Lore
Traveling in the time of iPhone
This post has been on the burner far too long! I hope to bring back more regular publishing in 2023. Essay ideas have come and gone, but reader, there you are, and thank you for reading.
On February 15, 2006, I flew from New York City to Bangkok on a one-way ticket. I spent the next five months on the Lonely Planet trail backpacking around Southeast Asia. In my lore, I have always framed that trip — and the year that followed — largely in terms of my "sober qualification" because after I returned from that trip, I mentally and physically unraveled and landed in my first 12-step meeting by October 2007.
But there's a different story that has started to reveal itself about that specific period of time between 2006-2007. It was The Last Year of Life Before iPhones.
That trip was the last time in my life I really traveled off the grid, the furthest point at which was a remote village in the Golden Triangle that required a day’s journey in the back of a pickup truck.
Out of Muang Sing and on to Nohn Khiaw, with a brief stopover in Udonmxai tonight at the bus station guest house to break up the grueling bus rides. Met a French woman, Juliette, on my way to Muang Sing and we're traveling together this week to Nong Khiaw and then back to Luang Prabang.
Muang Sing gets a lot of ink in the guidebook for having many different hill tribes in the area, which they do. …The most notable thing is that as you walk around the Akha women will inevitably show you bracelets to buy and then lift them up to show a round, black disc of pure opium. … April 5, 2006
At the time, there was caché, a kind of rugged travel glamour, about getting to such a spot; today it’s on YouTube.
Now 15 years into my Life with iPhone I am trying to understand more clearly what has been lost. As our mysterious, analog past gets further and further away, the keener I am to draw it close and keep access to those muscles and memories — less as an act of nostalgia but more perhaps as an act of resilience or resistance or even simply to hold on to my own humanity. In other words, I am trying to find my way back to the proto-unGrammable hang zone.
As our mysterious analog past gets further and further away, the keener I am to draw it close and keep access to those muscles and memories — less as an act of nostalgia but more perhaps as an act of resilience or resistance or even simply to hold on to my own humanity.
In November 2022, John and I ventured to Belize for some R&R travel. While spending eight days in Belize was delightfully mid-grid, it also put into sharp relief how uncomfortable I am without my iPhone these days, or WiFi, or a constant drip of information.
What has become of that girl who rode on the back of a motorcycle down the coast of Vietnam with only a dog-eared Lonely Planet? Travel lore was passed across tables, not platforms. It was misheard, janky information peppered with the occasional pearl. Now in our mini adventure to Belize, we just Googled everything. Like everyone else.
The first part of our stay in Belize was at a recommendable lodge in the jungle called Caves Branch. Each day included an adventure to the local caves. Our guide told us that locals were scared of the Mayan cave ruins and didn't enter them until "about 15 years ago.” (Scared for reason: Angry gods, ghosts, and human sacrifice are real.) Then came the internet. Then mapping. Then smartphones. Then looters, cave robbers, and tourists in many places. Gone were Mayan bones, pots, and jade relics. In a similar way, whatever “secret” there was of the Secret Beach in San Pedro island has now dissolved into Bob Marley beach bars and floating blow-up castles. There are no more secrets, even if we did have a very nice trip. The iPhone has irreversibly changed places, in ways that I am prone to keep considering. (See my essay about traveling to Scotland last year.)
Over the vacation, I used too much hammock time to tinker on my phone mostly because I overlooked bringing a good book to read (appalling). Instead, I scanned through more than a decade’s worth of digital photos. Through the 31,000+ images, I saw how my life progressed on a nearly day-by-day basis since 2007. How the would-be arty photos of the late aughts dissolved into generic lifestyle stagecraft by the 20-tweens. How the occasional selfie turned into a daily occurrence. How eating became less about the taste and more about the look. I probably have 50 photos from 2003; I have 1,287 from 2013 alone. Hyper documentation is now my outsourced lore.
I am conscious that this lament is fine-tuned to my fellow GenXrs, closer to 50-something than 40, who have been adulting in equal parts of a life lived with iPhone as without. How to express grief about a certain kind of undocumented life experience? It is literally and completely unavailable to us anymore as humans on the earth. I like to spook myself by contemplating this tipping point: We can never go back.
Travel is the easiest example, to me, that shows just what has been gained and lost. But what I suspect has been lost, is really about a certain vibrancy about memory, the ability to go deeper, not wider, in travel lore. I am no anti-technologist, but I am a pro-analogist. (Even that’s not so original these days. This New Yorker story is delightfully about how the guide company takes your devices from you and then dumps you in the desert to panic-find your way out. Also, no thanks!)
Upon our return from Belize, we immediately hosted one of John’s brothers visiting from Scotland. The Celtic love of story-telling, the brotherly love of embellishment, and the life force of travel stories had the Thanksgiving table in stitches. Everyone took turns. The lore was rich and living; each story slightly different than the last re-telling — there was no compression file, no versions recorded for comparison and fidelity, no reviews or ratings except for the toasts and tomatoes. Long live the lore.
Now, back to those Grammable travel moments:
ah, this has marinated nicely. Thank you for your weaving.
And the sweet memory of times past when the only communication to/from Europe was through the American express office and backpacking trips relied solely on Topo maps.