The man I know, Marc Simmons, has lived nearly no-tech for 40-plus years. Simmons lives in rural Santa Fe County, N.M. He has no iPod, no cell phone, no cable, no color TV, no stereo, no voice mail, no CDs, no computers, no Internet, no credit cards, no AC, no evaporative cooling and no central heating.

There's more. He has no sink, toilet or shower (no running water) and no electrical service.

What technology does he have? Propane for a heating stove, a land-line telephone with a rotary phone and a Toyota 4Runner of indeterminate age.

He's not poor. In fact, the land he owns makes him a millionaire. He's not Man Mountain. Physically, he's frail, the result of decades of time piled on top of a devastating car accident after which he died, literally, twice. Back then, after his surgeons, in multiple attempts, pieced him back together, he still found that trying to walk was excruciatingly painful. Months into it, the docs re-evaluated him and discovered they'd overlooked a broken hip.

In New Mexico, Simmons is famous not because of his lifestyle or two-time revival from death, but because he's New Mexico's best-known, best-loved historian. His profession: author. Thinking of showing him my 4-pound laptop one day, I cautiously asked him if the many writers he knows have told him he should use a computer.

"Oh, yes," he said, smiling. "I hear that all the time."

He writes his newspaper columns and his books on an Underwood typewriter the size and weight of a Mack truck.

"Some of them get persistent, and then I ask them how many books they've written."

Simmons is approaching his 50th book published. He added, "When I tell them how many I've published, they usually get pretty quiet after that."

His avoidance of technology runs deep. He watches TV, but on a small black-and-white unit powered by a car battery. And no spade he shoves into the earth has a fiberglass handle.

"Fiberglass," he scoffs.

Perhaps the biggest surprise about him, however, is that despite escaping all this technology and the stress that comes with it, he still must endure his own, unique form of stress. He cannot e-mail his newspaper columns in, so he must drive to the post office to mail them, and in the summer, he worries about a sudden monsoon stranding him out on the highway, unable to get home over a mile of rough, dirt road.

The mother of all worries, though, is his writing machine. His typewriter takes ribbons he may not be able to buy some day, so he keeps boxes of them in storage in his propane-powered refrigerator. And God help him if the typewriter ever broke. Where would he find a typewriter repair service? Or, failing that, a replacement machine? Or ribbons for the backup typewriter?

So we all have technology trauma, hassles with our gadgets, worries about whether and when they'll break.

Santa Fe neighbors for nearly a lifetime, Simmons and I disagree on technology matters. I think the dirt road we share requires the installation of a few dozen high-tech flood control gadgets (culverts). But he opposes their installation as useless. About culverts, we've reached an impasse.

I am sure I'm right. Then again, consider my experience here in Tucson.

In an engineering feat, years ago Pima County installed a pair of 5-foot-diameter culverts that made an arroyo flow underneath the street that is our northern route to work. The culverts kept the arroyo about eight feet below street level.

But in our biggest storm this year, both filled with sand and vanished permanently from view. Our arroyo adjusted its depth 8 feet upward and now flows directly across the street, twice preventing us from leaving our house to drive to work.

Still, each time, I just stayed home and worked from there. On my laptop.