San Isabel, Where the Internet Ends, Sort of

That mysterious box at lower right.

My friend Galen has been visiting the Lodge at San Isabel since boyhood; me, I probably came first in the late 1980s. On a fishing trip last week, we stopped to photograph this newish sign (not 1930s original), but we noticed something else — the functional pay phone.

The information sheet that you get when asking about the lodge's rental cabins makes it clear: no mobile phone service (unless you have a satphone), no wifi at the lodge or cabins, no broadcast television, and no satellite-based TV or Internet access. (Some homeowners have satellite dishes, of course.) You can borrow DVDs to watch. Messages for guests are posted on a notice board by the main door.

Otherwise, go fishing. Go for a walk. Paddle a kayak. Do something.

It is almost like "the land where the Internet ends," a piece about Green Bank, West Virginia, that ran in the New York Times last month.

Green Bank is home to several giant radio telescopes, all set in a "National Radio Quiet Zone, 13,000 square miles of mountainous terrain with few cell towers or other transmitters." (That sounds a lot like much of the Wet Mountains, if you stay off the ridges.) Scientists studying weak signals from the cosmos want no interference. The area also attract "electrosensitives," people who think that cellular phone signals and other transmissions make them ill.

The writer, Pagan Kenndy, wonders,

Activists have already created “dark sky reserves” to protect wilderness from artificial light. In the future, might we also create “privacy reserves” where we can go to escape the ubiquitous internet?

As it happens, San Isabel is (mostly) in Custer County, where to the west, in the Wet Mountain Valley, there is already a "dark sky reserve" with a website, "star parties" and so on.

She talks to a stranger in line at a convenience store. There is something odd about him.

The man carried himself oddly, with his chest puffed out and his head swiveling as if to scan everything in the store, from the hunting gear to the Little Debbie display case. I thought his posture must have been a remnant from his brain injury, but then realized everybody seemed to be walking around with the same heads-up attitude. Take away the cellphones, it turns out, and you also take away the cellphone hunch. And with nothing else to do but meet one another’s eyes, people talk. 

 Or they are gazing at the lake, watching the ospreys dive, looking to see if the trout are rising.