Errant Signals

Take it from me, when you’re on the lam like some rube in witness-protection—except from your own life instead of the mob—and you find yourself out on a nameless ribbon of blacktop in the middle of the night, unsure even of what State you’re even in, you’re gonna wish you’d spent more than five bucks on a pawnshop boombox of dubious provenance. Especially when the tell-tales in the dash light up like a Christmas tree, the open hole where your car-stereo used to be is venting hot air into the cabin, and there’s nothing but the feeble cones of your jaundiced headlights stirring the darkness out in front of you. Because when that Pawnshop POS eats your last mix-tape and you’re left with nothing but a bellyful of anxiety and the static-lashed spectrum of AM radio on the dial, you’ll know what you should have done with the extra cash instead of splurging on name-brand cigarettes.

I was pretty sure I was still in Montana, but only my watch and the gas gauge told me so. If my calculations were correct, I had just enough fuel to coast into a parking space in front of the dorm at my new job in Yellowstone National Park and immediately begin singing for my supper. But the only thing I actually knew with any certainty was that I was southbound and down on Highway 89, I had a quarter-tank of gas, a half pack of smokes, six dollars cash—assuming a buck-fifty of assorted change in the seat cushions—and exactly that much was right with the world.

In the debit column was everything about my hooptie. The window-crank was useless, and the glass was held in place with a matchbook wedged against the frame, the speedometer was inaccurate to varying degrees depending on what gear you were in, and the driver’s side door was held shut with a rope. Don’t even get me started on the calamities the heads-up display was screaming about. I should’ve put those last couple bucks in the tank back in Livingston, but I thought I might want something to eat other than a cigarette or roadkill.

I’m on a road with a number for a name and no speed limit, that feels like it’s being created from nothingness just beyond the reach of my headlights. Hoary telephone poles march relentlessly alongside, draped in mute skeins of wire. Otherwise, there’s one ahead and no one behind. I’m just hoping for a gas station or rest area to appear, before my bleary eyes forget to open after a blink. With no music to combat the numbing road noise, my head begins to feel like a bowling ball rolling precariously atop a tired post. So I paw at the Pawnshop POS on the bench-seat next to me to toggle it over to the radio.

There’s no sense pretending that FM even exists out here in these Martian badlands of sage, scrub, and igneous peaks; that wavelength is just too short to even attempt this vastness. Without looking I can tell the difference between the polite, muted white-noise of the FM band and the insistent buzzing of AM static, like a swarm of something angry. So I begin to scroll the tuning knob indiscriminately, searching for anything in the dark. Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, Dr. Demento… Anyone. Anyone at all.

Dots and dashes of fading lane markers flash silently past me, and drowsing in and out of highway-hypnosis, I strain to decrypt an otherwise silent message somehow embedded in the air itself using technology invented in the 1870’s. They didn’t have ballpoint pens, but this they could do. I’m practiced at this patient crawl through the increments of the potentiometer from all the nights I spent trolling the barren airwaves with the crystal-radio kit my vaguely anarchistic uncle helped me build as a kid.

Then, as now, I was up past my bedtime with nothing but all the time in the world to strain for a voice in the darkness of mere being.  Didn’t matter if it was sleepy public-radio monologues, Waylon Jennings, or madmen crying out in the wilderness of local-access pirate-radio. There is an exquisite loneliness inherent in a voice arising from the emptiness, at once furtive and confidential, like a guttering flame pressing back against the void. With radio, neither the speaker nor the listener can know one another, or whether or not they are alone in this world as they connect in some uncreated space of charged particles.

My head drops and I catch the faintest wisp of dream, ephemeral as smoke, before my chin hits my chest and wakes me. I snap back up with an electrochemical jolt of purest panic, and for a second I think I'm standing still as the road moves under me. I shake a cigarette loose from the dwindling supply and chase the tip with my Zippo, willing the nicotine to work some buzzing magic on my head as I blink away the flame’s after-image from my dark-adapted eyes. The dial bottoms out at one end and I start back the other way, patiently searching.

Each blink is a gamble and the white-noise is beginning to sound dangerously like a lullaby when the voice of bedlam itself emerges from the static, as real as a passenger suddenly with me in the cab. It’s  an ancient baritone, grown tired from decades of whispering through an AM megaphone about perpetually falling skies. His seditious murmurs like those of an agitator stalking the edges of a crowd, gently inciting, fomenting. Art Bell. The Hobo-Laureate of the airwaves, whose voice distinguishes itself from the fuzz of interference by virtue of its madness alone.

Art Bell, Hobo Laureate of the the AM airwaves

Soon I’ve sucked down four smokes back to back and I’m wide awake like a kid listening to ghost-stories around a campfire. But these tales are told by grownups living twilight lives, echoing from the loneliness of graveyard shifts, as they call Uncle Arty to talk about a bump heard in the night. Everyone with a straight face, everything given equal credence around the warmth of the radio dial's dim glow. Time seems to dilate until I see my own dim glow ahead that resolves into a pair of sodium-vapor lights attending an empty parking lot. I pull into the empty Emigrant Peak rest area, the sweep of my weak headlights revealing picnic tables, restrooms, and an inexplicable little chapel standing alone on the edge of the pool of light.

I park askew, in haphazard disregard to all the lines, and kill the engine. Draggin' my beleaguered bones and the POS into the bed of the truck, I pull the canopy shut behind me. Wrapping up against the April chill in a nest of sleeping bags and dirty laundry, I’m awash in conspiratorial whispers of chemtrails, mind-control, and alien visitations until they lull me into a dreamless sleep. I awake in the morning to the insistent buzzing of white-noise; the station is pure static once more. Whatever serendipity it was that arced an errant signal off the Stratosphere to find me in the dark has passed.

By way of thanks, I offer the first and only genuflection of my life in the chapel at the bust of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers and lost souls, and then hit the road. One hour later, I slide into a parking spot in front of my new home, with almost a gallon of gas to spare. Almost.