I Live in a Maine Town of Eight Hundred People. For Six Months I Have Been Doing One Specific Thing About It.

I translate German industrial manuals for a living. Mostly machine tools — Fanuc robot documentation, the occasional Siemens PLC reference. The work pays better than people assume and requires almost no other people. I moved to a small town on the coast of Maine three years ago, partly because the cost of living was reasonable and mostly because I had been told the winter air was good for the kind of tinnitus I have. The town has about eight hundred people in it. There is a Hannaday's, a post office, a library that opens four days a week, and a diner that closes at two in the afternoon. My nearest neighbor is a retired lobsterman named Henry. He is seventy-five. Every two weeks or so we have a four-minute conversation about whether the boats are still coming in. That, until last November, was approximately the volume of human contact I had on a given week.

This is not, I want to say first, a complaint. I chose this. The work is interesting. The light, in Maine, in February, is the best light I have ever lived inside of. But there is a particular cognitive tax to translating a language you are not speaking aloud, which I had not anticipated when I took up the work. By the third year, the inside of my head had developed a kind of moss. I would catch myself looking up English words I knew perfectly well, the way a person who has not driven in a long time looks up which pedal is the brake.

In November of last year a translator I trade work with sometimes, who lives in Cologne, mentioned in passing that she had been doing thirty-minute calls with strangers on a site called Knotchat in the evenings, because she wanted, she said, to remember how an unrehearsed sentence felt in her mouth. She did not recommend it exactly. She described it the way some people describe drinking strong coffee on an empty stomach — useful, occasionally clarifying, not for everybody. I had not heard of the site. I looked it up that night. The homepage is plain to the point of being suspicious; you click a button and you are in a conversation with someone who is doing the same thing for their own reasons.

The first call I had was with a woman in Espoo, Finland, who turned out to be a municipal traffic engineer. She wanted to talk about the politics of roundabouts. I had not known there were politics of roundabouts. She explained them to me for about thirty-five minutes, with the patient seriousness of a person who has been waiting a long time for someone to ask. I went to bed thinking about uncontrolled intersections, and the next morning I noticed that I had translated a particularly mulish paragraph of a Siemens manual in about half the time it would normally have taken me. I do not believe these two things are unconnected.

The second call, two evenings later, was with a man in Valparaíso, Chile, who had spent forty-one years building wooden boats and was now retired and learning, for the first time, to use a smartphone. He was very, very angry about smartphones. He wanted my opinion on the matter, which I gave him, and which he listened to with a respect I have not been shown by anyone in person in maybe four years. We disagreed about almost everything we touched on and parted on better terms than I have with most of my actual friends.

I will not catalog the rest. Over six months I have had perhaps sixty of these calls. Many were nothing. Several were strange in ways I would have trouble explaining. A handful — six or seven — have permanently changed something specific about the way I think about a thing. There was a high school physics teacher in San Bernardino who explained to me, in twelve minutes, the actual reason waves form on a beach. There was a librarian in Manchester who spent eight minutes describing the smell of the basement of the library she had worked at for twenty years, and I have not been able to walk past my own town library since without thinking about it. The conversations have a particular character because they cannot continue. There is no profile, no follow, no exchanging numbers. The site is designed in a way that makes a second call with the same person nearly impossible by accident. You get one half hour. You take it or you do not. The next morning you either remember it or you don't.

The mechanics matter, I think, more than the people. Knotchat does not ask you for an account. It does not ask for a phone number, an email, a username, or a picture. It does not have a friends list. It does not push notifications. The default mode is text, which is the part of the design I have come to believe is doing the most work; I do not think I would have stayed if I had been required to put my face on the screen at eleven at night in February in Maine. There are filters for interests, which I use, and which seem to do something real to the matching. If you want to see the site for yourself the address is knot.chat and there is no install and no signup; you click and you are somewhere.

I am still working on the same Fanuc job I started in October. I still have my four-minute conversations with Henry, who has, as of this writing, said almost the same sentence about the boats forty-three times since I moved here. I have not become a more sociable person and I do not think I want to. What has changed, specifically, is that I now reach for an English word with the slightly faster instinct of a person who has used it out loud recently. The moss inside my head has thinned by a measurable amount. I attribute this almost entirely to about fifteen hours of recorded conversation across six months with people I will not meet again, who did not have to be kind to me but mostly were.

I do not know if any of this generalizes. I would not advise anyone whose life is full of human voices to do what I have been doing; for them it would be noise. For people who translate German manuals in coastal Maine, however, or who otherwise have constructed a life in which a small but specific kind of human contact has gone missing, I have come to think it is one of the more useful applications of an internet connection currently available. I will probably still be doing it next November.