By Nathan Drezner, Princeton High School
For 10 months of the year, I am at home in Princeton, enjoying the town, the people, and the internet. The latter is a luxury, though I don’t know it until the summer, when having a single bar can be rare.
I am away for a good amount of the summer, staying with my family and grandparents in a small town on the coast of Maine, and, because they don’t really need it, they choose not to get WiFi for their vacation home. Coastal Maine isn’t known for excellent cell service, either.
On the drive up, I get five bars of LTE on my phone on the major highways, but when we take that right turn off of the exit and onto roads that are beacons in a sea of forest, that signal disappears.
Shifting around, I try to get signal. Fact: sticking the phone out of the sunroof often doesn’t help. But I know that that is what the next month will be like. It helps to know that many other PHS students face the same “dilemma:” heading out to a beautiful summer camp, or visiting family in a far away state, or renting a WiFifree beach house on the Jersey shore. They too won’t have internet.
At the end of June, I take my last, lingering glances at my Facebook feed, filled with messages declaring addresses of camps for mail or notices warning against texts (the overseas charges are extraordinary). I’ll write a few down, hoping to eventually write a letter, but then I remember that I am in the same boat: off the grid.
Before I leave, I try to get anything I might need to access online available offline: I load my phone up with music and podcasts, get a few games off of the App Store, and maybe download a movie or two. I won’t be completely isolated from the online world, and I set myself up to go offline. It works quite well, and so far, I am still working my way through some of those podcasts.
It is a drastic change from daily life in Princeton, but often, I realize the benefits of enjoying nature. I’ll pack a few books and sit on the porch, enjoying the sun and view, and remember how impossible that would be with a stream of alerts on my phone back home distracting me from the beauty of silence.
I can go outside and walk the dog without worrying that I’ll miss something crazy on Reddit, and instead focus on the walk itself. “Wow,” I say to myself. “Look what I was missing.” Even still, I know that I’ll come back home and get right back into those bad habits. For while it lasts, I can enjoy it — and I don’t need to think about anything more that what I see when I look around me. It is peaceful,
and extraordinary, a feeling that I would never get back home. I know that I’ll make the best of it while it lasts.
Being off the grid also means that there are fewer excuses for not doing summer work. I can enjoy my summer reading outside, and use extra time to work on a math packet or anything else that may come up. I can be more productive and efficient, though there is significantly less work than during the regular school year, meaning I have less time to take advantage of that efficiency.
No internet also can lead to some interesting situations. I often find myself entering a friend’s house and quickly asking for his or her WiFi password. Once, I walked outside in the middle of the day, trying to connect to my neighbor’s network (the range wasn’t far enough, and the effort was fruitless).
For me, getting away from the internet — even for a little bit — over the summer has been a good change from the usual, an opposite to the ease at which I can access the internet at home.
Though it is often hard to get through the time offline, I can do it. Even still, I know I’ll get right back to my old habits when I get home to Princeton.
Nathan Drezner is a rising senior at Princeton High School
