AM Radio

Wonder is dead in our culture. With technology rushing ahead at breakneck speed, we have grown accustomed to yawning at things that would have knocked our socks off 100 years ago. Take flying for example, roughly half or more of the people in window seats don't even bother to look out the window anymore. Another example, and one I want to dwell on for a minute is the miracle of radio. It is a marvel that we can listen to the musings of a man speaking into a microphone a dozen or even hundreds of miles away. I tried explaining this to Calvin the other day. We were driving out to the lake and happened to pass the radio station we were listening to at that moment. His mouth hung wide open in a confused awe as he processed this new piece of information. I hope he stays that way, but the odds are stacked against him.

After the sun goes down it quits interfering with radio waves allowing them to travel hundreds and even thousands of miles away. This means that you can listen to a Yankees game on their flagship station while driving through Indiana or listen to a weather report from Toronto while sitting in your kitchen in Kansas City. In the age of satellite tv, the internet, and cell phones this is completely unremarkable and not even worth talking about. All of that information can be found countless other ways. And really how relevant is a traffic jam on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago when I'm driving on Interstate 10 in Texas 1,242 miles to the south? It is irrelevant, it is outdated, corny even; but man, is it fascinating.

I found this out years ago while driving from New Jersey to Texas with my dad. We were listening to our local radio statio out of New York City when we started and roughly eleven hours and 700 miles later we were still listening to it. Later in life I picked up that same radio station in the Virgin Islands. I really got into this during our years in Kansas City, as we had multiple late night runs from KC to northwestern Wisconsin to visit Jen's family. We had an older car with a dial on the radio (much better for this activity than the current digital tuners) and I found that fiddling with the dial, my ears on high alert as I sifted through the fog of static and squeals searching for distant voices, was a great way to stay awake through the night. The search is fun, (think audible treasure hunt) and the payoff when you actually find a far off station is well worth it. Hearing an argument over a neighborhood issue in the Garfield Heights section of Cleveland gives you a proper perspective by making the world seem bigger and smaller all at once. It appears bigger when you realize the world is full of billions of people and neighborhoods you'd never even considered who are passionate about places you didn't even know existed. Sometimes it's easy to forget that your issues are not the only issues, but eavesdropping on a local radio show in another state quickly reminds you of this. The world seems smaller when you realize that even though the specifics are different, we're all arguing about a lot of the same things.

Radio has been called the theater of the mind, a befitting description, especially when hearing weather reports from distant locales. I remember once listening to Monday Night Football on a station out of New Orleans as I drove through Iowa farmland on a still, cold late fall night. As I tried to keep warm and awake, the game was interupted every few minutes with a severe thunderstorm warning for the New Orleans area. Before long my mind was down on the bayou, racing around trying to batten down the hatches before the storm blew in. Driving home from Dallas here recently, I picked up news of a blizzard from a local station out of Denver. There is a difference between hearing "there was a blizzard in Denver" and "it's cold out there folks, we'll have wind and driving snow all night, please stay indoors and off the roads." The local ads, accents (find Boston and you've hit the jackpot), and worries all combine to take you far away, which at 2 am on the highway is where you want to be anyways. All it takes is a little patience, a high tolerance for static, and an old fashioned sense of wonder.