A Rain of Frogs

The big yellow truck leaned over distressingly as it pulled onto the shoulder of the highway. The boy looked at his dad curiously, and asked “Why are we stopping?”

His father sat quietly for a moment, surveying the scene in front of them. Through the windscreen, they could see forever. Range after range of mountains, piled up one behind the other, stretched into eternity, dark close up, but fading to the colour of the grey sky in the distance. To their left, on the other side of the road, was a railing, and the ground simply vanished beyond it. It was breathtaking, even to a child.

“Well, first, because of this amazing view,” said his Dad, “and secondly because you’re going to have to go ride with your mother and sister now.”

The boy was stunned into silence. He had travelled at the side of his father for thousands of kilometres, had been a faithful and competent navigator following closely on the map their traverse of the the great country. He didn’t understand why now, at the last, he’d have to be relegated to the car.

“Why?” he asked. His eyes were wet with tears.

His father sighed and unbuckled his seatbelt. He slid across the bench seat and put his arm around his son’s shoulders.

“Well, my boy. Take a look out that window. See how the road goes down so steeply?”

He looked, and saw that the road did drop precariously from there. He nodded and leaned into his Dad’s side.

“That road goes down to the town we’re going to live in. It goes really, really far down. We are currently sitting on top of something called ‘The Continental Divide’. That’s a ridge of mountains that run down North America, sort of like a spine. It’s really high up. This road ahead of us is called ‘Kicking Horse Pass’.”

The boy giggled and asked why is was called that.

“Because a long time ago some crazy old guy got kicked by his horse here.” he father answered.

The boy visualized this, a man getting kicked off the cliff over to their left and falling down, down to the bottom. In his mind’s eye, he saw the man splash into a river, then surface, sputtering and shaking his fist up at the top of the cliff where his horse stood chewing grass slowly and regarding him with malice. He laughed again.

“But why do I have to go with Mom?” he asked.

“Well, like I said, we’re really high up. And we need to go really far down to get to town. That’s not really a problem. The problem is this truck, and specifically its brakes.”

The boy thought about this a moment, but his seven year old mind couldn’t really put the brakes and his exile to the car with ‘the girls’ in to a single coherent thought. His father continued.

“As the truck starts going down the pass, I am going to have to slow it down, and that means using the engine and gears. The hill is so steep that the engine and gears alone can’t slow the truck down, because it’s too heavy so I’ll have to use the brakes too. And that’s where the problem is. The brakes on this truck are okay for driving across flat ground, but on a hill like that, they might overheat. This is a very heavy truck. Do you know how the brakes work?”

The boy slowly shook his head, trying to build a mental model of all the things his father was telling him.

“You know how I told you once that energy never goes away, it just gets changed from one type of energy to another? Well, that’s how brakes work too. They change the motion of the truck into heat, and then that heat is transferred to the air around the brakes to keep them cool, so they can keep changing the speed of the truck into heat. And if they get too hot…”

“Then they can’t slow the truck down!” the boy answered. He suddenly understood. “But why does that mean I have to go with Mom?”

“Because it could be dangerous. If the brakes stop working, I won’t be able to slow down the truck enough, and there could be an accident. And you’re far too precious to risk,” his father answered.

The boy’s lower lip started trembling. He understood. There was nothing he could do, and he’d just have to accept that the descent into the town they would call home would simply have to happen with him in the car, not the truck. He sighed a great, shaky sigh, and turned toward the door of the big yellow truck. His mother was already there, wearing a concerned look on her face. She opened the door, unbuckled his seatbelt, and picked him up.

“What’s wrong, sunshine?” she asked, cradling him against her and rocking gently.

“I’m okay, Mom” he answered, then wiggled until his mother put him back down on the bench of the seat. He turned around and hugged his father tightly. “Will you be okay Dad? Will everything be okay?” he asked.

His father hugged him tightly to his chest. “Yes, boy. Everything will be okay. It’s just a precaution. I’ll see you at the bottom of the hill, and we’ll ride into town together, okay? There’s a restaurant at the bottom of the hill that sells pizza, and you know what? They put pineapple on it! Isn’t that awesome?”

The boy brightened at this thought. “Pineapple? That’s weird!”

“Time to go, little man,” his mother said, and picked him up again. She walked him back to the car and buckled him in among the houseplants. Then she walked back to the truck.

“You look like you’ve been crying,” his sister said.

“Maybe. But I know something you don’t,” he answered, “I know about pineapple.”

His father was right. The mountains were enormous. He could, barely, make out the tops of some of them if he turned his head sideways and looked up through the side window of the yellow truck.

They were driving through a winding roadway near the bottom of a valley, sometimes following a river, other times a pair of railroad tracks that cut through the untamed scenery. Sometimes there was a small town, usually heralded by a sign on a tall post around the next bend of the valley floor. Shell, Sunoco, Husky, the signs read.

At one point his father directed him to look up at the side of one tree-covered slope, where he could see the small black squares of mine shafts driven into the rock. Another time they both watched with fascination as a surprisingly long and slow train trundled up the slop and into a tunnel, only to emerge further up the steep grade and traveling the other way. A moment later it popped into another tunnel, and again emerged higher up, again moving in the original direction. It fascinated the boy to see three parts of a train going in seemingly different directions, so he asked his father to explain it.

“It’s a double spiral,” he explained. Seeing the boy’s somewhat blank expression, he drew a shape similar in the dust on the dashboard. “The train goes in, and spirals upward to the right in a big circle, always going up slowly. Then it comes out of the tunnel. That’s where you see it going in the other direction. Then it goes back in, and does the same thing in the opposite direction, but still going up. It’s kind of like an elevator for trains to get over the mountains.”

The boy thought on this a long time, forming a mental picture of stone tunnels through the darkness, and the engines pulling their long line of cars upward through the spirals. It put him in mind of a book he had read when he was younger, about the little engine that could. He laughed, thinking to himself “I think I can, I think I can…“ and when his father asked him what was so funny, he explained and they both laughed for a long time.

The big yellow truck was also chugging along, no longer rumbling gently along. The engine sounded like it was working harder, and it was much louder. His father had to keep it in a lower gear than when they were crossing the prairies, and they went along much slower, winding their way upward from the valley floor.

Around the big yellow truck endless wheat fields streamed past, a relentlessly flat sea of grain that stretched into the distance, where it eventually touched an equally featureless perfect blue sky. The scenery was the same no matter the direction, except for straight ahead, where the grey road cut westward through the golden plain toward a dark smudge on the highway. The engine droned on as consistently as the scenery.

After some time, the boy bounced excitedly on the bench beside his father.

“What’s that? Clouds?” he asked his father, pointing through the windscreen.

“Mountains,” said his father after a moment of screwing up his eyes and squinting into the distance, “the Rocky Mountains.”

The boy stopped bouncing for a moment, settling down with a puzzled look on his face. He’d been expecting to see mountains for two days – ever since Dad had mentioned them on the first day in fact. That grey smudge against the horizon was mountains? They weren’t very big. They were in fact much smaller than he had been led to believe.

“Not very big then, are they.” he said.

His father laughed. This was a good sound. Much better than the empty sound of the trucks engine pulling them across the prairies.

“They’re really far away. We won’t reach them till tomorrow. Possibly not even till the day after, in fact.”

The boys eyes widened in genuine surprise. He was pretty good at math, and figured out that they were a very long way from the mountains if they going to take that long to get there. They must be miles high! He said so.

“Yes, actually. Some of them are more than three miles high. So high that there’s always snow on some of them, even in summer.” said his father.

This impressed the boy. Snow even in the summer! Somehow, the boy had it in his head that their house would be up on top of a mountain, so he was imagining building snowmen while still wearing shorts, truly the best of both worlds.

He cast his memory back to last summer, when it was so hot in the city that his mother wouldn’t let him go outside to play on a few of the hotter days. And for most of it, the air was full of brown smog. His father had explained that fog was pollution from cars and factories and the airport, but had also told him that there wasn’t any smog in the mountains out west. The air was clean and the water was clean and everything was much better than in the city.

Snow in august, snowmen and shorts. Everything really would be better out West.

The boy was born in the city and lived in the city till he was seven, a true child of the Big Smoke. The year he turned seven however, the whole world changed. It changed in part because his father decided to follow a dream, and also because the deep recession gripping the country had left his parents with negative equity in their west-end condominium. So, with nothing but a truckload of possessions and a few hopes they moved more than half-way across the continent to a small town town in the B.C. interior.

The boy was pretty excited about the change, largely because it had been presented to him as a grand new adventure like the ones he had read about in his books, but also because he was too young to feel the cold sting of leaving friends and family and everything he knew behind. His sister, older and more aware, was miserable about the whole thing, convinced it was the end of the world.

But move they would, and one warm summer morning, after one last tour of the bicycle path around the condominium building on his orange banana-seat bike, after seeing the bike packed carefully into the big yellow truck and after one last check of the moisture of the soil in the potted plants that filled the family car they would tow across the country, the boy settled into the long bench seat beside his father and prepared for the great experience. His mother and sister followed behind in another car keeping each other company in misery.

Later, the boy would remember driving through endless rows of perfectly spaced evergreens as they drove away from the city. He would remember the feeling of near hypnosis as row after row of trees passed by, so perfectly spaced that he could see lines of trees stretching not only off to the side of the road, but diagonally forward and to the back as well. But that was later, for now he babbled in the way of seven-year-olds, asking his father a million and one questions, and receiving a million and one considered and patient answers about the new home they were heading toward, the particular colour of the sky, the nature of life.

As they drove the topography of the land slowly changed from the gentle flat farmlands and perfectly gridded forests surrounding the city that the boy had always known. Rock formations, bigger than any rocks the boy had ever seen steadily displaced the farm fields and grid-like forests. Drumlins formed further from the road as the landscape became lumpier and more rugged. The boy asked his father if the drumlins were mountains, and his father laughingly responded in the negative, that real mountains were so big that he’d barely be able to see the top from down here.

They had driven for hours before the boy finally asked how long the drive would be. When his father explained that it would take five days to drive across the country, and that they’d see a lot of really amazing things on the way, the boy bounced on the bench seat in excitement and munched on his peanut butter sandwich. Ten minutes later he was fast asleep, his happy dreams blanketed in the steady engine thrum of the big yellow truck.

The iPad isn’t an oversized iPhone.

If the iPad were an oversized anything, it would be an oversized iPod Touch, since it (currently) lacks the ability to make telephone calls. Many versions also lack the assisted GPS available in the iPhone, again making them more like the Touch.

The iPad isn’t a netbook killer.

The Netbook killer is in fact the modern Netbook itself. Too many features, too much cruft. The original purpose of the Netbook was to be a small, limited function computer that wasn’t a pain to take everywhere. Modern Netbooks are laptops, with (slightly) smaller screens.

I can hear all the gear-heads and tinkerers freaking out right now, because of the ‘closed’ operating system, because of the ‘closed’ app process and store, and because it’s made by Apple and they just don’t want to like anything Apple makes.

I can also hear them whining that the iPad doesn’t do anything that their Netbook can’t. It’s just a glorified, overpriced and under-featured Netbook. Nevermind the best-of-breed touch screen, never mind the operating system. Never mind the sheer joy of using it. And, never, ever mind the way you interact with it.

Whether or not people realize it, the iPad represents a fundamental shift in the way people not only use computers, but the very way they think about them. And no Netbook is ever going to do that. Steve Jobs was wrong, in my opinion, to draw the Netbook parallel in his presentation.

If anything, the iPhone and iPod Touch are more like miniaturized early iPads. Perhaps they were Apple’s way of teaching people how computing is going to work in the future, without scaring them away.

The iPad isn’t a metaphor.

Millions of people know how to touch their data instead of try to fit computing into a stale and difficult metaphor, thanks to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now Apple has given the world something more useful.

The iPad isn’t a finished product.

The original iPhone bears very little resemblance to the current iPhone 3GS in terms of use and even appearance. The same will hold true for the iPad. Apple is again proving the value of one of the core principles of the Umbrella Manifesto, the one pertaining to perfection:

Perfection is a goal, not a destination. Create something today, improve it tomorrow.

The iPad isn’t a perfect product.

But it’s on the right road.