Staying in touch while escaping

Sometimes we really don’t know how something has taken control of our lives until we try to escape it.

In this case, we’re talking about the Internet. My escape attempt was a four-day vacation in the community of Troy, Ore., along the Grande Ronde River, which winds into the southeast corner of Washington state before meeting up with the mighty Snake River.

It is a beautiful place with more fish than people. It’s an area where you can look up a mountainside and see a grazing wild sheep.

While writing this piece, I looked Troy up on the Internet. In the fall of 1960, it had a population of about 30 people. That seems about right for today, although the elementary school had five students then, the Internet tells me.

Last week, it only had two very friendly and polite brothers. I know, I met them one morning as they crossed a bridge over the Ronde to get to school, sending a flock of semi-wild turkeys scurrying across the field, which made a herd of deer look up from their morning browse.

The school is next door to the fishing lodge where I stayed, once the home of John Fogarty, a musician best known for his work in Creedence Clearwater Revival. I loved Creedence when I was young. The Internet tells me the band split in 1972 while I was still in high school, sooner than I would have believed.

At a dinner party one night that included many of the local residents, several told of the night that Fogarty flew in a drummer and gave the community a four-hour concert at the local tavern. Each had been given a video tape of the event, although one resident told me that when his wife couldn’t take living in the wilds any longer, she left with both the tape and a Jeep they’d bought from Fogarty that had only 30,000 miles on it.

I’m not sure what he misses more, the wife or the Jeep, which he said had been painted in camouflage colors.

If he’d had the Internet, maybe his wife would have stayed. I can’t be sure. But getting online was a popular item at the lodge. When I arrived, my hosts and friends Scott and Stefanie O’Donnell asked me if I needed to use the Internet.

I refused at first, but it was always there.

I noticed that when Stefanie showed up in the morning, the Internet got turned on with the coffee pot. During the community dinner, on a day that Scott was adamantly opposed to because it collided with the Monday night football involving his beloved New England Patriots, I noticed Scott hovered around the computer checking the game score on the Internet (the lodge had no satellite television service).

There was a cardiologist at the lodge from Oregon. I expected he’d be hooking up to his e-mail. But all he and his fishing companion want to see was how the Oregon college teams had done in football.

I tried to ignore the computer, but I found myself staring at it in the afternoon when we gathered for appetizers and talked about where we each had fished. For the record, I only had one strike that I missed and didn’t even hook a summer-run steelhead, which was our quarry. I did catch trout, but that doesn’t count. Nobody else caught any steelhead, either.

Maybe it was the lack of success that sent me over the edge, but I did start using the computer to check what was happening on Heraldnet.com. Just seeing what everybody was doing made me feel better.

I came away from the vacation thinking the Internet is a pretty great thing. While I was looking to get away from it for a few days, people without it as a regular part of their life couldn’t seem to get enough.

At the party, one member of the community, somewhat proudly, told me it costs $175,000 a year to hire a teacher and run the school for just the two brothers. We both talked about how that could be a lot less expensive if the boys had an interactive teaching program on the Internet.

But then we both shot the idea down.

The Internet is nice to have, even in an area with its own natural attractions. But in my mind, it will never substitute direct human contact.

Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.