It was just me and Garrison Keillor, inside the car, perfectly isolated from every other human interaction. We were encapsulated in warmth and comfort; me, white- knuckled, gripping the wheel, while he recounted the agony of Pastor Ingqvist’s convolutions in search of a text for his Christmas sermon following a tragedy in Lake Wobegon.
I should, perhaps, have not ventured out into the storm, but I’d felt the need to head home, to tackle the hundred mile drive from Franconia to Burlington despite the weather.
The wind howled and the snow drifted, as we kept up a steady 45 mph north on Interstate 93. The snow was thick but the wind was just strong enough to whisk it away and reveal the lane line a few yards ahead, keeping me on course. Nothing existed except the snow, the wind, the white line and Keillor’s voice, resonating like a steady hand on the tiller, an escape from reality.
I spend a lot of time alone in my car, moving through natural wonders at high speed. The experience is as different from connecting with my surroundings as taking photographs is from experiencing a family Thanksgiving. Each puts a barrier between myself and reality. Or perhaps each creates its own alternative reality.
To understand my efforts to manipulate that reality, you may need to be in possession of few basic facts:
· I enjoy listening to the spoken word – stories, discussions, reading, plays – rather than listening to music;
· I have an unconquerable aversion to commercial advertising on radio - or television for that matter;
· My degree of tech-savvy-ness is moderate; I’m certainly not at the cutting edge of audio-visual innovation, as will become apparent;
· My car is old: circa 1997.
Equipped with that information, we can now embark on the journey.
November 2011, and I was making plans for my eleventh drive cross-country. Which country? Well, yes, that does make a difference, doesn’t it? Cross-England would take less than a day, cross-Wales – well, that’s impossible, too many mountains.
I’m talking about cross-USA: all the way from South Hero, Vermont, to Joshua Tree National Park in southern California: the entire length and breadth of the lower 48, some 3300 miles.
Clothing: check;
Food: check;
Toolbox: check;
Ranger uniform: ohmigosh, where is that box? In the garage? Thank you Damon!
Ranger hat, summer, in large cardboard box: check;
Ranger hat, winter, in large cardboard box: check;
Clock radio; check;
Mobile phone (for emergency use only): check;
Cash: check;
And the list went on.
The challenge was how to ensure a good supply of spoken words for me to listen to during the journey. The car, you see, is equipped with a built-in am/fm radio. Period. No CD deck; not even a cassette deck; and, naturally, no headphone jack or USB port (in a 1997 car?).
Yes, I can tune to public radio in whichever area I’m passing through, and in the past I’ve even plotted frequencies across the country. Unfortunately I’m moving, pretty fast, through the states and I keep losing the stations. I’m alone and I can’t see the radio display well enough to select the next frequency even if I had bothered to look it up beforehand. I surf, and at first, in New England, fairly quickly find another PR station, but as I head west, the menu changes. Once out of Vermont, even, there’s a sudden increase in Jesus stations; then the country music clicks in and every other station is car salespeople.
Oh, what’s this? The grating but welcome tones of Click and Clack: I’ve found “Car Talk”. But it’s the edition I listened to yesterday in Vermont.
My son-in-law’s brother (in some languages, like Polish, there are actual concise word describing such relationships - I’ll just abbreviate it to “Chris”) on hearing of my dilemma once said laughingly: “You could just take a cassette player and plug it into the cigarette lighter.” I looked at him incredulously: “Why are you laughing,” I asked, “That’s exactly what I do!”
It works pretty well, too, and I’ve become adept at changing tapes while driving at 70 mph along a dark and rainy highway.
It does require some forethought, of course, to amass and select the tapes, which are becoming harder and harder to find. I find that sad because cassette tapes are really versatile; I did have a built-in cassette deck in my previous car (also a 1997 – the “new” one had half the mileage – I soon took care of that!) and the beauty of it was that if I pulled up into my driveway, or outside Motel 6 in Eureka, Missouri, before the story was finished, I could just eject the tape, take it in with me and continue from the exact point where I’d left off, listening on my Walkman or boom box. Try doing that it a CD!
That’s why I decided to splash out this time on a $20 MP3 player. “I don’t think they still make those,” said the clerk in the music store, but there they were on the back wall, several models, not all marked down.
Gary, the store clerk, who turned out to be good at his job, helped me hatch a devious plan. This was to download podcasts from my favorite radio station, BBC Radio 4, onto the MP3 player, plug it into my little portable speakers and plug the speakers into the cigarette lighter. He also helped me hatch Plan B, of which more later.
I made really good time in the first 24 hours of my journey. I attribute this to my companion, Tony Hillerman. Well, actually someone else was reading the story, but it was a Hillerman novel “The Fallen Man”. My clock radio incorporates a cassette player, which, incidentally, plays an important role in my daily schedule when I’m working because I use a specific song, on tape, as my alarm. It’s my joy every morning to awaken to the dulcet strains of James Taylor singing “The Water is Wide”. It’s a truly beautiful version that I came across courtesy my brother’s wife, Jan, who many years ago loaned me the “Full Moon Rise” album – blissful. If you really want to know about my taste in music, try that, Van Morrison’s “Avalon Sunset” and Neil Young’s “Ragged Glory” – which, incidentally, is a very good road album. Hmm – does the word “album” mean anything today? At least I didn’t say “LP”.
“The Fallen Man” reached a satisfactory conclusion and next morning I took out the MP3 player. I’d been postponing this moment, dreading the new. It was even smaller than I remembered, and it took me some time to get a grip on what the tiny control buttons did. The instructions, like my understanding, were minimal.
Before leaving home, I’d downloaded a number of episodes of The Archers, some nature programs, some discussions, a little commentary and a set of four incomparably beautiful readings that my friend Jan Mulreany (not my sister-in-law) sent me years ago, from a book called The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane. Mr. Macfarlane’s tones are not exactly dulcet, but very pleasant and full of reverent wonder and appreciation for the remaining wild places of the British Isles.
I plugged everything in, hit a few buttons and hit the road. “Mutter, mutter, mutter” I heard as I trolled along the highway. I reached over to turn up the volume on the speakers and hit an unexpected hitch. They were running at full blast.
Now, if my car were a 2011 Rolls Royce, no doubt it would be quiet and cushioned enough for me to hear my MP3 plugged into my little speakers, plugged into the cigarette lighter. But I don’t suppose all that would be necessary in a 2011 Rolls. The rattles and creaks of the 1997 Saturn, and its low-slung habit, made audibility impossible.
I unplugged the speakers and returned to surfing the FM airwaves. Half an hour later I repudiated Christianity, Country music and Car salespeople in favor of silence, wishing only that it, too was spelled with a “C” in order to preserve the alliteration; “Cylence”, as in the old song “The Cyound of Cylence.” (Eliciting, no doubt, another comment about my taste in music.)
Plan B was fermenting in my head. Plan B required another piece of equipment, which I had forborne to purchase from Gary, believing that Plan A would work. Positive thinking had proved insufficient to the task so now I had to find a little FM transmitter to play the MP3 through the car’s own radio speakers.
Remember, I’m not in the real world, I’m in Interstate Land. Eisenhower would be proud of me. For the week my journey takes, my USA is a simple network of interconnected high speed highways serviced by public and private enterprises, supreme among which are Love’s, TA and Pilot. Along my route these are major truck stop operators, and they’re into it in a big way. Never, never, never, do I have to leave the Interstate in search of any necessities. Years ago, I used to leave the Interstate in search of public libraries selling off their books on tape, but those days, and all the tapes, are long vanished.
Decades of experience have led Love’s TA and Pilot to stock all the necessities of a traveler’s life, including items that only a long distance motorist could want. These include megapacks of dried beef sticks, fridges that plug in to the cigarette lighter and, yes, tiny little FM transmitters that do the same – magic!
The FM transmitter plugged in to the cigarette lighter, and the MP3 player plugged into the transmitter. So far so good. Now all I had to do was turn on the radio, tune it to a frequency that wasn’t being used by a strong station, tune the transmitter to that same frequency, turn on the MP3 player, select my track and away we go!
The pragmatic, cultured northern English tones of Melvyn Bragg, the thinking woman’s crumpet, filled the car. Grand! His “In Our Time” Radio 4 program brings experts together in 45 minute discussions, each of which elucidates a single subject. And the range of subjects is outrageous: the moon, imaginary numbers; Pliny’s natural history; unicorns; the fall of Tenochtitlan; Custer’s last stand; the Hippocratic oath, to name but a few. For me, these long, informative programs make really good interstate listening.
Melvyn and I were about half way through a fascinating and very modulated discussion about Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists when I hit a bump in the road and, boing, the transmitter plug jumped out of the cigarette lighter and the voice of doom filled the car in the form of a radio evangelist. I had the volume full up in order to hear Melvyn and his friends properly, so the default to radio was a blast out of Hell, which is a subject “In Our Time” has probably tackled at some point. I could contribute to that discussion.
Radio off; back to cylence. Fuming I was, until, in the cylence, I noticed large birds circling the road ahead: turkey vultures. But, no, not all of them, some were smaller, blacker, more compact and, yes, white wings tips! Black vultures. Not uncommon in southern states but a treat for a Vermonter.
Within the cylence I could observe birds and trees, and watch the changing landscape. I could tell myself stories, rehearse conversations, re-design the kitchen, develop a new evening program. Who needed audio entertainment, anyway?
Well, I did, so after a break at Love’s or TA, or Pilot, as night fell, I scoured the car for masking tape, wrapped it around the FM transmitter plug and secured the plug into the cigarette lighter. Melvyn and I proceeded, this time examining the genesis of medieval universities. It lasted longer, but several bumps in the road later: boing! The plug jumped out and Mad Mitch the car salesperson blasted my shell-like ears. This simply was not good enough.
Even those of you who appreciate my great capacity for persistence will be willing me to give up at this point. But no! In the ensuing cylence I remembered something I’d read in the instructions for the FM transmitter operations – proving that one should always read the instructions! Of course! Batteries! At the very next Love’s, TA or Pilot’s I’d get the requisite two triple As and obviate the need for plugging the transmitter in to the cigarette lighter.
Reader, I purchased them. Oh, what a neat and tiny ensemble I created; the little MP3 player, just one inch by one and a half, attached by a short cable to the little, now wireless, FM transmitter, a mere one by two inches in size. All I had to do was tune the transmitter to the radio, select my track, and off we go.
It worked well. The final indignity, though, was my discovery that the ensemble was doing that horrible thing that radios do when you try to tune them to a new frequency – using my body as an aerial so that it’s only tuned in perfectly as long as I stand in the tuning-in position. To avoid annoying hiss, I had to hold my neat little ensemble in one hand balanced in top of the steering wheel. Still, it was a small price to pay.
Melvyn, I’m afraid, I jettisoned, discovering instead the sweetly pseudo-Scouse accent of DJ John Peel in an archive edition of “Desert Island Discs” – oh the things you can find on BBC podcasts!
John and I enjoyed our trip through Oklahoma, but, y’know, my plug-in clock radio still works best, so if you have any good stories on cassette tapes, I could sure use a few!
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Release one leaf at break of day;
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