Nothing is more relaxing than fly fishing. After my son completed his college finals recently, we packed up the truck and headed for the Elk River in eastern West Virginia. The Elk is one of the last streams in the eastern U.S. with a population of wild trout. As any fly fisherman will tell you, wild trout offer the ultimate challenge.
Elk River in West Va.
The trip to West Virginia was uneventful—freeways past cities and towns with strip malls and fast-food chains. We even saw a digital billboard near Clarksburg, WV. At Elkins, though, we left the freeway for a winding, two-lane highway. We snaked through narrow valleys and over larger and larger mountains. After 90 minutes of seeing only an occasional house or farm, we reached the small inn where we were the only guests.
I tried to call home to say that we had arrived. There was no cellular service and my iPhone was useless. The only phone in the place was a pay phone with a bad handset. Fortunately, the innkeeper had a dial-up modem that I used to send an email. Being an email junky, I didn’t know how I would survive the stay.
We went fishing the next day with a local guide, driving an hour farther into the mountains. We didn’t pass a house or farm until we reached an idyllic setting deep in one of the many valleys. Our guide had just retired after 31 years teaching forestry in the local high school. Lumber and coal mining are the major employers in the state and the evidence was everywhere.
During lunch, our guide asked what I did for a living. I talked about the design and production of computers systems. He said his school had installed a computer a few years ago and that it had made his life easier. He had entered students’ test scores into it and the computer calculated their grades at the end of a term. The man just laughed when I asked if he had a computer at home. He is on a party line, one of the few left in the country. The folks who share it with him, he said, wouldn’t be too happy if he tied up the line with a dial-up connection.
I soon began to enjoy my own freedom from the constant stream of emails. We spent the next two days in places even more remote, chasing the elusive rainbow, brown and brook trout in the crystal-clear Elk and Williams rivers. By the time we left, I had almost forgotten the lack of a broadband or cellular connection. Then, as soon as we reached the freeway, my cell phone came alive with hundreds of emails.
I envy the people we had met on our trip. Their lives don’t yet include what is coming even to rural West Virginia—the complexity and stress of being instantly available to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world. For myself, I hope someday to spend more time on a wilderness stream, less connected to the world, pursuing trout.
