Batteries Not Included

The Virtues of Simplicity

It might be April. The ground under the cedars is almost bare, the town roads are turbid rivers running between low dikes of salty slush, and a foraging blackbird is flashing scarlet epaulettes at anyone bold enough to approach him. It might be April. But it’s not. The snow will return. The New Model Climate may be making Canoe Country winters shorter than they used to be, but it hasn’t stopped the wheel of the year from spinning round. Winter will stay with us for a little while yet. And winter has lessons to teach us about our dependence on technology, as this tale from another time and place makes clear. So imagine there’s a winter storm headed your way. Because sooner or later, there will be.
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by Farwell Forrest | February 23, 2018
Originally published in much different form on March 6, 2001

As I write this, a major winter storm is threatening the mid-Atlantic coast. Some parts of the country, places where a couple of inches of snow usually bring traffic to a standstill, will probably get a couple of feet. New York’s northern mountains will be spared the worst, however. We’re unlikely to see more than a foot of snow in all, and that’s just business as usual.

A little more than three weeks ago, the shoe—make that the snow—was on the other foot. While the rest of the state dealt with downpours and minor flooding, we were expecting a one-two punch of heavy ice and high winds. Surrounded as we are by 80-foot-tall white pines, many of them already bearing the scars of earlier storms, we felt a certain understandable apprehension. But let it never be said that we don’t heed our own advice. Following Tamia’s lead, I was keeping a close eye on the barometric trace on our Casio 950 watch, a marvel of digital technology that also boasts an altimeter, a barograph, and a thermometer, all in a package no larger than an old-style silver dollar.

It must be said that the trace wasn’t encouraging. Updated automatically every two hours, it was dropping steadily. At first it took baby steps: single 0.05-inHg increments. Soon, though, it was descending by leaps and bounds, as much as 0.15 inHg each time. And the wind? It was already blowing a steady 20 miles per hour, with gusts to 30 or more. But there was worse to come. Before long, ice began to weigh down the branches of the pines. Then the wind strengthened to a banshee wail, and the first small branches crashed onto our sheet steel roof. Several hours later, the National Weather Service posted high wind warnings. These didn’t come as news to us.

I now felt a morbid compulsion to check the trace every time it was updated, but when I next went to the shelf where the Casio reposed, I found… Nothing at all. The watch’s display was blank. I then did what any intelligent, technologically-savvy person would do in such a situation: I picked up the watch, shook it, and cursed. But the watch was unmoved by my intemperate language. Its display gave nothing away.

Having failed to recall the watch to its duty by command, I tried to trick it into cooperating. I pressed the button to change modes, thinking that this might work some indefinable electronic magic. No joy. Indeed, the watch mocked me, offering up a single, flickering ghost image of the time and date for a few tantalizing seconds before once again going dark. After that, nothing. Our faithful weather watchdog had abandoned its post under fire. Outside, the wind was still rising, and when the next ice-covered branch slammed down on the roof, the clangor it made left us in no doubt that it was the biggest branch to fall so far.

By this time Tamia was standing by my side, drawn by my steady stream of epithets. She sized up the situation at a glance, took the errant watch from me, walked to her worktable, and proceeded to remove the first of the four tiny screws securing the watch’s backplate, explaining—in the same gentle, reassuring tone I’ve heard her use in speaking to a lost child—that the problem was almost certainly a dying battery. In a matter of minutes, she’d extracted the little silver coin cell from its snug recess, cleaned its contacts with an erasure, and replaced it. Then she fitted the first tiny screw back into place and started buttoning the watch up.

It was an accomplished performance under adverse conditions, akin to field-stripping an M-14 under fire. But my attention was already elsewhere. On the same shelf that held the Casio, I found Tamia’s forty-year-old Thommen altimeter. Tucked away in a corner, covered with a thick film of dust, and all but forgotten in my infatuation with my digital wunderkind, it had nonetheless continued to monitor the ups and downs of the moving sea of air above us, without the need for batteries. It may not have had a bar-graph display, but it worked.

I took the Thommen off the shelf and tapped it gently. The needle settled at 28.65 inHg. I set the tell-tale pointer. Then I looked among the scattered papers on my desk for a sheet of graph paper. When I found one, I ruled off a vertical scale and logged the just-measured pressure. That was all it took. We were back in business. All I had to do now was look at the barometer every hour or two and plot the pressure on my graph. The resulting curve would tell us how the storm was progressing and let us know when we could expect the winds to ease.

Just then, Tamia rejoined me. She’d had no luck. The Casio’s display couldn’t be magicked back into life. That wonderful, versatile, compact miracle of late-20th-century technology was useless—and all because a three-dollar battery had failed.

“Guess we’ll have to use the Thommen,” she said. “I’ll get some graph paper.”

“No need,” I replied, trying to keep from sounding smug. And I showed her the point I’d just plotted. It felt good.

That storm is history now, though it led us a merry dance while it lasted. The winds mounted higher and higher, until 60-mile-per-hour gusts were tearing the tops off nearby trees and sending limbs as big around as my thigh crashing down on our roof. We lost power for much of the next day, and even in the intervals when the lights came back on, the voltage was so low that the bulbs gave only a feeble red glow. But thanks to Tamia’s veteran altimeter we knew when the worst was over—and we knew it hours before the official forecasters had sounded the all-clear.

Now another storm is buffeting the eastern seaboard. Chances are that we’ll escape unscathed this time, but Tamia and I will still be graphing the pressure every few hours, just in case the boffins get it wrong.

And what about the Casio? The genie’s abandoned that bottle, I’m afraid. Despite a new battery, the display remains blank. Nothing we’ve been able to do has enticed it back into life. Of course it is ten years old. Who’d expect a ten-year-old television to work? Or a ten-year-old computer? No one with any sense. Then again, the Thommen altimeter is forty years old if it’s a day. It’s been carried up and down mountains, bounced through rapids, and spent sub-zero nights in unheated tents. Yet it’s still functioning flawlessly, and it will never need a new battery.

There’s a lesson here, I think. Yes, technology is wonderful. For one thing, it makes it possible for a couple of hacks in a shack in the northern Adirondack foothills to speak to the world. But everything comes with a price tag attached. Technology can’t make us any freer. At best, it can only help us exchange one set of fetters for another. And in liberating us from the constraints of the past, it makes us newly dependent in unexpected, and often unhealthy, ways. Canoeists (and kayakers, too, if you insist on this empty distinction) are quick—perhaps over-quick—to embrace the new. New designs. New materials. New techniques. We find their siren song irresistible. But we turn our backs on the old at our peril. Ours is a sport rooted in elective anachronism, after all. We choose to embrace what has come before, and now is gone. It’s what sets us apart from the jet ski jockeys.

What does this mean? Simply this: In an age driven by the internal-combustion engine, canoeists still travel from place to place propelled by muscle, gravity, and wind. Self-reliance and simplicity lie at the heart of what we do. So when we goggle at the latest offerings on outfitters’ websites, we’d be wise to heed the warning implicit in the words “Batteries not included.”

Gotta go. It’s time I checked the barometer.