideboat is something he can appreciate, and actually use. It was designed to be rowed by the hunting guide with a New York City swell sitting in the rear in a position in which the two could actually talk facing each other. They were plugged in, in a 19th century way.

The original boats had a technological genius of their own. Made to be stable and faster as they were loaded, their ribs were cut from spruce crooks, the part of the tree where the trunk splays out underground into the roots. Now the wood boats are made with shaped laminated ribs and a skin of fiberglass over the clear cedar planking. Or, like Al’s, they are made of Kevlar, which if you put enough of it together you’ve got a bulletproof vest.

That’s Al’s kind of technology. He has a love hate relationship with electronics. He uses a computer and an iPhone, but he’s not glued to them. He checks his Email maybe once or twice a week. A lot of times you have a better chance of reaching him through the US Postal Service that you do with the latest in communication technology. He’s holding out for a world in which people talk to each other face to face rather than texting or some other form of “exting” as has recently been practiced in Congress. I’ve sent him several texts telling him this is hopeless.

He does, however, have a point. A common emergency room injury these days is the bump on the head suffered while texting and walking into a phone pole. People have walked into shopping mall fountains while focusing on their Blackberry. We have all seen the groups of people in restaurants, or teenagers at the mall, together but separate as their attention is focused on their electronic tethers. No matter who they are with, they aren’t there.

Al insisted that I read David Carr’s book “The Shallows”, about how electronics and the distractions of Email, Facebook and Twitter are shattering human concentration. It turns out we were not made to multitask and we are fooling ourselves if we think we can. What Al calls “the screens” may even be causing the brain to rewire and work in a different way, just as the brain can rewire after a traumatic injury. At Al’s suggestion I sat down and bought a copy of “The Shallows” immediately and read it on my iPad.

Brian's gear