[at-l] Watches on the Trail? And Nimblewill Nomad's Question

[ellen at clinic.net (Bob C)]

"> To the extent that I'm looking at my watch, concerned
> about speed and time-to-destination, I haven't really
> disconnected, have I?
> 
> To the extent that "efficiency" governs us, we're
> following a goal more than a process."

Go as slow or as fast as you wish. It has nothing to do with disconnectiveness. It's just something humans visiting the "wilderness" have always done from Biblical times down to the present. If anything a watch has as much chance of enhancing your wildland experience as degrading it. Since first observing that the sun rises in one place and sets in another, humans quickly learned to tell approximate time in the woods and mountains.

Having been forced to live by a clock for all my working life, I have never become very skilled at judging hours till darkness. But like the oldtimers, I still prefer a cool spring to warm lake water for drinking water, and I prefer an established campsite to cutting something new in the wildlands. So I compensate for my lack of observing skills by carrying a watch.

Those who have greater skills or less stringent campsite goals can do as they wish. How carrying a watch in anyway relates to a cell phone, which involves not skills but instant contact with civilization escapes me. One is a continuation of what humans have always done in the "wilderness." The other is what humans have never done until the invention of portable radios and cell phones, a relatively few years ago.

Weary