CARRABASSETT VALLEY, MAINE — The sky was brilliant blue and on the northern horizon we could see the vast icy prominence of Mount Katahdin gleaming gold in the afternoon sunshine.
Several of us whooshed to a slushy halt on the brow of a hill, beaming with the pleasure of skiing and the absurd sight of each other stripped down to T-shirts. It was almost hot.
A moment’s pause in movement brought to our ears the rush and gurgle of melting snow, along with springtime birdsong that made us seem comically out of place in our Everest-ready Gore-Tex ski pants.
It was then that we noticed that a member of our party was lagging badly. Far up the slope, one of the two teenage girls in the group was zigzagging through the snowfield with odd slowness. She seemed to be having trouble with the zipper on her jacket.
“Liz! Are you okay?” someone called. Then we all laughed.
As the girl came nearer, it became evident that she was completely lost in the moment. She was unaware of us. Indeed, she was apparently unaware of her surroundings: the whole rushing water aspect, the chirping bird accent, and, duh, the moody mountain range across the valley.
She was texting. While skiing!
“What?” she asked innocently, when she reached the ridge.
Adults upbraided her, in a friendly way.
She was missing the here and now! She was a hazard to herself and other skiers! (“But there’s practically no one here but us.”)
There was plenty of time in life to text her friends; now was a time to exercise and enjoy the fresh air! (“I am breathing it,” she pointed out.)
The party pushed off again, swooping down through snow that became ever mushier. Assembling again a short time later, we noticed that we were now missing two teenage girls.
Eventually they hove into view. Each girl had pulled out a cell phone and was holding it up, in camera mode, while gliding down the hill, in order to catch action shots of the other girl gliding down the hill … while holding up a cell phone.
It was sweet and charming and yet, after the texting, it seemed to represent a sort of epiphany.
We’re all used to the idea that today’s children are growing up with their reality mediated by screens. If the unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates said, the unrecorded life, for American teens, does not even bear contemplating.
Yet there’s something about seeing a girl on skis, moving smoothly down the side of a mountain while typing to her friends a hundred miles away that brings home what a revolution it really is.
It won’t be long before there’s no place her generation won’t expect to be able to use a screen. BlackBerrying while parachuting? Scuba diving with iPhone apps? It’s a matter of time.
Amusingly, when the Ski Channel did a survey last year, it found that 41 percent of respondents had texted while on skis. Now, it’s a fair bet that most of that texting would have been from a chairlift (“Meet @ base @ noon”) or from beside the fire at the lodge, or at least while standing still on the side of a ski run.
But where one teenager goes, more will surely follow. …
Later, out of earshot of the other adults, I asked Liz what she’d been texting about, back on the slopes. She grinned, in on the joke, and said that her message to her friends had been: “Am texting while skiing, how cool is that?”
Washington Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
