A weekend in the mountains

The cabin had no coverage, which I knew going in and still managed to be surprised by. For the first hour I kept reaching for my phone the way you reach for a light switch in a room you know is dark.

Day one

We walked the ridge trail in the morning. The map was paper, folded along creases that had been folded a hundred times before us. It took twenty minutes to find where we were on it, and it was the best twenty minutes of the day. Nobody was in a hurry, because there was nothing to be in a hurry for.

Lunch was bread, cheese, and a tomato that tasted like a tomato. I do not know what to do with that information except report it.

Day two

It rained. We stayed in and read, and at some point I noticed I was bored and did not mind. I used to be good at boredom. Somewhere in the last decade I traded it for a feed, and I had not realized what I gave up: the slow, unglamorous state where ideas actually show up.

Boredom is not the absence of something to do. It is the presence of enough time to notice what you want to do.

By the afternoon I had a notebook page full of things I wanted to build, none of them urgent, all of them interesting.

What I brought back

• A rule: one screen-free day a month, no exceptions.
• A sunburn in the shape of my collar.
• The tomato, as a standard for everything else.

The signal came back about ten minutes down the mountain road. I let it wait until we got home.