It might be an advantage to have a slow speed internet connection. It could even save time. With a DSL hookup it’s pretty easy to check your e-mail twenty times a day and hit your favorite blogs multiple times. Back on Lummi Island where, except for the library or for those with satellite dishes, we’re looking at the internet at a 42,000 baud rate and the dial up reliability is frustrating. So, instead of dropping down in front of the laptop and surfing every so often as is our city habit, we log on perhaps once a day to check e-mail and the news. Somehow it seems a more reasonable approach than spending hours in front of a computer. The fact is, technology never saves us any time. It just helps us find easier ways to waste it. Cell phones: think of a reason to call some one. Palm pilot: hours of inputting information. Ipod: downloading and listening. GPS: always checking to see if you are where you already know you are. With all this electronic stuff is a manual written by some outsourced English speaker. A manual that doesn’t quite ever answer the question you need answered. When you call that customer service number you get a telephone tree (“Dial 1 for English”) that uses up even more time.
So, how do you use that extra time? On Lummi Island you can use it to get lost. Lost in the tide pools. Lost in the woods. Lost in the views. Today we picked “lost in the woods.” We weren’t really lost. We just didn’t know exactly where we were. Starting at the house we walked across the road to some property my brother Richard bought recently. He wanted to climb the ridge and take photos of the ferns growing out of a rather impressive formation of what is called Chuckanut Sandstone, a geological feature that is quite local and which once sat at the water’s edge before being pushed up a couple hundred feet some many years ago. At places you can still see where the waves carved the stone. There were a half dozen or more varieties of mushrooms including a cute little toadstool with a puffball on top. Richard’s property is appropriately located on what the maps call Richard’s Mountain. So, we (son Shawn, grandson Forrest, Richard of Richard’s Mountain and I) bushwhacked over the top of this 300’ skyscraper ridge, after enjoying views of Bellingham Bay and Mt. Baker, and walked down the other side to a faint road that seemed to skirt the west side of the ridge. We walked through alder groves along what is the recharge area for wells on this end of the island, wetlands and ponds that collect, filter and feed the water to an acquifer we tap for drinking water. After about a half mile the road petered out and we had to thrash through some blackberry canes, snowberries and assorted dead shrubs until we popped out on the top end of a small real estate subdivision and back down to Nugent Rd., our road.
We were lost up there for about an hour and a half. An hour and a half we won’t spend surfing the web.
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