backs loomed a sheer, smooth golden wall; to the south and west lay
an expansive spread of the river and its surrounding upheaval of
multicolored sandstone. Strayer told us about a petroglyph panel
some ways downstream, accessible only by wading and swimming
and then returning against the current. It was finally warm out, and a
handful of students decided to pursue the lead. They wouldn’t return
to camp until early evening, flushed with adventure, giddy,
triumphant and hungry for Strayer’s hearty cooking. They had made
their own grateful procession through the raw, spare, sometimes
voluptuous country.
Strayer was delighted the students were exercising their
exploratory—and social—instincts. “The students have gelled,” he
told me on the way back to camp. “It just shows you how starved they
were for social interaction, for connection.” I had to wonder if he was
projecting his usual technology-has-ruined-young-people bias, but the
fraying of social skills is increasingly documented by researchers
such as Sherry Turkle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Our capacities for empathy and self-reflection do appear to be
challenged—even atrophying—as our digital interactions replace
analog ones. One happy solution Turkle acknowledges but doesn’t
emphasize: spending more time in unwired places. One of the
underappreciated benefits of venturing into remote landscapes is that
we are often thrown into connecting with each other.
Just before the adventurers returned, it was my turn to undergo
Strayer’s latest experiment. His grad student Rachel Hopman tucked
my head into an EEG device more elaborate than the crown-of-thorns
one I wore in Scotland and on the lake in Maine. It was more like a
bathing cap with twelve sensors sprouting out. Six more sensors
suckled my face, all connected via many wires to a small portable
unit beside me. I felt like a tethered hedgehog. I carefully settled into
a lawn chair at the tamarisk-lined edge of the campground along the
San Juan. The students and I would be sitting here in pairs for about