It’s been a hectic few weeks.
Just over a week ago, I headed by car to Winnipeg on a journey to start work at the Winnipeg Free Press, where I’m the new comment editor. The job means writing columns and editorials, along with helping to edit op-ed pieces and prepare the opinion pages for publication six days a week.
It’s work I know well — I did almost exactly that at the Telegram in St. John’s for a number of years — but I had forgotten, well, for the lack of a better word, how courtly the job can be. Courtly, in that the emails back and forth with people filing submissions are still polite and low-temperature, and how the opinion pieces themselves manage to deliver enough light to see concepts and ideas very clearly, without so much added heat you feel burned by them.
It felt, in some ways, like another time, before the hot, sharp takes and the points you can score from them on social media became more important than the actual exchange of information.
But it wasn't the only thing that felt like another time. In an earlier trip to Winnipeg house-hunting, my wife Leslie and I lost both a rear passenger-side window and an old, sim-card-less phone with our car music on it to an opportunistic thief, who also took baby carrots and almonds.
So, as I trundled down the Yellowhead Highway alone last weekend for the eight and a half hour trip, I got to play hopscotch FM, that traveller’s roulette of music, talk shows and even religious sermons that grows and fades out of the car’s speakers as you travel through the cast-out transmissions of overlapping radio stations. Yorkton’s Fox FM, Brandon’s Bounce FM, the drawls of Q-Country and Pure Country, and, for a while, a minister recorded badly in church, with a monotonal high-in-the-range reading of scripture that faded in and out like it was a message from another solar system.
A lot of the music became repetitive — the flatland drive, too. After all, it’s pretty much a long straight line drive, and there’s only so much top-40 pop to go around. Country music, to me at least, has the inherent weakness of fundamental similarities of form and function. Even the FM ads seemed to be representative of a particular genre. Ads for hot tubs and meat smokers, in-person radio personality presences at home shows — “You won’t believe how much money you’ll save” — plenty of them delivered with a kind of breathless hollow hope that seemed over the top for the products involved.
But the whole experience of shifting though stations reminded me of being around 14 years old, when I would lie in the dark of my bedroom when I was supposed to be sleeping, turning the big tuning know on an old shortwave radio, travelling, it seemed, by radio wave from language to language, place to place. Sometimes I would even be stopped in my tracks by the rhythmic poetry of fast-paced, seemingly urgent Morse code, a flow of dots and dashes that seemed to unroll like an endless ribbon out of the radio’s single speaker. Spies, I thought back then, spies sending dangerous, perhaps deadly messages. There were sudden fragments of classical music, found and then lost again in mid-stream, foreign languages, and occasionally just single tones, cast out into the radio ether for no apparent reason.
I was transported, without even moving, on my bedroom mattress magic carpet.
It was also a simpler, more courtly time.
Then, after a week in the Winnipeg saddle, back again, eight and a half hours, to Saskatoon to work remotely for a while, bedevilled along the way by prairie rain ships and seemingly unable to stop and take a picture without having a fingertip in it. And once again listening to the ebb and flow of accidentally radio.
The only thing that would have made it better?
Even though I don’t really like driving in the dark in prairie deer country — especially as the spring thaw reveals haphazardly-thrown carcasses almost every mile — I almost wished that I had been taking the trip without daylight, just so I wouldn’t have been anchored so firmly in place on the highway.
Just for the opportunity to ride completely detached from the world — or maybe the right term is surf — on transient radio waves once more.