Roads From the Ashes

by Megan Edwards

  Actually, the store was called Electronic Butterfly. It seemed to sell all kinds of computer paraphernalia beyond the ordinary Radio Shack lineup. Better and better, I thought. I walked up to the counter where a tall man with a long mustache was taking apart a calculator with a tiny screwdriver.

  “Do you sell acoustic couplers?” I asked. The man looked up, startled.

  “I think we’ve got an old one around here somewhere,” he said. “But why on earth would you want one?”

  He didn’t have to ask twice. I poured my heart out. “I want it so I can log on at pay phones as we travel,” I said. “I used to want to log on with my cellular phone, but I’ve given up that dream. I’ve got this little black box, but . . .”

  “A black box?” He interrupted. “What’s it supposed to do?” I explained as well as I could, using every fragment of techno-jargon I could muster. At the time, my fluency in modem-speak was at an all-time high. I’d immersed myself in manuals for weeks. A fair amount had stuck, if only momentarily.

  The trouble is, my knowledge was fleeting. I’d detested learning it, and as soon as I could forget it, I did. This means that now, I am incapable of reporting my conversation with anything close to accuracy.

  As well as I can remember, it went something like this.

  Store clerk: Have you connected your fleeb strut to your crankduff bilgebanger?

  Me: Yes, I used the glingbat dub that came with it.

  Store Clerk: Good. Then the problem’s got to be in the kilber chain. Do you know about kilber chains?

  Me: Well, I’ve been reading the manual. I know how to change them.

  Store clerk: Good. Why don’t you try changing the jib hammer to a sneak hub and add an X-pod to your huppernog. That may do the trick.

  Me: I’ll give it a try!

  Store Clerk: If the X-pod doesn’t work, you can try a Y-frag.

  Me: I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks!

  Mark was so grateful he bought a new battery for his watch even though he didn’t need one. “If what you told her works,” he said to the clerk, “I’ll send you a consulting fee. You may have saved our marriage.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” said the clerk. “And don’t forget to check your corkle bunt,” he added.

  “On another topic,” said Mark, “Can you tell us where to find the Department of Motor Vehicles?”

  The DMV, it turned out, was only a few blocks away, which, come to think of it, was true of everything in Susanville. We went there immediately, and I scribbled what I could remember of the store clerk’s advice in my notebook on the way.

  “You’ll probably be stuck in the DMV for hours,” I said to Mark as we parked. “I’ll come in with you, but if it’s going to take forever, I’ll come back out and see whether I can make the black box do my bidding.”

  The first thing that struck us about Susanville’s Department of Motor Vehicles was the size. It was housed behind a tiny storefront and had only one desk. A smiling woman stood behind

  it, and behind her on the wall was a child’s crayon drawing.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked cheerily. In five minutes, Mark had a new license.

  Five pleasant minutes. Service with a smile. I swear, the next time I’m in Los Angeles and my license needs renewing, I’m driving to Susanville. Even with the twelve hundred mile detour, I’ll save time.

  As soon as I had the chance, I set up my computer, made the changes the store clerk had suggested, hooked the modem up to the black box, and dialed an access number on the cellular telephone. It didn’t work the first time, and it didn’t work the second time. The third time — the last time, I told myself — it actually worked. Two pieces of e-mail transferred themselves to my machine. It was hardly earthshaking, but I felt like Archimedes, ready to run through the streets in the buff shouting “Eureka!” Luckily for Susanville, I restrained myself and settled for a celebratory glass of Chardonnay.

  Susanville was founded by a man named Isaac Roop, who came to the area in 1854 after he lost his business in a fire and needed a fresh start. He staked his claim along the river, which he named after his daughter. Later the town got her name, too, and grew rapidly into a busy hub for Gold Rush-inspired trade.

  That may be Susanville’s important history, but for me, this quiet hamlet will always remain a place of marvels: an unexpected elephant, a five-minute driver’s license, and, thanks to a friendly Radio Shack genius, a black box with a voice.

  At the Feet of Giants

  Technically speaking, it was spring when we arrived in Sequoia National Park, but winter had not wholly retreated. Azaleas were blooming in sunny spots, but the spreading branches of the Presidential Grove’s giants preserved a shadowy white carpet at their feet.

  We walked quietly among the noble redwoods, each one bearing silent testimony of ancient fires, lightning, wind. In the presence of their extreme age, size and magnificence, I felt like a short-lived nuisance flitting by. How absurd that humans presume to name these beings, to act as though we own them. If Sequoias had arms, I wouldn’t blame them for swatting us.

  The first loggers to happen upon a Sequoia grove drooled immediately and put their saws to work almost as quickly. Fortunately, the giants were found lacking in one astonishing regard. They had been blessed with size and beauty and age, but their wood is weak and brittle. Giant sequoias, unlike their smaller coastal cousins, are useless as lumber. A few trees died anyway to serve as side show freaks at Centennial celebrations and world fairs, but giant Sequoias were ultimately worth more alive and standing than sawn to bits.

  We may kill them anyway, of course. Sequoias are champions at surviving forest fires, but nobody really knows whether they can survive having their root systems covered with asphalt and pummeled by two million feet a year. Size bears no relation to deadliness, and humans may well be the AIDS virus of the giant redwoods, a lethal invader with a long incubation period.

  I hope we’re not killers. I hope we’re harmless groupies, not death-bearing tsetse flies. I want those redwoods to be here until the sun dies, and as long as I’m here, I want to be able to visit them. They remind me to seize the day.

  We walked until the sun began to fade, and then headed for a campground we’d noticed earlier. Campgrounds in national parks have an unwritten rule that every car camper knows. You have to drive by every available site before you pick one. You can’t just take the first one, because you might be missing one that’s flatter, bigger, shadier, prettier, or just plain better. We began our obligatory circuit, and around the first bend, we surprised six people standing next to a camper laden with mountain bikes. They all wore that now-familiar “What is that thing?” look, and we smiled politely.

  The campground was nearly deserted, which made our search more challenging. “That one’s got azaleas blooming next to it,” I would say. “But that one’s got its own water faucet,” Mark would counter. “That one’s got a view.” “That one’s nice and level.” Before long, we found ourselves back at the entrance gate. “Okay, now we have to pick,” said Mark, and we began our second orbit.

  This time, the six cyclists were expecting us. They were standing in a row, and as we rounded the bend, they salaamed in unison, touching their foreheads to the ground in exaggerated adoration. We waved sheepishly, and suddenly a site on the opposite edge of the campground seemed ideal. We fled. The cyclists came by later to make sure we weren’t mad. “No, just embarrassed,” we said, and Mark spent the next hour happily discussing suspension systems and tag axles.

  I retired to my office. From a romance point of view, it was the perfect setting to test the newly functioning black box. I set up my computer and turned on the cellular phone. At last, I thought as I looked at the moon rising above the cedars outside my window, we were truly mobile. At last, location was unimportant. I really could sit at my desk in the wilderness and function just as efficiently as if I
were in a Manhattan skyscraper.

  The telephone didn’t work. In 1994, cellular phones functioned fairly well in major cities and heavily traveled corridors, but relay stations were few in sparsely populated and mountainous regions. I should have known, but my success in Susanville was still fresh.

  I wrote for a while anyway, and near midnight, Mark and I went outside to take Marvin for a walk in the starlight. We crunched across the snow and soon arrived at the campground gate. “Look,” I said. “There’s a pay phone.” It was housed in a tidy wooden shelter, and there was a neat cap of snow on its little peaked roof. I could reach out and touch a perfectly functioning telephone, and it was useless to me. And all I want to do is send e-mail, I thought. In 1994, I didn’t even know about the World Wide Web. All I wanted was to transmit a small text file once a week from wherever I happened to be. Was that too much to ask? I sighed. I was beginning to think it might be.

  Chapter 6

  It Makes You Wonder Whom to Believe

  “There’s This Guy in a Kayak in Alaska”

  There were several forces at work against me in my quest to transmit data on the fly, and the most insidious was the pervasive general belief that millions of people were already doing it. Every single person I talked to seemed to know about someone else who was already doing what I wanted to do. There was a guy in Alaska who logged on from a kayak, a woman on a lemur-watching expedition who sent e-mail from a tree in South America, some guy in Nebraska, some woman in Maine. “Do you have a name? Do you have a number?” I’d ask. No, it was always a friend of a friend. It was the urban legend of the nineties, promulgated by hyperbolic advertising in glossy computer magazines with names like Portable Computing and Mobile Office Solutions.

  Page after page of advertisements touted gadgets and gizmos glowingly described as wireless, and heralded with slogans like “The Ultimate in Telecommuting.” Most of these devices were designed for business travelers who stay in hotels. The rest had limited range, or worked only in the middle of Manhattan at high noon. “Oh, sure, we have what you want,” salesperson after salesperson would say. Then, within moments, I’d hear, “Our product isn’t quite right for you, but there’s this guy in a kayak in Alaska . . .”

  Friends sent me flyers from trade shows, clippings from newspapers, brochures from computer stores, but nothing could improve on my black box that the magician in Susanville had brought to life. It worked about one time in five, a frustratingly low average, but so much better than zero, I was grateful. I was also grateful that I had only one writing deadline a week, and that I could still use a fax machine if I had to.

  It irked me that the general public had so little understanding of my meager triumph. “Just wait,” I said to myself. “Just wait until they want to try it themselves.” But nobody seemed to want to. Nobody seemed to grasp the exquisite beauty of being mobile without dropping out of society, of leading a nomadic life without giving up community. “When I travel, I don’t want a telephone anywhere near,” was the response of people I’d share my dream with. “I travel to get away from things like that.” They were talking about vacations. I was talking about my life.

  Four years after I first coaxed my black box to speak, the desire for a mobile Internet connection blossomed in a friend of mine. He’d started his own Web site, and he’d finally come to the conclusion that it would indeed be nice to go hiking in the Sierras and still get some work done. This was one of the very same souls who’d been eager to share his certain knowledge of wired kayakers and connected lemur-lovers. With cocky self-assurance, he bought a gadget that was supposed to allow him to log onto the Internet with his hand-held cellular telephone. So confident was he in the legend of mobile access that he didn’t even try it out before he left home.

  Even in 1998, he was expecting a miracle. He was counting on a cellular telephone with less than one watt of power to find a clean signal in a range of mountains averaging 9,000 feet in elevation. He was expecting his new gizmo to reformat that signal into a package his modem could understand. In addition, he was relying on the whole grand union to stay up and running long enough for him to connect to the Internet, download e-mail, and upload files to his Web site at one-tenth the speed he was used to. “It didn’t work because I used the wrong access number,” he said.

  Maybe so, Captain Video, but do you have any idea how many variables you’re dealing with? It’s chasing the 99,999 other possibilities that will make you bald. Then again, maybe you’re just stupid. After all, there’s a guy in Alaska who’s been doing it in a kayak since 1994.

  The Iguana

  Sometimes even I was cowed by the advertising and the omnipresent assumption that mobile Internet connections were yesterday’s news. “It’s me,” I’d think. “I’m missing something obvious.”

  I’d begin my search once more, only to find that there were no better solutions for our particular requirements available, at any price. You could pay $3,000 for a satellite telephone of the type used on ships, but, in addition to costing $5 a minute to use, they were designed primarily for voice transmission, not data. I knew that the armed forces had been using two-way wireless communications systems for years, but their equipment wasn’t available to ordinary mortals.

  It wasn’t that Mark and I expected mobile communication to be cheap. The black box was expensive to use, too. Since we were constantly moving, we were nearly always assessed “roaming” charges by our cellular service provider. This meant that we paid as much as $5.35 a minute, even if a call didn’t go through, and even if the black box failed to perform. Since it often took five or six tries to get the box to work and then four or five minutes once it did, well, do the math. It was expensive.

  But wait, I hear you saying. I know there were satellite systems easily available in 1994. That was the year everybody was going in for those little dishes, the portable ones made by RCA. You’re right, and they were an instant hit with RV owners. They were reasonably priced, and they provided cable television just about anywhere. In 1994, the satellites could barrage you with images, but you couldn’t beam anything back.

  And so we were back to the black box, and even in 1998, its direct descendant was still our best choice for coast to coast mobile data transmission. Satellite systems began offering Web access as early as 1996, but they required a land based telephone line to function. Several wireless communications systems appeared on the scene, but they were limited in geographical area.

  And here I must mention the acoustic coupler I finally discovered in an ad in a computer magazine, an updated vestige of the Jurassic age of computer technology. “Log on anywhere in the world!” the copy proclaimed. If that included a pay phone in the snow in Sequoia, it sounded good to me. “Hotel phones! Pay Phones! No Problem!” Sold. I ordered one immediately. It came in a little black nylon bag, and when I took it out, its coiled black cord hung down like a tail. “It’s a dinosaur that lives today,” I said to Mark. “It’s an Iguana.”

  The Iguana was designed to be placed face to face with a telephone receiver and held in place with Velcro bands. You plugged the cord into your modem, and voila! A few other minor adjustments, and you’d be online. Until I actually tried to use it, the Iguana was my Lancelot. After I tried to use it, I realized it would never be my savior. It worked one time in six, and it was stubbornly prejudiced against certain telephone companies. Even so, it was better than no fallback at all, and I kept the little reptile on hand for days when the black box was giving me the cold shoulder.

  Death Valley Days

  I’d turned forty the December before our house burned down, and now it was Mark’s turn. We’d descended to the floor of Death Valley on the big day, and even in May, it’s easy to understand why this famous depression has landmarks with names like Furnace Creek, Dante’s View and Devil’s Golf Course. Native Americans called the valley Tomesha, or “Ground Afire.” It’s hot at the bottom of the world.

  We par
ked in front of a visitors’ center at Furnace Creek, and got out to look around. The sand burned through our shoes, and the sun blazed straight overhead. The air was stiflingly still. Leaving Marvin in the Phoenix with the generator and air conditioning running at full tilt, we stepped inside. Ah. Cool and dark.

  Our eyes soon adjusted, and we browsed through the exhibits that explained about the twenty-mule teams Ronald Reagan made famous in “Death Valley Days” and the golden age of borax mining. The fact that caught our attention, however, was that ground temperatures in Death Valley can reach nearly 200 °F. “Which means you really could cook an egg,” said Mark. Today, by contrast, the air temperature was a mere 112°.

  “So does that mean nobody comes here in the summer?” we asked the ranger at the desk. “No,” he said. “That’s the most popular time for German tourists. They come all year round, but they really love the heat.

  “The trouble with summer visitors is that they sometimes don’t realize they have to take the heat seriously. We go out regularly to scrape desiccated sun worshipers off the road.”

  I already knew about the love affair Germany has with the sun. I lived in Düsseldorf for two years, teaching at an international school. In a land where drizzly gray skies are the rule, sunny days are rare treasures.

  One spring day, I arrived at school to find that classes had been canceled. “Why?” I asked. “Too hot,” was the reply. The mercury had risen to a full 80°, and the sky was a brilliant blue. Was it too hot, or too rare a gift to be spent inside? Who cared? The sun had made a rare appearance, and like every other vitamin D-starved soul in Düsseldorf, I stayed outside until dark.

  Germans have the reputation of taking more vacations in other countries than any other people in the world. They rarely head north. They go to places with warm sand like the Canary Islands and Rhodes and the Dalmatian Coast. If they’re the adventurous sort, they go to Kenya and Egypt and Mexico. The extremists go to Death Valley in August, and stay in places like the Furnace Creek Inn, which for over seventy years has played host to visitors from all over the world.