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

[rafeb at speakeasy.net (Raphael Bustin)]

At 09:57 PM 8/10/2005 -0400, Bob C wrote:

>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.


So I take it I'm having a better wilderness
experience than, say, Moses in the desert,
or your typical Amazon tribesman?


>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.


You're dancing around the issue, now.

Accurate time keeping changes the way people
think, act, and behave.  It makes civilization
possible.  It's a /qualitative/ change from
measuring time by sun and stars.  It's not
merely a matter of degree or "skill."


>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.


In other words, the watch is a crutch.
It's enabling actions/plans that would not
have been possible (for you) without it.


>[a watch] is a continuation of what humans have always done in the 
>"wilderness."


Did primordial humans have to deal
with post office closing times?


>The other is what humans have never done until the invention of portable 
>radios and cell phones, a relatively few years ago.


So the watch is an innocuous enabler and
crutch, but the cell is to be shunned?

This argument can only hold if you discount
any benefit the phone may bring, and assign a
zero or negative value to the "connectedness"
it might provide.

It does, in the end, come down to values.


rafe b
aka terrapin


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