Why the Phone Stays in the Truck

People assume the phone stays in the truck because there’s no signal up there, and that’s true, but it’s not the reason, or not the whole one. On a good solar week, panel getting full sun most of the day, I could probably charge a phone off the same setup that runs my headlamp and the radio, if I was careful and didn’t ask it to do much. I’ve thought about it. A phone with no service left is still a camera, a clock, a flashlight, a place to jot notes instead of the notebook. Plenty of reasons a person could talk themselves into carrying one four miles up a trail even knowing nobody’s going to call.

I leave it at the trailhead lot anyway, in the glovebox, off, and pick it back up in October like a shed skin that’s been waiting for me.

The honest reason is that I don’t trust myself around it, not because I’ve got some weakness for scrolling, there’s nothing to scroll to up there, but because a phone in your pocket changes what your attention does even switched off. I know this because I tried it two seasons ago, brought it up charged for the camera, told myself that was the whole plan. First week I caught myself checking it for the time about eleven times a day, out of habit, not need, there’s a clock on the wall and another on the radio unit. By week two I was taking pictures of things I wouldn’t have looked twice at otherwise, a decent sunset, an odd cloud formation, framing the mountain through a four inch screen instead of just standing there and looking at it with my actual eyes. I took a fair number of pictures that season, the way people do in that kind of setting, and figured I’d look back on them someday. The photos were fine. I don’t have most of them anymore, deleted them that winter, because looking back I mostly just wondered where exactly a given ridge line was and what I’d even been trying to take a picture of, and that wasn’t a feeling worth keeping a phone around for.

That’s the part that got me. The device didn’t fail, it worked exactly as built, and what it built was a thin second layer between me and the ridge, an option to record instead of watch. I’m up here five months mostly to do the opposite of that. Weather doesn’t need documenting to matter, it needs watching, actually watching, long enough that you notice the wind shift before the trees tell you. A smoke doesn’t announce itself in a photo, you catch it because you were already looking in that direction for no particular reason, the way you can’t be if part of your attention is reserved for a device in your pocket, even a dead one, even one you’ve sworn you’re only carrying for the camera.

So it stays in the truck. I’ve got the notebook and the radio and whatever I hauled up to read, and that’s most of what a person needs for company across a season, plus the coyotes and, some years, an elk who doesn’t ask for anything back. I won’t pretend it’s a hard rule I never question, some Julys I stand at the trailhead lot and think about grabbing it just for the flashlight app, save the headlamp batteries. But I always leave without it, and every October, walking back down that four mile trail toward the truck, there’s a specific kind of quiet I’d lose the first day I decided a phone in the pocket was worth the trade. I’m not there to be reachable. I’m there to be paying attention, and I’ve learned the two don’t share space as well as people like to think they do.