BEAVER ISLAND (AP) — Muggs Bass doesn't own a computer. She's pretty much dead set against e-mail. Anyone who calls her home on Michigan's remote Beaver Island should be prepared for a busy signal, if she's on her land-line phone. She has no cell.
"When you don't have it, you don't miss it. That's what I say," says the spunky 70-year-old grandmother, who's as comfortable telling jokes at the local pub as she is attending Mass each morning.
Technology isn't really her thing. So, it's a small miracle when Bass drives, once a month, to her island's rural health center to sit down in front of a wide-screen television. There, she and a handful of other islanders connect by video conference with a similar group in Charlevoix, a two-hour ferry ride away.
They chat. They laugh. They cry together.
All of them have, or have had, cancer, Bass included. Hers started with a lump in her breast and has since metastasized to her bones, making her cancer treatable, but incurable, her doctors tell her.
Her own grandmother died of the same disease and went off the island for occasional treatments, as Bass does every few weeks. But that grandmother could hardly have imagined a day when islanders talked openly about their cancer, face-to-face with people in a support group miles away.
It's just one of many ways technology is making this rugged place less remote than it once was and, some would say, more livable for more people.
Not that the change has come quickly, or that technology always works perfectly.
That's just how it is on an island where a popular bumper sticker reads "Slow Down! This Ain't The Mainland." It's aimed at anyone who's in too big a hurry, including lead-footed tourists who kick up dust on the many dirt roads or who panic when cell phone service drops.
That's life on wired — or at least, semi-wired — Beaver Island, where the year-round population is about 650, give or take a few dozen.
Internet A Godsend
Beaver Island — much of its 54 square miles covered in lush hardwood forests, sand dunes or pristine inland lakes — is not well known. That's partly because it is difficult to get to, especially in winter, when small planes are usually the only option, weather permitting.
So when high-speed Internet service became available to most of the island last spring, this was more than just a convenience. For many, it was a godsend — even if having the service simply meant being able to shop online or to watch a new movie. For others, it meant being able to stay on the island longer because they had a more reliable connection to do work.
Either way, the outside world was even more readily available, at least virtually.
Schoolchildren on the island were ahead of this curve, already taking language and advanced-placement classes — even college courses — online.
Isolated Lifestyle
Today's state-of-the-art Beaver Island school is quite different from the one Muggs Bass attended. For her, books were the only real window to the mainland.
Like many who settled on Beaver Island, her great-grandparents and a grandmother had come from Ireland. She was born Mary Margaret but called "Muggs" as long as she can remember.
Other than a trip to the doctor when she was a young child, she didn't go to the mainland of Michigan — "across," as the islanders like to say — until she visited an aunt in Detroit when she was 12.
But after she graduated from high school, she left the island to find work and ended up living elsewhere in Michigan and then Illinois, where she met her husband. They moved to northern Indiana, where they raised their son and his children from a previous marriage. Always, she longed to return to the island one day.
Support From Afar
When Muggs Bass moved back 12 years ago, she had no idea that she'd soon be dealing with a serious health issue.
A year after she'd been there, she traveled to the mainland for her annual mammogram, which revealed cancerous tissue. She had surgery to remove a breast.
"Then I went along fine for 10 years," she says, until she got a cough she couldn't shake. One morning, she said to her husband, "I need to go across, to the doctor."
Her lung was filling with fluid. The cancer had spread to her bones.
The support group in Charlevoix includes an 80-year-old woman with lung and colon cancer, plus younger mothers who have survived breast cancer and those who are in the thick of the battle. They talk about infections and mammograms, find humor in topics such as constipation.
An Enduring Dilemma
Joe and Phyllis Moore understand the dynamic.
Earlier this year, the longtime islanders were able to "attend" their youngest granddaughter's first birthday party in Washington state via Skype.
"Just thinking about it, it almost brings tears to my eyes," says Joe Moore, a retired teacher who's now a medic on the island, among other things.
"I hardly knew my own grandparents," says Phyllis Moore, who grew up on the island. So this is progress.
Tech A Mixed Blessing
Like Muggs Bass, though, a growing number of people want to find a way ONTO Beaver Island — many of them among the thousands who visit each summer and would like to make it home. For many, technology is key.
Jeff Stone and his wife, Sarah Rohner, were able to start spending more time on the island in 2006, when a satellite-based service began offering an Internet connection — a precursor to the current faster service.
Stone quit his real estate job in the Chicago area to start a website design business that he and his wife run from the island much of the year.
Now that Internet service on the island is more reliable, many islanders say improving cell phone service is the big hurdle.
But even those who reap the benefits of technology feel torn. They worry that it infringes on one of the very things they love about the island — its blissful peacefulness.
It also used to be the joke that, by St. Patrick's Day, anyone who lived here year round couldn't stand the sight of anyone else. In many ways, communicating with the outside world helps with that, but not always.
"Sometimes, I think it makes it worse because they can communicate more and get on each others' nerves even more," Joe Moore says, chuckling.
Best Of Both Worlds
But Muggs Bass says nothing compares with the support she's gotten from her tiny island community.
When she got her latest diagnosis, islanders organized a "50/50 raffle" for her, where the winner is supposed to take half the donations. Instead, the winner gave his portion to Bass. She received nearly $9,000 to help with flights to the mainland and other expenses related to her illness.
"You talk about emotional," Bass says, tearing up again.
She recalls sitting down after that to pray and, as she might say, have a chat with God.
"I thanked Him, and thanked Him, and thanked Him. I was so grateful that I was able to come back and live here, and for holding me up at this time in my life," she says.
The support group and her new friends on the mainland are part of that.
For her, technology — at least her little slice of it — has allowed the best of both worlds.
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