I realized I needed to leave my smartphone at home during my most recent vacation when I thought about doing so and worried whether I would have a good time without it.
I don’t consider myself a phone addict. Those folks are tough to be around. When you’re trying to talk to them in person, they’re also managing several other conversations over text.
But I saw that I was getting there. Checking my own Facebook and Instagram feeds, especially, had become a mindless tick, the same way I rotate my earring in my ear when my hands have nothing to do. It was rare that I was giving my mind downtime to wander. Those moments were replaced by fiddling with my phone, and I was antsy when it wasn’t nearby. What if something photo-worthy happened and I had no way to document it? What if a strange question popped into my head — can bunnies eat sand? — and Google was not nearby to answer it?
So when I booked a weeklong trip via plane, train and automobile to San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Yellowstone National Park, I also spent 50 bucks on a pay-as-you-go flip phone. I kept the phone number close, providing it only to my family and the people I would be staying with on the West Coast.
The decision made me think: What a lucky person I am to afford a smartphone, which at a moment’s notice brings to my fingertips the sum of man’s knowledge (and the sum of his Instagram pictures), but also to be allowed to temporarily stick this machine in a drawer, to journey away from technology — an opportunity that employees at a wide variety of jobs will recognize as a luxury becoming only rarer.
It was the right call, so to speak, and it made the trip better.
The thing about it, though, is that life without a smartphone is not all that different from life with a smartphone — with some small but enjoyable pluses.
The first thing that happened when I ditched my smartphone is I noticed that everybody else around me had one. It was startling.
The second thing that happened, eventually, was I stopped reflexively patting my butt in public while searching for the phone in my back pocket.
And the third thing was a feeling of presence. I was noticing other people around me and their interactions more acutely, like the man on the train to Portland, hitting on a traveler from Spain, explaining that New Hampshire is the only good state on the East Coast because Granite Staters have “the least federal laws of any of the states” and say “live free or die.” (The East Coast in general, he told her, needs to smoke more weed.)
There was the scenery, too: the architecture in the Bay Area, the forests of western Oregon, the flat expanses in Idaho and Montana, the wildlife in Yellowstone. I enjoyed it all without a single selfie, and read National Geographic cover to cover — twice.
At one point, I wrote in my travel journal, “I thought I didn’t have my flip phone at all today and it felt totally amazing to be unreachable and disconnected. I was disappointed when I got home and realized it was in my tote bag the whole time.”
Why bring the flip phone at all? I decided that, in the year 2016, it would have been unkind to ask the half-dozen people I was visiting on my trip to plan all of our meetups a week in advance.
Even the little flipper felt like a nuisance soon enough, buzzing with texts. And about halfway into the trip, I began to resent the loaner film camera I was lugging around, because it felt like it was undercutting the joy of experiencing, without distraction or need for documentation, all the interesting things I saw. It was almost a relief when I screwed everything up at the end and accidentally exposed all the film.
The truth is, I was usually not too far away from a smartphone, and much of the time I was asking other people to do things for me — look up information on the Yellowstone campsite, direct me toward the Portland intersection where there was a thrift store I wanted to visit.
And sometimes, life was less convenient. I woke up one day in San Francisco when my friend was working and realized I didn’t know what the weather would be. There was no radio. I remembered seeing a newspaper in the apartment lobby, so I went down to try to sneak a peek, but it was a two-days-old New York Times. So I winged it with pants and a jacket, and used the guidebook my friend’s mother had bought her when she first moved to the city, hopping from map to map across its tiny pages to make it to my destination.
Later I realized I had taken a comically indirect route from Russian Hill to Golden Gate Park, traveling in a haphazard horseshoe around the peninsula. Soaked in sweat from the rather warm day, I wished I had left the extra layer at home. But the hours-long walk was a wonderful way to take in some of the city’s neighborhoods — sights, sounds, people, dogs. If I had used a rideshare app — which, it seems, have all but replaced cabs in that tech-centric city — those are things I would have missed.
In the three weeks since my vacation, I’ve settled back into some of my old routines. I even found myself checking text messages the other night while hanging out with other friends.
But I’ve also started leaving my phone in the car sometimes, or at home altogether when I leave the house. The mini respites help me to remember that a phone can be a wildly useful tool, as long as you keep it from becoming a burden.
Maggie Cassidy can be reached at mcassidy@vnews.com or 603-727-3220.