A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (2 page)

More people, more communication, more value.

More pressure.

As networks became more populated and powerful, they added a huge wrinkle in the demand for attention by turning computers into personal communication devices. The technology was delivering not just data but information from friends and relatives—communications that could signal a business opportunity or a threat, an overture from a mate or a potential one. As such, the devices tapped into deep human needs—with increasing speed and interactivity. It was not just pure social communications, but video games, news, even shopping and consumption, a powerful, personalized electrical current connecting all of us, all of the time. This was the marriage of Moore and Metcalfe—the coming together of processing power and personal communications—our gadgets becoming faster and more intimate. They weren’t just demanding attention but had become so compelling as to be addictive.

The modern attention researchers, walking a path laid down by their forebears 150 years earlier, asked a new question: Was technology no longer the slave, but the master? Was it overtaking our powers of attention? How could we take them back? It wasn’t just a question of life-or-death stuff, like the stakes for pilots in World War II. Now there were subtler tensions, the concept that nips and cuts at attention in the cubicle can take a persistent and low-grade toll on productivity, or in schools on focus, or at home on communication between lovers and parents and children. Would it hinder memory and learning rather than enhance it?

Past technological advances, from the printing press to the radio and television, had invited questions about their unintended consequences and possible negative side effects. But many scholars agreed that these latest breakthroughs, taking full form only in the last decade, marked a difference in our lives in orders of magnitude.

Technology was exploding in complexity and capability. How could we keep up?

Reggie Shaw could not—keep up. He could not conceive of the larger dynamic, even the crisis, that had enveloped him. So maybe it’s no wonder he couldn’t grasp what had happened; perhaps this confusion prompted him to deceive himself and lie to others. Or was he less innocent than he was letting on? In any case, after being pressed by science and common sense, he no longer could keep the truth at bay and he recognized what he’d done, and he changed, completely. He became the unlikeliest of evangelists, a symbol of reckoning. And he began to transform the world with him. Broadly, his story, and that of others around him, became an era-defining lesson in how people can awaken from tragedy, confront reality, address even smaller daily dissonance, and use their experiences to make life better for themselves and the people around them. And their journey showed how we might come to terms with the mixed blessing of technology. For all the gifts of computer technology, if its power goes underappreciated, it can hijack the brain.

Along the way, Reggie’s defenders and antagonists alike came to see themselves in the young man, a projection of how they would’ve handled themselves, or should. His attention, ours, is so fragile. What happened to him could happen to anyone, couldn’t it? Does that make him, or us, evil, ignorant, naive, or just human?

Is his brain any different from ours?

Ms. Johnson, the technician, hands Reggie two little plastic devices, gray, looking like primitive video game joysticks. She tells him that the gadgets have buttons he’ll be asked to press when certain images appear in the mirror. They’re going to see what Reggie’s brain looks like when he tries to pay attention.

“I’m going to put you in slowly, Reggie,” says Ms. Johnson. “Is that okay?”

Reggie clears his throat, a sign of his assent, an exhalation of nerves. He disappears into the tube.

CHAPTER 1

REGGIE

I
N EARLY JUNE 2006
, nineteen-year-old Reggie Shaw sat in the backseat of a Chevy Tahoe heading north under a big, cloudless Utah sky. His father, Ed, a machine-shop manager, was crying quietly as he drove the white sport-utility vehicle. In the passenger seat, Reggie’s mother, Mary Jane, sobbed.

Reggie was her little boy, her baby, at least until his little sister came along when Mary Jane was forty. Among her brood of six, Reggie was the quiet charmer, a peacemaker, sensitive with a dry wit, both athletic and awkward, honest. This time to a fault.

A day earlier, Reggie had been sitting in a classroom in Provo at the Missionary Training Center. He was surrounded by eager teen Mormons, each preparing to embark on a mission, Reggie’s lifelong dream. He’d recently returned from his freshman year at a small Mormon college in Virginia, where he’d played basketball, and he was committed to taking the Mormon message to Winnipeg. But a secret nagged at him. He went to his president at the training center, and he confessed: He’d recently had sex with his girlfriend, Cammi.

The fact that he’d previously lied about their coupling, and hadn’t done the spiritual work to put it behind him, ruled out his participation in the mission. Most horrifying to Reggie was the knowledge that the Church would soon phone his parents. The family lived in Tremonton, in the northernmost part of Utah. It had some of the heaviest concentration of Mormons in the state and, by extension, in the world. When someone came home early from a mission, everyone in the community knew about it, and people would suspect the reason. Even though the Shaws were well regarded, with deep roots, Reggie felt he’d marked not just himself, but his family.

“It was difficult for them to drop me off knowing I wouldn’t be back for two years,” he says, looking back. “It was much more difficult to pick me up.” His dad was a quiet man, particularly if you didn’t know him well, someone who ached for his children when they hurt, even if he couldn’t quite express it. This was the first time Reggie could remember seeing him cry.

Reggie uttered hardly a word as they wound their way through Salt Lake City on I-15 North. It was nearly seven p.m. The sun, falling in the west, to the left of the Chevy, snuck into the car at an insidious angle, causing Reggie to squint. He had a short haircut, leaving a touch of bangs in the front. His young face usually projected kindness, approachability, but now held heavy weight he had no language to express.

In the distance, to the right of the car, in the east, rose the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains. The imposing jagged peaks put the topography out of balance, almost tilting the land in their direction; the mountains had a gravity that helped define the state, outline it, just as they would come to define Reggie.

The family continued north, passing through Salt Lake City, things and places blurring—the auto mall, McDonald’s, Best Buy, the exit for the University of Utah. As they drove, Reggie thought about Cammi, and wondered what would become of them, and her, of him.

Less than an hour later, they arrived at the two-story, red-brick home in Tremonton, the town where Reggie had grown up, and his mom had, too. Her family had raised sugar beets, cattle, hay, and corn. Lots of land, few people. Everyone still knew everyone. By 2006, there were fewer than six thousand residents. Down the block from the Shaws lived the town’s mayor; kitty-corner from the mayor lived their LDS bishop. They were all within walking distance from Reggie’s elementary, middle, and high schools, from the Little League field his dad had helped care for, and the recreation center where Reggie first learned to play his great passion.

A few days after they returned home from the failed mission, on a Sunday, Reggie went to church. Mary Jane felt a cascade of emotions. Heartbroken, embarrassed. “If you come home like that, it’s almost like a disgrace,” Reggie’s mom says now. “But he walked right back into church. He never faltered.

“I was very proud of him for having the courage to do that.”

That summer, Reggie took a painting job at Wall to Wall, a company in Logan, the veritable big city to the east, over and then around the first batch of mountains, past Chocolate Peak and Scout Peak. Every morning, it was the same thing; Reggie was up and out of the house by six a.m., he’d drive the Tahoe north through town in the dark, then take a right at Valley View Drive, where things got wide open, and then accelerate up the crest into the foothills.

He lived in the room he’d once shared with his older brother Nick. It was all boy; Chicago Cubs wallpaper covered the bottom third of the wall. There was a poster of Reggie’s favorite basketball player, Reggie Miller, but the star’s bio was covered up by a picture of Jesus, looking serene, wearing a white shirt with a red robe over it.

Reggie tried to reconnect with Cammi. “She was the one, man. That’s what I thought.” She didn’t share his resolve. He couldn’t quite figure out why things weren’t working, her periodic distance. Then one day, she stopped taking his calls. He couldn’t get ahold of her. Then she reappeared. “She called me up and said she’d gotten engaged to someone else.”

By September, he’d developed a rhythm. Painting, trying to figure out what would come next, playing recreational hoops and video games, and forming a new friendship, with Briana Bishop. Still just a friendship, but with potential.

Most of all, he was doing the spiritual work to cleanse his transgression. He was determined to get square with his Church and Maker so he could embark again on a mission, sometime the following year. It was not the path that Reggie had once idealized, but it was a clear direction and one he was undertaking with typical, quiet resolve.

THE LAST DAY OF
summer was September 22. The weather was already turning, fast. Just after 6:15 a.m., Reggie climbed into the SUV to head to a job in Logan. Like always, he took his Cingular flip phone. After he turned east on Valley View Drive, he made his regular stop at the Sinclair gas station for his one-liter plastic bottle of Pepsi. It had started to rain.

At the same gas station, John Kaiserman was pulling up in his Ford F-250, hauling a trailer. For Kaiserman, forty-one, a stout man with a handlebar mustache, the trailer was a kind of mobile office or workshop. He was a farrier, a certified maker of horseshoes, and his trailer carried all the tools of his trade, including nearly one thousand pounds of horseshoes, a gas forge, and a 150-pound anvil. As farriers had done since the Old West, he would visit your farm, assess your horse’s hoof needs, “get a piece of aluminum or steel, or whatever your horse required, and I could build it on site, and nail it on.” Not bad for the price of $65 to $150 per horse.

The equipment was a hell of a lot of weight to carry around, maybe 4,500 pounds worth. Hence the powerful Ford, itself weighing around 6,000 pounds; together with the trailer, it was nearly five tons—a missile at highway speeds.

For Kaiserman, that morning had been a particularly pleasant one; weirdly so, he thought. He’d awakened naturally thirty minutes earlier than usual. It gave him more than enough time to pitch the hay and tend to the animals on his own modest property, located on five acres just outside Tremonton.

He was comfortably on schedule when he pulled his big load out of the Sinclair station and back onto the road, heading toward Logan. He turned the radio to 96.7, country music. He looked up to see a few snowflakes, and, about two hundred yards ahead, Reggie’s white Chevy. It was dark, but Kaiserman was able to see the vehicle wander several times across the yellow divide, then steer back. A few miles later, the Chevy did it again. Kaiserman thought it odd, and he kept his distance. There was no hurry to get to Logan, he thought, no need to tailgate, and the weather was bad.
I got all the time in the world.

As they pressed on over the curves and hills, Kaiserman saw something that gave him greater pause. The Chevy veered entirely into the incoming lane before recovering with a quick jerk of the wheel.
What was going on?
Kaiserman wondered whether the driver was unsure of where he was going. Or maybe the driver was thinking of taking a left turn on one of the dirt side roads but was having trouble in the low light figuring out which was the correct road.

Or, Kaiserman thought, maybe the driver of the Tahoe was trying to pass the semi just ahead of him. The Chevy, as he put it later, was “half near tailgating the semi.” Strange behavior, bordering on very dangerous; why try to pass a semi in the freezing rain?

This guy is an idiot,
Kaiserman thought.
This guy is going to cause us all some trouble.

ABOUT FIFTEEN MILES AWAY
, heading out of Logan, in the opposite direction, was a blue 1999 Saturn sedan. Its driver was James Furfaro, thirty-eight, who’d left home that morning a bit late. As usual, he picked up his friend and colleague, Keith O’Dell, fifty, at a Park & Ride in Logan. Both men were scientists commuting to their jobs at ATK Systems, where they were helping build rocket boosters. Rocket scientists. As they drove, Jim munched Cheerios from a plastic baggie handed to him by his wife.

Keith ate his regular breakfast, a red Fuji apple. He was tired, which was his lot in life. He was a contented workaholic. But he’d seemed particularly tired of late, to the point that his wife had suggested that morning that he skip work and stay home.

Around 6:40 a.m., just minutes before dawn, Keith and Jim neared milepost 106.6, which was right around the turnoff to a gun range. Traffic was modest. KVNU, a local radio station, reported the temperature at thirty-three degrees. The roads were wet but not icy.

In the darkness, Keith and Jim could make out oncoming headlights, but not the big, heavy trucks the lights belonged to. First was the semi. Then came Reggie in the Chevy, but he was tracking so close to the semi that he was basically hidden from Jim and Keith’s view. Then, a bit farther back, still cautious, drove Kaiserman and his haul. Two minutes earlier, this trio of trucks had sped down the last big hill before Logan—a crest that in the light afforded a spectacular view of Cache Valley below—and they’d descended into a flat patch. It was a straightaway, a relatively easy stretch, though narrow. Reggie felt he knew the road like the back of his hand. He’d driven this hundreds of times to go to Logan—the region’s big city—to go to work, see movies, go on dates, hang out, attend all three of his brothers’ weddings; he’d taken his driver’s test there.