Tuning In
I remember a road trip during the summer after I graduated from college. The view through the windshield was a sea of wild grass, currents rolling in the wind, only interrupted by the road which guided me and my friend Dan across Wyoming. We sat in his Honda CR-V and headed west. The only signs of life outside of the car were the occasional black-billed magpie flying away from the road and the mounds of prairie dogs dotting the grass at various intervals. I had never felt this level of remoteness. You could look to the horizon and see uninterrupted emptiness in every direction. We continued driving, seemingly stationary at the center of an endless world of grass.
Inside the car, we had run out of music downloaded to our phones, and we were tired of choosing songs. So, as Dan drove, I turned on the FM radio and tuned across the static. Occasional fluctuations in noise indicated potential signal just out of the reach of our antenna. But then I hit what was clearly a voice, fighting its way across the airwaves to reach us with a message. At first, specific words were hard to make out, but the static began to clear and sentences became recognizable. We listened to the end of a commercial for a local Chevrolet dealership (without any sense of how far we were from where this car dealership could be called “local”) before a DJ’s voice filled our car:
“You’re listening to KYTI The Coyote, 93.7 FM! Thanks for tuning in. I’m with you until the end of the hour.”
Alone as we seemed in the middle of this vast expanse of nothingness, here was a direct link, an analog connection, to another human, talking live on air — seemingly directly to us. Country music began to play — not our first choice, but we appreciated that the decision was no longer ours.
Clouds appearing on the horizon soon revealed themselves to be the peaks of the Bighorn Mountains. We continued west, and the twangy music seemed fitting.
That feeling of connection in the midst of isolation has found me many times. I felt it on many restless nights as a kid. Jolted awake by a bad dream or simply unable to sleep, I would open my eyes and lean towards my nightstand to note the time on my Sony Dream Machine alarm clock. It felt like I was the only person awake in my world. I would reach over and turn on the radio.
The silence of my room would suddenly be covered by a live voice. Typically it was the BBC world service, broadcasting through the night as local public radio hosts slept. A feeling of comfort would sweep over me as I was reminded that regardless of what I could see in my immediate environment, elsewhere other people were awake too, and the radio gave me a direct link to them.
It’s no longer difficult to feel some level of connection to the world beyond your immediate environment. Jump on a social media site, and evidence of other conscious people is plentiful at any hour. But I still have that Sony Dream Machine clock radio next to my bed, and most mornings, I awake to voices from WNYC filling my room. In the shared living space of my apartment, wires of an antenna hang across our TV stand to grab signal for the radio underneath. When my roommates aren’t home, I turn the tuning knob very slowly to catch the millimeters of WFMU reaching my Brooklyn apartment from Jersey City.
The radio doesn’t make any effort to pull attention from something else. Its waves stream through the air silently, only making themselves known when there is a deliberate effort to tune into them. The live voice, unadulterated on its journey from microphone to speaker, brings a feeling of intimacy. A voice speaking directly to you, not to be recorded or edited for rerelease. A voice beaconing into the world, often passing by undetected, but ready to be caught by anyone searching for company.
Great stuff, Matt. Excited to read the next one