The Eagle Cap Wilderness Area might be the most beautiful place in Oregon. Mirror Lake, just under the 9572-foot Eagle Cap, is the epitome of ultra-blue, high-altitude lakes in white granite mountains. The joy of being there immediately erased two days of backpacking weariness. Louann sat at the lake's shore, painting, and I swam to my heart's content.
   We weren't the only people to enjoy such beauty. Whenever we left our campsite to walk on the trail around the lake or to catch the sunset from another promontory, I began to get a peculiar urban feeling. Here were people out walking their dogs, tugging on leashes, saying, "Heel, Jupiter; heel"; here was a woman strolling down the trail sipping coffee from a mug; and here was a teen-age girl with a cell phone at her ear. She reminded me of two people I met earlier this summer on top of Greyback Mountain, a talkative father and his bored, adolescent son, whose only comment was that he was missing his favorite television program. No doubt he would have been happier on the mountain if he could have brought along a tiny TV to watch while his father talked (and talked and talked), just as the girl was no doubt happier in the wilderness with her telephone. So why should it bother me?
   Well, it does, partly because they're missing the experience I think they should have. If it is a good thing that the world is becoming more connected, it's not a good thing that that connectedness is never severed. We need to experience ourselves in environ-ments without our props and gadgets, and I think people who go to those environments should have that experience.
   It bothers me on a larger scale, too, that has something to do with sacredness, holiness, communion. I doubt that teen-age girls carry their telephones into church with them. One doesn't commune with the Holy Spirit through one's cell phone. It is no different in the sacred places of nature, the wilderness areas where we go to experience nature in its purity. Some of us bring our fishing poles, some our water colors; others hike to exhaustion; I swim, but all of these are ways to commune with a holy spirit, and none of them depends on the digital world.
   The man fishing on the point directly across the lake from where Louann was painting, talking excitedly to his dog when he caught a fish and showing it to him proudly before he released it to the water again, interfered less with my sense of communion than the group of loud young men with their horseplay and crude jokes. The campers who built a campfire even though fires were prohibited at Mirror Lake may not have interfered directly with my experience, but they desecrated the holiness nonetheless. As for the girl with the cell phone, she reminded me simply by her presence that I wasn't very far from the world down below, after all, and that the sense of sacredness was merely an illusion. What I hold holy is no more universally holy than someone else's church, and "getting away from it all" has become more difficult now that we can "take it all" with us. Alas for the wilderness; it is shrinking even as we expand its borders.