“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote the poet. Or a cellphone, he could have added.
I was a late adopter of cellphone technology, about three steps ahead of the Amish. My wife insisted I get a little drugstore burner when her father became ill 15 years ago. It had become essential for me to be reachable. Since then I have lost, drowned, boiled and mashed every phone put in my hands. And the odd thing is … nobody ever tries to reach me.
The latest mishap occurred when I was loading groceries into the truck and happened to set my phone on the tonneau cover, just for a second. I was pulling into the lane at the farm when I realized my mistake. I raced back into town and found the phone on the road in front of Walker’s Small Motors. It had been run over about 50 times in 10 minutes. I picked up the pieces, put them in a plastic bag and took them to Mohammed, who runs the dollar store and has built a lively trade repairing these things.
He looked at the contents of the bag sorrowfully and said, “Oh, Dan. I am not a magician.”
While I’d been gathering up the pieces on the highway I’d noticed the side of the road was littered with cellphone parts. Apparently, I was not the first. This stretch in front of Walkers is a cellphone graveyard.
Mohammed nodded. “That’s about as far as people get before the phone falls off the back of the truck.”
I wasn’t always a Luddite. I was the very first person at Queen’s Park to put a personal computer on my desk back in 1978. And I had one of the first mobile phones too. I was the assistant to Ontario’s Minister of the Environment and we had a phone in the government limousine so that we could be reachable at all times in case of ecological catastrophe. But the phone never really worked. Reception was poor, the connection would last for only a minute before going dead or joining someone else’s conversation. I learned to hate it because it always delivered the first half sentence of bad news and then suddenly quit. To get the other half of the sentence you had to find a radio tower and park under it, or go call the office from a pay phone. (Remember those?)
Eventually I moved out of the city to the farm where nobody needed to reach me for anything in particular for the next three decades. After my father-in-law died I threw that little drugstore phone in the farm pond and went radio silent for a brief period. Then I suffered a bad fall in the barn on a winter night and lay on the concrete for several hours until my wife found me rigid with hypothermia. When I could walk again, she imposed a phone-carry rule that came with severe penalties for non-compliance.
But the phones didn’t last. I ran over one in a parking lot, lost one in the manure pile while wrestling with a ram during a blizzard, dropped one in a lake while fishing, fumbled another one down a sewer in town. The others are just gone, somewhere around the farm. The odd one turns up when I’m rototilling. My wife decided it would make more sense to put an ankle bracelet on me, which my iPhone has now become with her tracker app.
My phone quacks, which is not a good choice if you actually own a duck. Somebody set it to quack for me and I don’t have the attention span to figure out how to change it back to something normal. My wife has 300 contacts on her phone list. I have six. Those six people know that if they leave a message it may not be picked up until the polar ice cap melts. They – along with phone scammers – learned long ago that it’s better to call me on my landline at suppertime.
If you see a straw hat and a cellphone on a bench at McDonald’s, they are most likely mine. My wife would very much appreciate it if you would let us know through this publication. You can keep the hat.
Article appeared in In the Hills Magazine September, 2025. Click to read more articles in In the Hills Magazine. Illustration by Shelagh Armstrong.
