Excitedly I anticipate her arrival, a friend from middle school who moved to Rhode Island soon out of college. It’s a warm summer day in Truckee and I think to myself, perfect, a perfect blue-sky day to greet her in perfect Tahoe style. She gets out of her rental car, beams with delight, hugs me tightly and says, ‘God, I love this air. I am so happy to be here.’ We fill our days with hiking, swimming in Tahoe, and shopping downtown, talking about old days and new, each day immersed in our forty-year friendship.
Her personal items include an iPhone, a device that has become hitched to every part of her life. I gawk at the mini computer, a neophyte to its workings. At the kitchen counter she gives me a tour of the sleek metallic do-everything planner, revealing its smoke-and-mirror acts, the wizard-behind-the-curtain applications – ‘apps’ they’re called. She shows me about twenty colorful graphic symbols, and I soon learn the newest iPhone will offer 75,000 of them (which, to me, is incomprehensible).
She touches an icon that pulls up images and configurations, then moves onto another screen, then onto another. Page turning anew. After pressing the video app, she takes a video of my dogs while voicing introductions in the background: ‘Here’s Emma lying on her back and here’s Lola beside her.’ She replays the video and then turns toward Internet sites, photos she’s downloaded, and gives me a quick lesson on texting. ‘What’s that one?’ I ask, pointing to an icon with a speaker.
‘Oh, that’s audio. You can record anything you want.’ Of course. Everything visual must connect to everything audio. I am duly impressed.
A few days later we sit outside in comfy chairs on the small brick patio outside my kitchen, the crowded pine and fir forest embracing our small circle. Her days at Tahoe are waning, but she is satisfied with her intake of mountain air, blue sky and sweet cold drinking water. The wind picks up while we reminisce about our visit, and our conversation stops as we pay attention to the subtle roar of the wind. With acute ears we listen to the whirring noise, and I think to myself how the wind sounds like a curling ocean wave, a rumbling distant train, or a frothy river rapid. ‘I love that sound,’ she says, and we become mesmerized in a transcendental state. Until she announces an idea.
‘I wonder if I could record the wind on my iPhone?’ I contemplate her idea and all its implications, but all I can think is how strange, her idea of capturing a moment in time and retrieving it at a later date. If she records the wind on her iPhone, the wind that is occurring in this forest on this day, would the wind heard now sound the same as the wind heard later? Can technology truly arrest the real and change it to the surreal and claim it as truthful representation? If she captures the wind is she stealing a piece of nature? Somehow it seems wrong, even sacrilegious – an act of betrayal. Clearly, technology is challenging our modus operandi, the way we engage in a reciprocal relationship with nature. Am I ready for this? Surprisingly, she doesn’t retrieve her phone and instead we just watch and listen, our noses pointed up in the air like dogs smelling rain.
Of course I know it’s possible to capture the wind. On any day you can walk into a department store, unhook the headphones from the center aisle kiosk and listen to babbling brooks or bird calls. But recording nature on an iPhone? On a pocket-sized gadget that in the next minute can list every President in the United States, book a flight to Mexico, or locate directions to the nearest Chinese restaurant? This is new territory. We tap at computers, Palm Pilots, Blackberrys and iPhones. We watch videos of whales breaching, coyotes baying and people climbing mountains. Is this part of technology’s new role? Are we becoming more comfortable with nature, virtually?
I imagine a scene. People gather inside. One looks at his computer screen where people are cooking over a fire and setting up a tent. Another watches a kayaker hugging a rocky coastline. One turns up the volume to hear the screech of a red-tailed hawk and the coo of a mourning dove; the other pulls up a downloaded breeze.
For us now, though, nature is real. We’d rather feel the wind brush against our skin and smell the scents it stirs – butterscotch from ponderosa pine and sage from sagebrush. We’d rather watch its path as it lifts one group of needles before it clandestinely moves to another. We’d rather not know when the wind comes and goes, acknowledging nature’s capricious character. In the end, we love nature just the way it is, so in the end we dismiss her question, ‘I wonder if I could record the wind on my iPhone?’ The query lifts from her voice and joins the gust that brought the idea to her attention in the first place.
Can we capture the wind? Perhaps. But instead, on this day, sitting outside with a summer breeze unexpectedly blowing through the treetops and into our circle of friendship, the wind captures us.
~ Discuss this article with author at equesnel@moonshineink.com
