The sun had sunk below the treeline and I was parked alone on a gravel approach, facing a field of dead sunflowers. I had just sped five miles out of the dead-zone town I was staying in, and finally I had mobile data again. As I watched my smartphone screen, two days of emails flooded into my inbox and I felt a physical ecstasy, a squirt of serotonin or dopamine or whatever it is that the body releases when an addict scores.

The rush was so conspicuous that when I was done checking my email I couldn’t help but reflect on how badly I’ve come to depend on invisible wireless networks for my senses of control and connectedness and possibility. I knew that my current situation — stuck working for four days in a town with no phone or internet — was bearable to me only because I knew it was temporary.

My employer had sent me and my assistant to a map-dot called Glenboro, two hours from the city. Accommodations had been set up for us at a green and white 55-dollar motel right on the highway. After we checked in, I jokingly referred to it as a “one-star hotel” — the one star being for, if anyone asked, “No visible mice,” but during breakfast on the last day I had to retract even that star.

I am a city person and have known that for a long time. Small country towns give me existential crises. They make me crave two things: my home city’s tap water, and a feeling of meaning to what I’m doing. I don’t know quite why. In small towns I feel aimless and self-conscious and disoriented, like I’m moving too fast and expecting too much. Maybe I am, and small towns make me confront that. Or maybe I just don’t like them.

Maybe because I was without telecommunications, my sphere of awareness filled with small-town minutae and it was almost too much sometimes. On our first day, this existential daze was settling over me when we finally stopped circling and settled on a place to eat lunch. It was a hotel-bar-restaurant but at least two of the three of those appeared to be permanently closed. The restaurant door was open but there was no other indication that anyone was there. We sat anyway.

We waited for quite a while, mostly staring, before one of us decided to make things happen. My assistant leaned into the door beside the till and called “Hello,” as if he were standing at the mouth of a cave. Nobody answered and he sat down again. Eventually a server appeared carrying two menus and a baby, and disappeared again for a long time.

During that long time it grew impossible to sit still and so I figured going to the bathroom might be slightly more interesting than sitting and staring. So I ventured into the cave, and looked for a bathroom, and I found one, but it didn’t look public. There was a bathtub and fish-pattern shower curtain. The toilet appeared to be unflushed but I would later learn that’s just what the town’s water looks like. At eye-level above the toilet tank there was an embroidered wall-craft that said “Nobody notices what I do around here until I don’t do it.” Below that was one that said “Jesus died for me.” Suddenly I felt like a remorseful burglar and retreated to the dining room.  Read More