Artificial Intelligence

Disconnected from the pleasures of discovery

by Elizabeth Folwell

The sky was Google G blue, the clouds scudding in layers, with cumulus cauliflower outpacing the frosty wisps above. Looking up we could see the aluminum mast reflecting and concentrating sun. The sail stretched taut, funneling the wind in an elegant white arc; the force turned fickle fabric into architecture.

We were interfacing in an old-fashioned way, taking the power of an invisible gas to move a solid object over a liquid surface. This wasn’t a dreamy voyage but required intense attention to minutiae, scanning the telltale threads on the sail to be sure they were blowing straight, taking full advantage of the breeze that dimpled the distant water. Pushing the tiller, pulling the lines, adjusting the jib, shifting our bodies from windward to leeward, cleating, tacking—we were multitasking while actually doing only one thing: sailing. The activity is about focus, physics and physicality, about jostling from fine-tuned awareness of barely perceptible matters to globally watching the three dimensions surrounding us in all-too-real time.

The plan was to gather a passenger at a large dock far from our mooring. (Not everybody wants to swim to a boat and climb in or hop from a canoe onto a rocking deck.) At our designated pick-up point, which was quickly looming very large, two girls sat with their legs dangling into the lake, heads bent reverently as if they were sharing some deep teenage secret.

There is a law of nature, as yet unnumbered, that requires that the wind velocity increase dramatically whenever you want to dock a boat gently. “Hey!” my husband yelled, as we arrived in a clanging, banging, flapping state. “Can you give us a hand?”

The startled girls looked up from their cell phones, where they had been texting somebody somewhere, perhaps even each adjacent other. I can’t guess what on the tiny screens was more real and compelling than the presentation of a massive boat that filled their eyescape. They did leap up and scurry to catch an outstretched hand so our guest could step aboard, but I suspect the break from their other, faraway reality was duly recorded in the next outgoing messages, a string of acronyms that would embarrass us if we knew what they meant. I suppose the semaphores and flag language of naval battles are ancestors of this communication. But something pithy popped into my mind as we charged away: Information is not knowledge. Information can be trivial, transitory, ultimately useless and even wrong, while knowledge is earned.

A few weeks later we paddled beneath a beautiful rustic bridge into another lake. This place is usually the nexus of not home, the mother lode of peace. But 200 yards away a lone kayaker was having a loud and lively conversation. (Note: another unnumbered law of physics involves just how well sound carries over still water.) “No way! He did what? I mean, like, that is so …,” she prattled, her boat swaying like a porch swing.

“I’m losing you. Can you hear me now?” the paddler pleaded into her phone.

A pileated woodpecker had landed toward the stern of her plastic craft. Just above the treetops a bald eagle was harassing an osprey for a fish, a full-blown aerial skirmish. On shore a tawny mountain lion was slinking through a jungle of ostrich ferns, intent on his prey, a young moose with velvet-covered antler buds the size of knockwurst. A pair of loons bracketed her boat, rising above the waves like Botticelli’s Venus. A beaver family swam toward her bow, each towing a white birch branch. A purposeful snapping turtle the size of a manhole cover had the yak in view, with the Jaws soundtrack thrumming in the air.

Just kidding about the wildlife extravaganza. Our only actual creature sighting was a cackling kingfisher that swooped parallel to our path. But for the kayaker the assembled multitude might as well have been there, under her nose, within reach of a dainty finger or as seductively close as a whisper. That’s the nature of the place, how the sensual surrounds open minds and interested observers.

Long ago the Adirondacks was designated as a place apart, where even tangled forests and trickling streams have unprecedented legal protection. The landscape offers a commodity that is thankfully abundant here but increasingly scarce everywhere else—solitude. But solitude, like knowledge, takes some effort. And despite all the folks who yearn to stay connected to the non-Adirondacks when amid mountains, solitude is not isolation. It’s immersion.