Pondering Important Conveniences

 

Pondering Important Conveniences

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We few who live in Oconahua and continue to use cable internet service have just experienced three days without phone or computer services along with intermittent electricity outages.

I could not explain in a rational way why I insist on clinging to what most of my friends consider to be outdated services. I like my landline phone sitting on my desk. I have no need for whip-quick internet. My service seems plenty fast enough for me. At approximately twenty dollars a month for the combo, it’s a deal.  

I do not find it necessary to cart around a plastic rectangle in my hand. In fact, I refuse to have a cellular phone. Why should I pay for a hand-held computer load of stuff I’d never use. A phone, for me, is for talking with another person. End of. I know. Dino.

When I go to lunch with friends, I’m the only person not checking in with the latest FaceFlap or TickleTackle, some surreptitiously, most outright blatantly.

I’ve no idea why our cable service was interrupted for three whole days. Electrical power was off and on with surges that first day. Does that matter? I don’t know. It was a little windy. By Montana standards, the wind would not have been noticed nor commented upon. So, I don’t know. How can those thing affect cable?

I’m of the generation who recalls when communication meant you wrote a letter, stamped the envelope, and put it in the mailbox hoping for a reply within a month. Local telephone service was sweet although the party line was not always so great. If you don’t know what those are, ask your Grandma.

We never called long distance unless someone in the family died.

Now we don’t even have long distance.

No, I do not want the “not-so-good-old-days” returned. I just want uninterrupted cable service, slow and low as it might be.

Those three days of my own personal disconnect felt like three years to me. It would be a rare day in which I utilize more than an hour of phone and internet combined. But, Holy Canoli, now that I have them, I want them, those faithful little worker bees making my life better. Okay, so I got a tad carried away. You know what I mean. I’ve seen you misplace your cell phone and go into a panic.

Which led me to thinking and you know how dangerous thinking can be.

Obviously, I rate electricity as a “necessary convenience”. I ignore any clash of definition of those two words. I remember when I lived in Dodson, okay, dark ages, my nearest neighbors did not have electricity. Nor did a whole large swath of land south of us have an electric line within double-digit miles.

We, ourselves, did not have running water, unless you counted me running from the well to the house with buckets.

I did not think it was funny when my father-in-law wanted to put running water in the barn but bypass the house.

I value all my modern conveniences, especially power and water. Interesting word, that, “conveniences”. I’ll leave you to ponder that.

I want it all, water and electricity, internet and phone, washing machine and refrigerator. And books. Don’t forget the books. Today I have all these things. What if . . .

Some days I think we are devolving. A huge percentage of my emails from friends show up with cave drawings. Almost cave drawings. None show a whole stick figure, only a round head, like an M&M. What if . . .

Tomorrow I might be climbing up the mountain to the spring to beat my laundry on rocks. Clothes? Animal skins? Will we still have animals? What if . . .

Tomorrow will my family/friends and I huddle around a fire grinding corn in a stone trough? Will we grunt and point because we’ve lost the ability to use words?

What if your cousin, who always was weird, yeah, that one, picked a charred stick from the fire pit and scratched wiggly marks with ashes on the cave wall? Things that looked similar to a water faucet or a telephone or an automobile, yeah, Flintstone era?

Maybe I’ve had enough isolation. I’m off to Laguna Colorado for fish tacos with friends.

I could not make up what happened. When I got home, we had no power in our town. Electricity was off for hours into the night. I located enough black marking pens to write the alphabet and basic rules of grammar on the bedroom wall.

Sondra Ashton

Havre Weekly Chronicle

March 6, 2025

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