The deer hunter shook his head in disbelief as he told me about the most jarring sound he’d ever heard in all his seasons of tromping though the Maine woods.

It wasn’t the eerie howl of a coyote, or the heart-stopping crack of an unseen hunter’s rifle being fired too close for comfort. It was a much more modern sound, and so utterly out of place in the woods on a frosty November morning that he still gets disoriented just thinking about it.

It was the trilling of a cell phone, followed two rings later by a cheery “hello” from a nearby hunter who had put down his gun and taken the call as casually as if he were in an office.

“A telephone going off in the middle of the woods, can you imagine,” said the incredulous hunter as he lamented this technological twist on the wilderness experience.

His tale led naturally to a chat about how cell phones have become so commonplace that they’ve completely infiltrated every aspect of our existence. I told him how unsettling it was, for instance, when I first heard a telephone ringing while I stood waist-deep in my favorite little stream, casting for trout. When I looked downriver, I saw a young man sitting on a rock, a fly rod in one hand and a phone in the other, babbling loudly to a friend about every detail of his restful little outing on the river.

“What in the world did people do before cell phones came along?” my hunter friend asked.

It was a good question, and one that I ask myself with increasing perplexity every time I visit New York over the holidays. For as familiar as the cell phone is becoming here in Maine – I got one last year, but rarely can find a reason to actually use the thing – we are mere pikers in the art of senseless gab when compared with our urban counterparts in the Big Apple. There are so many New Yorkers shouting into so many phones so much of the time that the out-of-towner is left to wonder if there is a single thought that goes unspoken in that garrulous city. In every store, restaurant, museum and subway car there are people who feel it necessary to share the most intimate details of their lives with anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot. In one deli, I heard a woman screeching at her lazy lout of a husband for 10 minutes while her order was being prepared. Most of the other diners didn’t notice, however, since they were all thoroughly absorbed in their own phone conversations.

The train out of the city that night was a rolling Tower of Babel, a cacophony of banal conversations being conducted all at once in several languages. Phones rang incessantly, filling the car with all manner of annoying musical chirps and digitized pop tunes. One man flopped down beside me, whipped out a cell phone from a holster on his hip, and proceeded to coo sweet nothings to his beloved as if I weren’t even there. A few minutes later, the object of his telephonic affection, who apparently had been sitting one car back, came walking up the aisle with a phone to her ear. Ain’t love grand?

It is said there are a million stories in the Big City, and I swear I was made privy to most of them before my visit was over. Frankly, it was more than I ever wanted to know about any of these strangers who thought nothing of spilling their guts without regard for the presence of others. I didn’t need to hear that young man in Macy’s, for instance, rant on and on to his girlfriend about her alleged infidelities, nor am I a better person for having been forced to eavesdrop on an anxious sidewalk conversation between a woman and her shrink. And I most definitely would rather have been spared a teen-age girl’s obscenity-laced tirade that shattered the otherwise somber atmosphere near ground zero.

What in the world did people do before cell phones came along? The same mundane stuff they do now, I’m sure, except they did it without telling half the world.