Phone-free

Over the past month or more, the tides and/or wind and/or copious rain have changed the shape of the dog beach so that in the late afternoon, when I like to go, there’s no longer dry sand stretching from one end of the beach to the other, perfect for strolling (humans) and zoomies (dogs); now there’s dry sand at the northern end only, and at the southern end, where I used to enter the beach from the stairs, there’s ocean, coming and going and coming and going, as waves are very much wont to do.
        Since the beach shifted, I’ve started walking the longer route along a path behind the beach to get to the northern entrance, but I don’t enjoy this; it’s less pretty, for a start, and too many off-leash walks have meant that on the odd occasion we clip on their leads, both of our dogs interpret pulling sensations at their collars not as encouragement to slow down, but as direct human-versus-beast strength challenges. This is why I’d always check the southern entrance each time I arrived, just in case the beach had moved again and I could finally let the dog* loose there rather than being dragged mercilessly around the path that led to the other end.
        On Wednesday this week, I discovered, to my delight, that the water had receded slightly: there was definitely more sand than on our recent visits, and I figured that if I timed my runs according to the coming and going of the waves, I could probably get through the small sections between two rocky ledges I’d need to jump up on to avoid ending up with soaked socks, and in this way make it to the dry sand on the northern half of the beach. And I was right! My well-timed dashes worked exactly as I’d hoped they would, and Grizzly and I soon found ourselves with oodles of sandy space to chase other dogs and poo unashamedly and splash in the water (as well as all the activities Grizzly wanted to do**). 
        After almost an hour of play, Grizzly and I made our way back towards the southern end of the beach to repeat the racing-and-then-waiting-on-rocky-ledges thing, just in reverse. There was another woman nearby as we approached the sections requiring timed runs, and we ended up watching the waves and then dashing together, leaping over small rocks and trying not to trip over Grizzly, who — in his excitement at having his owner finally participating so enthusiastically in the fun-having as opposed to her usual standing-around-taking-photos-of-rainbows boringness — was repeatedly crisscrossing in front of us as we ran. 
        “Who knew coming to the beach could be this stressful?” I said, and she laughed and waved goodbye. This was before I’d even reached peak stress! But I didn’t know that yet.
        At the stairs, I clipped the lead onto Grizzly’s collar and we made our way to the car. I dried him with a towel and let him into the back seat, then headed for the driver’s door, mindlessly feeling the contents of my pockets as I walked. Car key? Yes. Spare poo bag? Yes. Phone? No. I checked my jacket pockets again, my mind now alert: Phone? No. 
        I checked my jeans pockets, putting my hands deep into the back pockets and then the front ones as well, even though I’ve never kept my phone there in my life. No phone. I whisper-yelled “FUCK” as I headed back for Grizzly’s door. It must’ve fallen out of my pocket during one of my leaps, I thought, before thinking fuck several hundred more times. 

        Grizzly and I retraced our steps: back across the grass, down the stairs, onto the sand. I jogged slowly through the watery sections this time, keeping my eyes on the sand and the rocks, looking for my flowery phone case and wishing I’d chosen something garish instead of moss-coloured. No phone. 

        I walked the same route I’d taken along the sand, checked the shallow puddles I’d jumped over, returned to the site of a poo I’d picked up, scoured the surrounding grassy areas for my phone, wished once again I’d chosen a fluoro yellow phone case. No phone. 

        The daylight was starting to fade by this point, and I was keen to try calling my phone in case someone had picked it up, so Grizzly and I once again completed the racing-and-rocky-ledges routine, though both of us were considerably less happy about it this time. My phone was not on or near the rocks I was now bounding across for the third time since I’d last used it (to take photos of a rainbow). My phone was not on the wet sand, where the waves were coming and going. I couldn’t see it tumbling around in the whitewash. 

        At the car, having pointlessly attempted to dry Grizzly a second time with the already-wet towel, I poked my hands into all my pockets once again, just in case I’d somehow missed my phone sitting there innocently on each of the last seven times I’d checked. It was not suddenly there, however, which brought a fresh pang of disappointment despite the fact I’d expected exactly this.

I arrived home and breathlessly explained what’d happened to Alan, who immediately tried calling my phone. “It’s gone straight to voicemail,” he told me. 

        “Do you think someone’s stolen it?” Moses asked, because he listens to too many crime podcasts. 

        “I think it’s probably been fried by the ocean,” I said. “Still… do you reckon it’s worth checking the beach one last time, just in case?” 

        “I reckon we should,” said Moses, suddenly an optimist. 

        And so he and I jumped in the car and sped to the beach again, armed with a torch and (on my part, at least) a heavy feeling of hopelessness. We did the racing-stopping-racing thing, scanning, scanning, scanning. We rechecked the puddles and the poo site. 

        “Will you give me $100 if I find it for you?” Moses asked. 

        I assured him that I most definitely would not be doing that. 

        Eventually, we decided it was time to give up. It was dusk now, and soon we wouldn’t be able to easily see where we were walking. Dejected, we made our way back towards the southern end of the beach, and commenced the timed runs and leaps, slower again than before so I could have one final look at the ground before giving up forever, though watching the waves carefully to make sure we wouldn’t be surprised by any, and then I spotted it! My phone! There it was, face down on some pebbles! 

        I squealed in a way that Moses later told me he interpreted as “mum has somehow injured herself,” and grabbed at my phone, borrowing Mo’s optimism and deciding that maybe it hadn’t spent too much time in water at all despite the fact it’d dripped as I picked it up. Maybe it was more like a gentle kiss from the ocean than a brutal drowning? Things survived gentle kisses!

        Moses and I sped home again, talking over our feelings about both the before and during moments of finding and collecting the phone, and with Mo expressing some disappointment that he’d not been the one to spot it and was therefore unable to argue that I now owed him a large sum of money. 

        I carefully placed the phone in rice (uncooked, as the websites repeatedly pointed out; one can only imagine why) and left it there for 24 hours. Then I read another site that said dry rice was actually bad for phones because the starch could get into its nooks and crannies, and also phones had been found to dry faster on kitchen benches than buried in long-grain. Yet another site suggested a sealed container with silica gel packets might do the trick, so I took the phone from its rice coffin and placed it in a takeaway container along with a silica gel packet I found in an almost-empty carton of seaweed snacks. Then I remembered the packet of damp-absorber crystals we’d bought to tackle the threatening mould earlier in the year, and tipped a bunch of those in too. I left the phone in this new cocoon for another 39 hours. Towards the end of this time, I found another site that said all of its wet-iPhone tips applied only to phones wet with regular water; if your phone’s even considered a dip in seawater, it said, it is — and we cannot stress this enough — well and truly fucked. (This is a paraphrase.) 

It wasn't even a good rainbow photo.

And so it was that I found myself, for the first time in many years, phone-free for a full 63 hours. I missed it! I kept looking around for it in moments of boredom, as well as in joyful moments I’d have previously shared to my Instagram stories, like a headline from the local newspaper that made me laugh, or Moses and Hazel sliding the full length of a room on their slippery socks after taking a run up. 

        On one afternoon, I found myself waiting for pick up time at the school with no internet to scroll through, no phone with which to make and change appointments, no music to sing along to. I tried listening to ABC radio but quickly lost patience with the host’s time-killing chitchat and the fact I’d heard the station’s number announced four times within the preceding six-minute drive. I was parked in a quiet street, so there was no one around for whom I could imagine various gripping backstories. It was just me, my thoughts, and the inside of my car. I found a bag and collected all of the rubbish I found jammed under the front seats. I lay back and noticed my breath filling my belly and then blowing across my lips, then decided I didn’t want to turn this experience into the kind of story where a day without my phone suddenly turned me into a mindfulness expert and cured me of all of my mental and physical health complaints. I may have dozed off briefly. The time passed. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I certainly survived it. 

        At home, I could use my laptop to complete my daily puzzles — Wordle, Quordle, Heardle, Hurdle, Moviedle, Posterdle and Framed — and share my results with the family group chat. I could also check Instagram from my laptop, although it felt different, strange, on the larger screen. Perhaps because I was looking at my feed in a new way, I started noticing the accounts I’d always scroll past rather than engaging with. And I didn’t miss Twitter for a single moment, which surprised me because I’d loved it with the passion of a thousand burning suns only days earlier. 

        Another surprise was that I started writing in my head again, about everything and nothing; I found myself searching for the best words to use to explain this situation or that observation, because I couldn’t take a quick photo and post it online and move on. I found myself missing my old blog, where I used to post such musings the last time I had no smartphone to occupy me instead. I realised after my phone-free time this week that there are always words in my head; when all of the social media and podcast and song words were taken away, my own were there! Just, like, buzzing away, making sense of the world around me! I liked hearing them again. 

At the end of the 63 hours, Alan asked whether I was planning to try turning my phone back on again anytime soon, and I sighed and said I probably should, and he asked if I was putting it off because I was nervous, and I told him that was exactly the case but since when was he so insightful.

        I took my phone from the takeaway container, and I plugged it in to charge. 

        And then I waited for 15 minutes or so and pressed the power button. 

        Friends, it did not turn back on. I know that after the whole introduction, the repetitive to-ing and fro-ing up and down the beach, you were probably hoping this story had a happy ending and my phone was fine! I understand! I wanted this, too! Alas: just as that final website had warned, my phone was well and truly fucked. (My SIM was fine though. I'm not sure the ocean was able to even kiss it.)

        I took myself off to Apple, where a very young person replaced my dead phone with an identical-but-alive, refurbished one for less money than I’d expected to pay, and, because they own approximately 97% of my identity and also because I am impressive at backing up my data since almost losing a stack of it earlier in the year, I was able to sign in and find everything exactly as I’d left it, as if the previous few days hadn’t even happened.

            

I did notice myself being more present and mindful over those phone-free days (I know! I suck!). I noticed that I preferred completing my daily games at my laptop at the dining table while eating cereal, rather than squinting at my phone’s screen in my dark bedroom within moments of waking. I unfollowed a stack of famous people on Instagram and muted the stories of anyone who used them purely to point out what they’d already posted in their feed. And since having a working phone again (is 24 hours enough time for me to be allowed to brag about reflect on my progress?), I’ve started asking myself whether I’m reaching for it for a particular reason (connecting with someone, making a call, googling who was pablo escobar and chords cherub ball park music, etc.), or whether it’s just my arms moving out of mindless habit. 

        Also, you know the best part? You absolutely won’t believe this, but now I have, like, zero mental or physical health complaints??!

A. 

* I only ever take one at a time so I have a fighting chance at the aforementioned strength challenges.

** HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA