Mountain Standard Time

14 July 1997

On l July, the very day HotWired relaunched and ran my now-controversial series on the rise of the geeks, I packed my dogs, computers, and four cartons of research for my next book into the minivan and set out for a tiny, decaying cabin I had impulsively bought, on the top of a mountain in upstate New York overlooking the green hills of Vermont. My wife was off on an assignment, my daughter on a long trip in a remote corner of Eastern Europe.

When I left my basement in New Jersey, there were already about 200 unanswered email messages commenting on the redesign, berating me for fuzzy thinking on my geek series, praising me for writing it, complaining about glitches on the new Web site, and either condemning or celebrating the rise of the geek.

I remember the days when I could drop an idea in some magazine like New York or Rolling Stone, then run, vanishing behind a cocoon of interns, voice mail, and unlisted numbers. In a month or so, an envelope would appear with a couple of angry letters tucked inside, or even one or two nice ones. Feedback was a couple of comments from writer friends or neighbors who happened to see what I wrote.

This, of course, is no more. There's no place to hide on the Web. An idea worth offering is one worth defending and explaining. It has to stand a new kind of test, or die trying.

Needing to stay wired, even in so remote a place as this mountain, I had a whole corner of the car stuffed with technogear. Driving past farm after farm, the houses coming every few miles rather than every few feet, I felt like some dumb digital James Bond, wires and cables flopping in the rearview mirror in the back of the van.

I had my PowerBook, a battery pack, miles of phone cords, a plug-in hard drive with extra space, a new digital phone with a radius of 1,800 feet, a tiny cell phone, and an answering machine.

This was more electronic equipment than existed in the entire house on the mountain, where there were two lamps, a fluorescent bulb in the kitchen ceiling, and a plastic rotary phone.

I soon realized that my cabin, built in the '60s, had only a single phone jack.

I'd ordered a second line for the computer, but it wouldn't come for weeks. I was leaving my well-tested and reliable Power Mac, laser printer, supplies, and ISDN line behind and working with something that would undoubtedly be workable, if more primitive.

The cabin was musty, airless. The phone jack was in a corner of the bedroom. I looked at it strangely, vaguely recalling when phones were used only to make calls or take them.

I plugged in the new phone and the answering machine and took the dogs for a walk, revelling in the beauty and quiet. I was stunned by peacefulness.

The view on my mountain is shockingly beautiful, even if the house is collapsing around my ears. As I write this, the valley below is shrouded in mists, the huge mountain across from me peeking out of the clouds. It looks much more like a painting of a scene than the scene itself.

A couple of neighbors waved as they drove past. I doubted any of them thought much about geeks or would take kindly to being called one.

When I got back, the answering-machine light was blinking. It was the realtor, who advised me that the water had failed the test and had been polluted by sewage, probably from the septic tank. There was a high coliform count. Drink only bottled water.

Even as I played the message, three enormous men - Chuckie, Joe, and Bob - arrived in two trucks, emerged with giant picks and shovels, and began tearing up the backyard. I nodded and talked septic as best I could. My dogs watched in immobile amazement as a deer bounded across the road. Chuckie and Joe dug ever-deepening holes. I wondered to myself about the email piling up.

I knew if I didn't stay with the geek-related email, I'd never catch up. The series had struck one of those chords. Everybody had something to say.

But the PowerBook refused to dial up. An operator kept coming on to ask me what my number was. There were no techies around. I experienced the peculiar kind of panic any Mac user feels when something that has always worked perfectly doesn't.

I called Nynex. What was going on?

"You have a party line, sir. You can't make long-distance calls without the operator logging who made the call, so the billing is correct. You can't make that many local calls, either. There's a limit. So the operator will always come on when you call out of the county."

"A party line? Like in the old Jimmy Stewart movies?"

"Yes, sir."

"They still have those?"

"A few."

"But my second line won't be installed for weeks. I write on a computer. How can I use it?"

The operator nearly burst out laughing.

"Good luck, sir." She hung up.

A few minutes later, the power went out. Some woman down the road had swatted a bee and veered off into a telephone pole. She was fine, said my neighbors, but the pole was a mess, and the mountain went dark for six hours.

A writer friend lives down the mountain. I fled there, and he kindly offered me his phone jack. I'm writing this from there. Now I make the drive once a day, PowerBook, phone, and power cord in hand. Since that first call about the sewage, I've been humbled by the mountain and, in several ways, reminded of the many parts of the world in which being wired is a mythic and remote idea.

"Have you ever been online?" I asked the realtor. "Goodness, I'd rather just jump right off that bridge," she said, shaking her head and muttering to herself.

Two forest fires broke out on my mountain, but there is no 911. You wait for the volunteers to get into their pickups with flashing blue lights and charge up the hill with water tanks. From my back window, I can smell the smoke and see them coming. A neighbor phones to say that there are no hydrants on the mountain. Wow, I exclaim. This is pretty exciting.

Why is she telling me this?

"Get the hell out of there," she says abruptly, as if in reply. "Now." My dogs and I sit on the road for three hours while the trucks race back and forth. I never even see any flames.

There are frequent power outages on the mountain. And deer that jump out of woods in front of cars. And squirrels and raccoons that eat wires.

When I asked Steve in the hardware store if he ever went online, he asked me if I meant the Internet, and slapped his knee and guffawed. "I work for a living," he gasped.

But here I am. Out of the basement and loose in the wild; eating garden stuff, multigrain bread; running, walking, and shedding pounds. I take my PowerBook, not downstairs, but off to the Battenkill River, where I set up a canvas chair and a table. My dogs plop themselves down at the edge of the water while I mull the World Wide Web. Not half bad, this disconnecting.

My Labs are making a slow transition to country life. They stare at wildlife in a bemused way, watching the country dogs make fools of themselves by chasing woodchucks, mice, groundhogs, and deer, and vaulting into the water. My dogs are more contemplative. They never venture far from the computer. Their favorite spot is right behind the house at the very top of the mountain, where they can ponder the mists and shadows and watch the hawks dive.

This is a big trip for me, a long and deeply held fantasy. I've been waiting to come to the mountain for years, inspired by one of my heroes, the late Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whose fifth volume of journals was called Run to the Mountain. I know what he means. I couldn't wait to get here.

I have been abruptly unwired here, at least for the week I wait for phone-company reinforcements. There are black holes in my news - the Tyson ear-bite and the dumping of Apple's CEO. I can go online only once a day, and answer email briefly. I will get to it all, though. My HotWired editors are flummoxed. They can't quite figure out where I've gone or why, let alone how to reach me.

By the fourth day, I was falling further and further behind on my email. Proud geeks were writing in droves to thank me, others were accusing me of betrayal, sophistry, arrogance, or worse. I love my mountain, but I like being wired too. It's become brain food for me. I need it. It's part of my life, and I want both - the quiet of the mountain and my many friends online.

Debates about geeks were raging on Threads, but I couldn't join in much, or even follow the discussion. While HotWired was showing off its new bells and whistles, I was dragging dead mice out of the basement.

Why am I on the mountain?

Like it was for Merton, it seems to be a necessity for me. The more wired I've gotten, the more I've dreamed of a place like this one, only maybe with good water. I don't fantasize about being disconnected, but rather about finding the right balance between being wired and not. Up here, being wired is grounding. It's possible to lose track of the day and time. Going online will keep me up to speed on the news, in touch with friends, my mind sharpened by the communicative geeks and others who are good enough to send me messages. And Merton is a good inspiration.

Merton was perhaps the most interactive monk ever, especially for somebody who battled to get to his own remote hermitage. In the solitude and quiet of his isolated hermitage in the Kentucky woods, he was a best-selling author. He cranked out more than 30 books, wrote countless journals and diaries, and kept up a running correspondence with more than a thousand people. Rebellious for a monk, he tormented his abbot for decades about ecclesiastic authority and monastery policy.

It's hard to even imagine what he would have done online.

"Unlike most people, I live in the woods," he wrote in one of his journals. "Do not ask me to explain this. I am embarrassed to describe it. I live in the woods out of necessity. I am both a prisoner and an escaped prisoner. I cannot tell you why, born in France, my journey ended here. I have tried to go further but I cannot. It makes no difference. When you are beginning to be old, and I am beginning to be old, for I am 50, both times and places no longer take on the same meaning."

There is, wrote Merton, a new kind of mental ecology in the woods, a living balance of spirits.

I know what Merton meant, for I feel both like a prisoner and an escaped prisoner sometimes too. And I can't begin to tell you why my journey started out there and reached here, PowerBook on the picnic table, sprawling valley before me, hawks diving overhead, 30-foot cord stretching out behind me.

I will also turn 50 here, and times and places have taken on different meanings for me. Unlike Merton, I don't feel old at 50. I'm thinking if I'm smart and careful and restrained, I can find a new kind of balance up here, a new kind of mental ecology that connects me to the world I left behind and also gives me some distance from it.

I'll keep you posted.

. . . . 

Katz on other admired writers:

Pitting H. L. Mencken against William Bennett

Bringing Mary Shelley's messages to today's media

Citing Wendy Kaminer on religion's hold on politics