Radio Charisma

Spent about eight hours today, driving from somewhere or another in Idaho to somewhere or another in Oregon. The weather truly, deeply sucked: it started raining about a half hour after I got in the car, was still raining when I checked into the hotel. Numerous times when I could barely see the road through the rain, the fog, the rooster tails coming up off the endless lines of semis.

When you can't see anything, you start noticing things missing from the landscape.

There have been so many extinctions over the years, things you wouldn't even notice had gone extinct. Okay, the Mom and Pop diner is on its last gasp--call it the endangered species list. But when was the last time you saw a cabin court? Or how about service stations with actual service? When I stopped to buy gas in Oregon, a guy came out and pumped it for me. Apparently, that's the law in Oregon, "to create jobs," but wouldn't time be better spent training in computers, or something less extinct? How mobile can these people be?

Roadside picnic tables not in rest stops. Burma Shave signs--although fake ones have made a comeback.

But what I was really thinking we're missing now is radio charisma. That's not my phrase--that comes from a book called Pictures from a Trip, by Tim Somebody. Rumsey, maybe? (A quick check on abe.com confirms: Rumsey. Apparently I didn't waste those 15 years working in bookstores.) Wonderful book, about hunting dinosaur fossils and true love.

To understand radio charisma, first, you have to be old enough to remember AM radio. Then you have to also be old enough to remember cars with radio dials, not "seek" buttons and digital tuning.

There was an art, now a lost art, to working that AM radio dial, pulling in farm reports from three states away, the last Dodgers game of the season--Vin Scully had the perfect voice for radio announcing (or was his name Vince Gully? Who knows, it was on the radio, we never saw it spelled out), "Radio Mystery Theater," where I remember the voice of Fred Gwynne, better known as Herman Munster.

You'd put one hand on the dial, take a quick glance at the sky, see what direction the clouds were, because AM, unlike FM, bounces. That's how you could listen to southern rock and roll from the Rocky Mountains, that's how you could pick up a small town's radio swap mart from three states away.

The furthest I ever pulled in a station was in high school, when I lived in Sitka, Alaska; late one night, I pulled in a Japanese radio signal. Heavy static, I worked the radio's knobs like a microsurgeon, trying to bring those voices, a different world, a little bit closer, closer.

Is there anything better than working a dial and finding out that the world extends so far past the horizon that there might as well not be a horizon?

Now you can just play your iPod through the car radio.

Radio charisma. Extinct. Another loss.