For Ambient Waves of Radio

Since I moved back to Wisconsin last fall, I have spent a lot of my weekends driving around the state. My travel has for the most part been necessitated by family obligations and celebrations, but the drives have been as important as the destinations. At a time when I don't even use my car in town any more, I love to drive at my new, gas-conscious pace hundreds of miles at a stretch just to turn around in two days and drive back again. I know that long weekend drives may be one of those luxuries our children and eventual grandchildren will find as unthinkably old-fashioned as record players and typewriters and family meals that take precedence over soccer games and high school musicals, but we can hope one part of long weekend drives may endure: Public radio.

Public radio is the best part of driving, no matter what kind of vehicle you're steering. I love it in my old Honda Civic every bit as well as in my sister's Beamer, though I grant that the sound quality's a little better in the German car. Even when you have the great good fortune to live here, where roads (with the notable exception of billboard-blighted Highway 41) take you through landscapes so stunning that sentimental types sometimes have to pull off to absorb the full impact of gorgeousness, public radio is the best part of driving. Yes, even when they're in the middle of a fundraising campaign. Wisconsin Public Radio, DoubleupeeR as we who love it fondly refer to it, reaches nearly every part of our state. It is among the best public radio networks in the nation, a fact shown clearly by the large number of national radio shows that originate here, in studios that you'll usually found tucked away into inadequately or overly heated corners of university buildings no one else would consider occupying.

Indeed, I love WPR so much that I count myself fortunate that I only listen to radio when I'm driving. You see, I have a strict rule about talking on the phone when I'm driving. So, on afternoons like today's, when I'm driving down a highway I drive so often I not only know every speed trap and produce stand, but also how long it took the farmer at the Bethel Road intersection to sell his dying father's Ford truck versus the farmer up the road a piece to sell his enlisted son's ATV, I am invulnerable to the pleas for financial support from my beloved WPR hosts. I won't pull out my cell phone; I won't succumb to the chorus of "Yesses!" that answers each and every argument of my favorite moderators and commentators as they tell me exactly why I should spend three minutes of my drive time donating money today.

I will, of course, pay for this great all-American pleasure, and once a year, I will send in my WPR donation, but it will not be done in the heat of a moment's ardor on a back road winding among the hills of maple and oak trees overlooking round little lakes reflecting a blue sky overlain with brilliant sunshine and the unmistakeable wingspan of an eagle silhouetted up high. It will not be done from the shoulder of this two lane highway where I have paused to catch my breath along with the snatch of a poem that's been buzzing like a nectar-drunken bumblebee among the ragged blossoms of my end-of-summer mind. I will drive home and then I will do it, under the influence of things like mortgage payments and health insurance premiums and the fact that my car needs another oil change from too many drives in the countryside.

You should do it, too. Life without the intelligent discourse of public radio would be travel without roadside wildflowers waving their charming and ebullient heads as you pass, school lessons without recess or jungle gymns or maybe just without mental gymnastics, sleep without dreaming or clean pillowcases, coffee without cream and sugar. Some things must be had, like an occasional weekend drive in autumn no matter what the price of gas, as long as the radio's working. All things considered, this American life would be less worth singing without the broadcasts of public radio.

http://www.wpr.org/