My mother grew up in the Four Corners area, southwestern Colorado. Her parents founded Ismay Trading Post in 1924 or so and raised 9 kids there. Two of my uncles never got married and lived at home to help run the business. After my grandparents died in their 80s, Uncle Robert and Uncle Eugene continued running the store and taking care of the farming and peach orchards.


They never had television because they were too far from any signal towers, and too stubborn to get satellite TV, but listened to the radio a lot.

Uncle Robert sells a lot of zucchini in his store; the Indians like the really large ones.


Several years ago I decided they needed to at least look at the Internet to see if it was something they would be interested in. I borrowed a laptop and got a temporary ISP account in their market town, Cortez, and we strung a long telephone cord from the living room to the kitchen so we could sit around the kitchen table and look at the Internet.



Eugene on the left, Robert on the right, pan of fried catfish on the table.

Uncle Eugene was interested in the stock market because he had inherited some mutual funds from his aunt. Uncle Robert wanted to look up a part for his rototiller on the manufacturer's website, and then we listened to a re-play of an Art Bell all night radio show about a little alien a guy found and put in his freezer because he thought it was dead, and the cold revived the alien so it woke up. I decided that even though they didn't have the Internet, they had a pretty good idea of what information it contains.

When it was time for me to leave, I asked them if they would be interested in having their own computer and access to the Internet, and they said no, but they'd be glad to look at it again if I wanted to show it to them.

This is one of their vehicles, from the 1940s, but still running. The old gas tank has been replaced, and the gas line is a piece of clear surgical tubing. Robert is a very good mechanic. He worked his way through the system and finally determined the problem, so we walked around the yard until we found a junked motor with the part we needed.



There goes the truck, new carburetor in place, headed across the yard to get filled with gasoline. Note the jet trails in the desert sky. Art Bell, the radio talk host, thinks they are a sign of conspiracies.