On the way to the RV this week, there was a sign by the road for eggs, honey, and garlic. Eggs were on the shopping list so I stopped and rang the doorbell. A woman answered and sold me a carton of gorgeous earth-toned eggs in tints of creams and ochres and khakis and terracotta and even two pale blue ones — the range of colors backyard eggs come in still amazes me after all this time, and I still talk about it as passionately as ever in the conferences I give about backyard flocks.
The lady also gave me a handful of garlic scapes, the way people who grow things often do. Small talk followed. She mentioned that a lot of people are at their cabins during weekdays now.
It is true. The technology to work from almost anywhere has arrived. Starlink at the RV, the laptop on the banquette, the phone with signal in places that had none a few years ago. The pitch was freedom, and the freedom is real. The old constraint — that work happened in the place work happened — has genuinely dissolved.
The desk this week has been the dining banquette. I worked from there in the morning, in the afternoon, and sometimes after supper. Nanouk waited on the cushion beside me. The RV is parked above waterfalls; the sound came through every window we opened. There was no reason I could not work. The internet works, the coffee works, the laptop works. The work does not do itself.
And this is what the pitch does not tell you. When work can happen anywhere, work happens everywhere. The freedom to bring the laptop with you turns out to also be the difficulty of ever quite leaving it behind. The banquette that is a desk in the morning is still a desk in the afternoon, unless someone decides otherwise. The waterfalls outside the window can be background noise for the workday just as easily as they can be the point of the trip. The tools do not decide when to stop. The person has to.
Some of the three days, I decided. Slept in with the sound of the waterfalls. Walked Nanouk to their very bottom, where the air is really more of a mist. Swam in the river. Played Catan with my partner — the large version, the two-player variant we invented for when it is just the two of us. He made a tartare one night — he is a wonderful cook. He whisked up his famous sauce while I did the chopping. A lot of chopping.
The considered version of working-from-anywhere is not the freedom the pitch sold. It is the daily decision to close the laptop when the laptop could stay open forever, in a place that could be a workday or could be the trip it was meant to be. The tools give us the option. They do not give us the pause. That has to be built.
The parts of the trip I closed the laptop for, those are the parts I will remember.
— Catherine