It is absolutely mind-boggling for a person my age to think back over the years and realize how far we’ve come where technology is concerned. Take the cell phone, for example.

These days it is common to see a person using a cell phone almost anywhere — at the grocery store, in a car, at a gym, while driving a tractor — anywhere, and that goes for all ages. When I see someone using a cell phone, I can’t help but think back to my growing-up years when our family didn’t even have a phone in the house, let alone a phone in every pocket.

I was a teen before we had phone service. That was after some of the ranchers in the Deer Creek/Morapos area got together, enlisted some ranchers from the Williams Fork area, and built a phone line. They had reached an agreement with Mountain Bell to provide the phone service once the line was built.

It was no easy task because there were mountains to climb and big rocks to maneuver, but in the end we had a phone. There were a lot of people on the line, meaning that if someone wanted to make a call, instead of a dial tone, he or she was apt to hear two other people talking. There was a wait until the line was free. (A nosy person could listen in on a conversation.) The ranchers were responsible for phone line maintenance, too, so if the phones went dead or there were scratchy sounds on the line, they had to ride the line to find the problem.

There are pros and cons concerning the use of cell phones, but they could have been beneficial — even life-saving — to ranchers in those days. For example, my dad took his turn riding the high country summer pasture (all the ranchers put the cattle together), and he stayed overnight in the cow camp cabin. He had no way of letting us know of any mishap, such as the horse falling with him, or of letting other ranchers know if cattle needed to be moved.

I remember one year when one of our uncles had his turn riding. He didn’t show up at home, our aunt let Dad know, and he and another uncle rode up to the cow camp where they found a very sick man. They managed to get him on a horse and back down country and then to a hospital. It turned out that he had pneumonia.

A cell phone could have come in handy, but we kids would have never been allowed to have one in school. As far as other technology is concerned, we didn’t have computers or similar devices — not even a calculator. Believe it or not, back in those earlier days, some people used an abacus (with sliding beads) or a slide rule. I even learned to use a slide rule in high school and used it in college as well.

Over the years the advances in technology have been mind-boggling, indeed.