I saw my first cell phone while traveling through Sweden in 1984. I was hiking through a remote stretch of forest, seemingly the only person for miles around, when I was startled by an unlikely chirping. I stopped and looked around but saw nothing. I heard the noise again and noticed a moose hunter sitting high in a stand, partly concealed in the boughs of a pine tree. The man was holding a phone the size of an eyeglass case, something I’d never seen before. When finished with his call the man explained he was talking to a fellow hunter about a moose headed our way. Just about that time the hunter silenced me, raised his rifle, and shot and killed a moose as it ran through some trees nearby.

It wasn’t until a few months after my return to California that I saw my first cell phones in use there, heavy contraptions strapped onto the back or shoulder of the owner, too heavy and ungainly to take up into a hunting stand.

I’ve been to Sweden many times since 1984 and cell phone use is taken for granted now. You regularly see children and elderly people messaging, reading email, and looking at
photos on their phones. Yesterday, though, I saw something that took me back to that forest in 1984. Some friends were over (she, 59, a bank teller; he, 62, a garbage truck driver) and before sitting down they set their cell phone on the table before them. During our visit their phone made a periodic beep, and each time it beeped the couple
glanced at the display. After awhile I had to ask what was going on.

Their son, it turned out, was competing in the Vasaloppet, a 60 mile, marathonlike, cross-country ski race in the middle of Sweden. The phone was beeping each time their son passed through a town along the route. The couple had done the necessary “programming” to keep track of their son, though they didn’t really understand the mechanics behind what they’d done, in the same way they don’t understand
exactly what happens when they program their answering machine, or use Amazon to order a book. This is significant, I think, because it demonstrates how cellphone technology has passed through the hands of techies and is being used by ordinary people to do advanced things.

Seen any cool cell phone tricks lately?