I am just back from a vacation in Yellowstone National Park (YNP). YNP let in the cars in 1915, snowmobiles in recent years but surprisingly hasn’t been friendly to the Internet. I had no Internet access inside the Park and am now catching up with my email and the RSS feed backlog. It will take make a few days to get through it all.
Although I didn’t mind being cut off from my email and RSS feeds, I did miss the Internet. There were many times when I wished I could have dived deeper into a particular geological feature. For instance, most of the geyser activity is in the Yellowstone caldera which itself is not too dissimilar to the Ngorongoro crater I visited last year. Both are about the same size (less than 30 miles in diameter) and similar in age (less than 2 million years old). Given this, it would have been fun to explore the similarities.
How we interact with nature is changing due to the digital age. Gone are the days when people would buy postcards to remember their visit to a place. Now everybody wants to take their own special pictures of landscapes on a trip. My 9-yr old daughter isn’t interested in a nice picture of the beautiful Yellowstone Lake in a coffee-table book; she wants her own special photograph. Photography is no longer about recording a vista; it’s now about personal expression.
Similarly learning about an awe-inspiring geyser is no longer about reading a plaque put up by YNP. Instead it’s about using that plaque as a starting point for making your own personal mind-map using the Internet. This doesn’t mean that you need high-speed internet on the phone - I don’t expect to be standing in front of the geyser and browsing on my phone. I want to be able to soak in the moment at that time but later back in the hotel room be able to reflect on it more deeply using the Internet. It’s not much to ask for. But on all my recent vacations, this hasn’t been possible. For instance, it would have been nice to look at Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theories about pyramid building when I was in Egypt.
We need to rethink solitude in a connected world.
Although I understand your desire to connect within the parks for the purpose of learning more about Geysers and such, I cannot imagine a more inappropriate place than Yellowstone to increase our wireless range. I offer this experience.
After nine days of driving around Yellowstone and Grand Teton National parks, we realized that we had never once turned on the car radio (I personally always listen to news, talk radio, or baseball in the car). The reason we never did was because we never thought of it. In my opinion, our surroundings were so unique (and beautiful I might add) that we never felt the need to distract out senses by connecting to the outside world. We were amazed at how easy it was to let these thing go.
When we visited Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton we were just as amazed and, for myself, disturbed at how distasteful connecting in such an environment can be. The Lodge is one of the few places in the area with WiFi and strong Cell support. As a result, the room with perhaps the most breath-taking view I have ever seen was filled with a disturbing and surprisingly loud morass of individuals talking on their cellphones and playing on their laptops. Kids, instead of being outside exploring this unique place, were playing video games.
To a great degree, seeing this in a place whose purpose is to preserve the natural environment seemed out of place and inappropriate given the surroundings.
Hope u had a good vacation.
Dont have an opinion on “modernizing” aka “connected” nature spots.. but your post reminded me of a recent book I read (or rather listened to) - Bill Bryson’s “A Short histor of nearly everything”.
In a chapter on natural disasters and how the earth has survived many of them in the past, he talks specially about YellowStone, which apparently has seen two major blasts in the past, each of them divided by a consistent timeline. And guess when is the next one due, according to that extrapolation - Now! He says its already overdue, and prediction is that it would be bigger than the earlier ones (impacting thousands of miles around that area)
Now this might be scary to read, but in a way is humbling to understand how fragile our existence is. And how we have a foolishly machoist attitude towards Earth and everything else (that was there before us, with us and will be even after we are gone), when in reality, we are just small fray, even possibly an evolutionary mistake or an anomaly (Bryson even suggests that), in its path.
Oh well… where is that TV remote.. time to discharge more rays to the stratosphere.. *yawn*
:-)
Re: Internet access at vacation spots, I bet your family would rather you stayed disconnected from the Internet!
To add to Kumar Rangarajan’s comments above, Yellowstone is what is called a supervolcano, and an active one at that! And the funny thing was the guy from the Geological Survey who was studying the volcanic history of this place in the 1960s, was very troubled because he couldn’t find the park’s volcano (or rather the caldera). He realized virtually the entire park was the caldera only when he saw NASA’s high-altitude pics of the park.
I tend to agree with John that some places are better left “unwired”. Only recently when we were packing for a quick holiday, my son asked if he should carry his Gameboy / game CDs and I asked him to try leaving home without them for a change. He faced some anxiety pangs like most of us would without the “blackberry”… But we figured that without them he’s spend more time on the beach and taking in the natural beauty…
To our shock that turned to amazement [ only later ] when we reached Alibag, we found that there was no cell / internet coverage. For the first day we each carried around our respective cellphones / blackberry’s around with the hope that we’d catch a sliver of signal… We didn’t. The next day onwards we realised it made no sense carrying them around. [ which reminds me to check if it is berries or berry’s like mouse and mice? ]
On our way back as we all played a game going round the car asking what part of the holiday we had enjoyed the most, someone said the seafood, someone the weather. I said I loved the fact that I actually made a sand castle, getting my hands in the mud without worrying about getting dirty, germs, worms or such. And my son’s answer moved me the most. He said he loved the fact that my phone and laptop didn’t work!
I’ve had to rethink my usage of the cellphone when I enjoy quality time with him and while at home. It’s left on silent mode - people who need to reach me in an emergency situation know my landline number!
I also realise now that when I was making the sand castle [that I must admit, was rather unstable ] it had been a while since both my hands were free!
And I was really thankful that there are still some places that are unspoiled by cellphone coverage.
I think you’re onto something here. I’d also like to be able to look up more information about things that I’m seeing, whether animals or geological features. Maybe once Wimax is rolled out?
This is more of a response to John and Anuja’s comments. I think Sharad does enjoy and respect nature. What he is talking about is the joy of learning/discovering nature. It’s so fascinating. For that, Internet is the most easy and convenient one. (And I am sure this pursuit is not lonely but in solitude.)