Geekward Bound

Introduction

What would it be like to live your life entirely connected, ready to work and surf anytime, anywhere? That's the future everyone talks about. So when TIME Digital asked me to hit the road and see how close I could come to wired bliss, I couldn't resist. Outfitted with everything I could persuade high-tech and outdoors companies to lend me, I loaded a van and set out to Chiriaco Summit, Southern California desert terrain 180 miles east of Los Angeles that General Patton once called "remote and desolate" and his troops cheerily dubbed "the place God forgot."

Well, maybe God forgot it, but just as long as AT&T remembered cellular coverage, I assumed I'd be all right. I meant to be a kind of anti-Crusoe, alone but fully equipped, with the world wirelessly in sync, keeping me company day and night. Is it really possible to set up shop along the banks of the digital data stream without having to heed such trifles as geography? Can I sit out here among the cactuses, lizards and coyotes and convince someone (if only myself) that I'm safely ensconced at home? Or is this the kind of hubris that gets ordinary mortals in more trouble than they can handle? That was the idea, anyway. And this is what happened.

Day 1

With the warm morning light pouring down, I park my van behind a brush-covered ridge. The landscape is like something out of an old western, open and barren. If I can make a digital base camp work here, the future has surely arrived. I begin to unload, and the cumulative weight of the stuff from the van that I tote to my spot makes me think that what the revolution really needs are robot movers. Sony built Aibo, its digital dog; what about Acme, the digital moving man?

My first goal is to have a place to stash all my digital gear. I set up the two-room Backwoods Lodge tent from L.L. Bean, which should do nicely — it's your typical triple-coated, waterproof, urethane number, complete with "no-see-um mesh" netting and a handy divider that separates a sleeping area from a, well, family room, I guess. The tent sleeps six — just right for me and my equipment.

I'm a mere three miles from the highway, yet it feels as if I'm in the middle of nowhere — but a palatial nowhere. I lay out a Therm-a-Rest mattress, which conforms to my shape using my body heat, and a High Camp mummy-style sleeping bag that's astonishingly lightweight. Next I set up a rest couch from L.L. Bean, a Coleman five-day cooler, a couple of 34-oz. Glacier Vacuum bottles, a portable espresso maker and a small propane stove.

For power, I'm packing enough deep-cycle batteries to keep several AC-hungry, 2-volt appliances humming for the duration. Also, I unfold a PowerLine solar panel. The size of a paperback novel, it comes with a cable that connects directly to my Nokia cell phone. It begins charging instantly; so far, so good.

For work, I'm relying on a trusty PowerBook G3 and a Canon Color Bubble Jet printer for writing my geek diary and printing drafts. (I'm still old-fashioned enough to want to read what I've done on paper.) And why not? It's early afternoon now, with the temperature hovering at 95° F. The Suunto Advizor watch I've strapped to my wrist indicates there's no cooling rain in sight, and sweating, I come to the moment of truth: I pull out my Palm Vx and OmniSky modem cradle to log on and get my e-mail. (I've also got a Palm VII for backup.) If you can't check your e-mail, that's the ball game, right? Guess what? Ball game's over. I can't raise a signal with either Palm.

I walk to high ground, cursing the way Crusoe must have on his miserable island. No luck. I'd called OmniSky before I left, and they warned me that coverage was iffy. Now I know why.

The Palm will still do for note-taking while I wander, and I've got my laptop and modem for jumping on the Net. But I'm done for the moment. The afternoon has passed. Later, I'll dig out my Niterider Digital Extreme, a small halogen lamp — as bright as the sun — that attaches to a headband, which will be useful for working at night — as will a Night Owl Explorer Pro night-vision monocular, which will provide a panorama of the green-tinted desert floor. And for tunes, I've got a Sony portable minidisc player, an MP3 recorder and enough vintage songs by Gordon Lightfoot to retire an elephant. But now, with the light falling, I turn to my GSI Outdoors Adventure Travel Bar. After all, I'm out here to live like a postindustrial pasha. I shake up a pitcher of dry martinis and start thinking about dinner. I decide against flipping on the portable DVD, enticing though the thought is of watching The Usual Suspects under the stars. Tomorrow, I tell myself, tomorrow I'll log on.

Day 2

With another morning of searing sun overhead and a mug of espresso in hand, I turn to my laptop. The wireless 3Com modem I've brought is new. I'm hopeful, though. Popping the modem in the slot of my G3, I fire up the laptop. Nothing.

Groaning, I call 3Com on my cell phone. I learn I need an update — on a floppy disk — to get the modem to work with my Mac. Problem: my PowerBook doesn't have a floppy drive. "You want me to download it from your website? If I could download it, I wouldn't be calling!" This will not do.

So I decide to cheat. I hop into my van to drive to the diner on the highway. A phone there could solve my downloading woes. And as I back up — my van sinks up to its tailpipe in sand. I am Job in the wilderness.

But did Job have a Garmin GPS/cell phone? I think not. I locate my exact position and call for a tow from Chiriaco. With the hour I've got until the truck arrives, I get creative. If I'm the Dilbert of Arabia, why not record my adventures for posterity with my Sony digital camcorder? Posterity will be amused by my excellent footage of slithering lizards, of rocks and dirt and modems that don't work — in the midst of which the camera veers to capture BOBBIE, as it says on his shirt, pulling up to make the tow.

The Chiriaco Summit diner has one phone line, as it turns out, and I use it to log on to the local Earthlink server for the precious download. Finally I get the requisite file on my G3. The modem works! Perhaps this digital in the desert thing will actually happen. In fact, my long-awaited wireless e-mail is mostly spam, including a message from a co-ed named Tami offering me a hotter time than any desert could ever dish out. I put that thought on hold as I drive back to camp. The morning is shot, but now I've got access. I swing into full office mode.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, comes from the Jerusalem Report: I've been asked to interview Colonel Ilan Ramon, who will be the first Israeli in space when he flies on nasa's shuttle next year. The e-mail flies between NASA, the Israeli space agency and me. The connections are seamless. I could have been anywhere. I even consider doing the interview from here, but there's more digital work to be done. I decide, for example, as my second day winds down, to take that lizard footage and edit it on the spot. I've loaded the program Final Cut Pro on the G3, and I plug the camcorder into the laptop. As the saga of the wandering geek unfolds, I trim scenes, cutting dramatically to the lizards. Too bad my 9,600-baud modem crawls so slowly. It's not worth the time to e-mail my video home. Instead I want dinner. And a show.

With a pot of paella sizzling on the stove and the night's martini sweating in a glass, I prop the DVD player on a table. The Usual Suspects? No, I decide out of sheer perversity to pop the chiller The Sixth Sense into the drive. I know I'll pay later, when the coyotes start howling.

Sure enough, as I fall asleep, I hear a shuffling outside and nearly jump through the tent's roof. I pick up my infrared monocular and peer out at the contours of a man coming toward me.

"You asleep in there?" he asks.

"Uh-huh?"

"I left my shovel here today," says a familiar voice. "Got it now. You be sure to send us that article." Oh, that Bobbie.

I wave in the dark, then try to fall asleep. No, don't ask.

Day 3

Early this morning, I hike out along a ridge, following the chain link fence that separates Joshua Tree National Park from the Bureau of Land Management turf that I'm on. I'm taking notes with the Palm Vx about my days, or trying to. Have you ever used Palm's Graffiti shorthand while walking? An occasional plane moves slowly across the sky. I make my way, Garmin GPS along for the ride, telling me my speed, where I'm heading, the nearest towns.

Back after my trek, I take more notes, but instead of writing, I just talk at my laptop, using IBM's voice-recognition software, Via Voice. This way I can keep the keyboard covered to protect it from sand. And for a last act, I regale my lizard friends with the Hebrew newscast from the Voice of Israel website. They love it.

My time is done, and the answer to the question on your mind is no, I wouldn't do this again anytime soon — a slow wireless modem in the desert pales beside my fast dsl connection and the comforts of home. But the fact is, here, after innumerable Keystone Kop-like flubs, I can do practically everything I can at home, only slower and smaller, with low fidelity instead of high. Pretty soon, high-speed wireless will make real inroads, and another corner will be turned. Of course, at the end of the day, the bigger question is: How connected do you really want to be?