Unplugged by reconnecting

Unplugged but reconnecting

by Peter O’Neill

Last autumn, to help overcome our Covid ennui and empty-nesting grief (our only child having just fled to Colby College) my wife and I eagerly searched for diverse walking trails in the picturesque coastal region around our home in Barrington. Whose footsteps were better to follow in a pandemic, we thought, than those of our regional ambler Henry David Thoreau, America’s first famous social distancer? While our mentor fled to the woods to escape the metaphorical pandemic of industrialized busyness, we sought the sylvan solace from a real and mounting pandemic.

The Dundery Brook Trail in Little Compton

Early on in Walden, Thoreau explains why he went into the woods: “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.” “Not life,” for Thoreau, meant an inauthentic, soulless existence. Thoreau was not enthusiastic about the telegraph, railroads, or the proliferation of newspapers. All of this “progress” and haste blunted our powers of discrimination and ultimately our sense of self, he believed. Ideally, my wife and I, in our extended sojourns into the woods, discovered similar insights. Our first stop was Fort Barton Woods in Tiverton. After one of our marathon matches, a tennis friend who lives nearby had introduced me to this hiking trail in the autumn, when most of the paths were covered in crisp leaves. Though the layered leaves look pleasantly aesthetic at first, a newcomer must tread carefully, for beneath these leafy lanes lie many sharp, jutting rocks and pesky protruding roots. In fact, it was on one of these obstinate roots where the middle of my worn tennis sole landed, when I chased my friend that day after he jauntily burst into a run. I sense this misstep caused a nagging ankle injury for a few months. Thus, if you trek across Fort Barton’s sinuous paths during the fall, be sure to wear stable, well-cushioned trail shoes to avoid any foot or knee injuries. In short, saunter, don’t sprint. When I took my wife for her debut at Fort Barton a few weeks later, it was even deeper into autumn. The trails had taken on a distinctly sublime character. At the beginning of the trail, you descend steep steps into what seems like the womb of the earth, re-emerging later as if you had undergone a native Pocasset adolescent’s rite of passage. While I was still wary of furtive rocks and stubborn roots afoot, my wife more buoyantly gazed at the tall, sentinel oaks, birches, and hickory trees that lord over the park. The abundant, commanding trees create

more darkness, especially during shorter days – this adds to the trails’ sublime atmosphere. Thus, another helpful hint: if you go for the first time to Fort Barton during the shorter days of autumn, be sure to consult your trail map or the AllTrails App on your phone. Time your walk well. Speaking of cell phone apps, staying mostly unconnected during our hiking adventures allowed my wife and me to recapture what the critic Michael Harris calls the “daydreaming silences” that once filled our lives before the relentless disruption of the Internet and other forms of constant connectivity. In his excellent study The End of Absence, Harris eloquently asks whether or not it is worth having our days filled with pings, emails, and other rude intrusions: “As we embrace a technology’s gifts we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return – the subtle hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for the marvellous service. We don’t notice, for example, that the gap in our schedules have disappeared because we’re too busy delighting in the amusements that fill them. We forget the games that childhood boredom forged because boredom itself has been outlawed. Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack? Why would we care that absence has disappeared?” As my wife and I moved on to our next walking tour, I realized that what Harris describes here mirrors Thoreau’s version of “not life” in Walden. Soon, at Dundery Brook Trail in Little Compton, we would relish the mostly unplugged pleasures of absence. For the most part, each park or trail has its own identity. Just as Fort Barton has a brooding, cathedral-like mood, Dundery Brook embodies a lighter, picturesque aesthetic. Upon first stepping on the extensive boardwalk that ultimately leads to an open meadow, I felt like a corduroyed flaneur of wonderful wetlands views. There are even small observation nooks for visitors and ambitious school children to carry out enlightening fieldwork. Though my wife and I walked together at first, I soon lagged behind, snapping select photos with my cell phone and sending them to my brother or daughter to document my

Upon first arrival as a budding naturalist. After a stepping on while, I realized my vanity and lingering the extensive dependence on my boardwalk that cell phone. I then zipped it away in ultimately leads my field coat and concentrated on to an open truly looking at the landscape around me meadow, I felt with my own eyes. By then, my wife was like a corduroyed ahead and out of sight – I felt abandoned but flaneur of wallowed in my sweet wonderful solitude. Thoreau would be proud. wetlands views As I panned over small, intertwining pathways, just off the boardwalk, I heard a rustling and descried the eyes of a white-tail deer. The deer stayed frozen in place for a while. It was a privileged moment; when hiking on trails in the autumn and winter in this region, one rarely sees any wildlife at all. Deer are mystical to me. Instead of hearing deer hunters’ gunshots on private land adjacent to Fort Barton, I savored observing the supple shape and ginger steps of one in the forest wetlands. No doubt, this is what Thoreau meant by real life. Lived life. Had I been texting my brother at that moment, I would not have experienced this special sighting. It was an unplugged revelation. As the Victorian critic John Ruskin observes, “To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.” I caught up to my wife, who had reached the glorious meadow pond at the end of the boardwalk. I told her about my transformative moment with deer. She quipped, “Well, let’s take a selfie in front of the pond to celebrate it then.” I acquiesced. Clearly, we still had some work to do to wean ourselves off of these intrusive devices.

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