The first car I remember riding in was a huge Oldsmobile Cutlass, probably from 1978, and its radio had this classic-looking dial, all zinc and backlit with two dull yellow lights – the kind of radio you would more naturally associate with a ‘52 Chevy and its huge red and white tailfins than with a ‘78 Oldsmobile. My favorite part, and I may be thinking of the wrong car here, was that the radio antenna was laminated into the windshield – two thin strips of wire up the center of the glass.
In 1986, on a trip to Florida for my fourth birthday, we drove through a dead-of-the-night electrical storm. I stretched myself out across the front seat of the car while we cruised down the interstate. I stared for hours up through that antenna, watching the lightning split the sky into gold and blue and watching the antenna split the lightning neatly into clean halves.
As far as I was concerned, that particular electrical storm was the entire point of the universe. It was the cause, effect, and reason of and for everything.
Then my dad flipped the switch on the radio from FM to AM.
It was the middle of September, just when baseball gets interesting, and he must have wanted to hear how his Cincinnati Reds were doing. I don’t remember baseball that night. I remember that rapture found me somewhere in central Georgia.
Every time I saw a flash of lightning, I heard a scratch in the sound of the Oldsmobile’s radio. I didn’t see the lights flickering; I knew that nothing was broken. I didn’t understand. The quick stabs of static and the way they interacted with the electricity in the sky generated even more electricity in my lungs. Each breath made my pupils dilate, the blood rush to my fingertips, and the world lean in towards me. I was shivering from the thrill. Each shiver felt like a tick in the mechanism of an ancient, giant clock, rusty and deliberate in its age.
My dad saw me shiver. Or maybe I asked him. Either way, he tried to explain the radio interference. Lightning is electricity, and it’s not shielded the way an extension cord is. When it flashes, it sends out radio static the way a dog shakes off water after a bath.
I picture the static from a lightning bolt exactly like that. Not ripples, like in water, but in sunbursts. In rays. Radio, in my mind, broadcasts in ripples. So when the lightning shakes off the wet static, a drop of radio will disrupt the ripple of the station that was supposed to be telling us how the Cincinnati Reds played last night.
Lightning just knocks bits of the signal out of the sky. Somewhere between the transmitter in Atlanta and the highway that carried my family to Florida in our Oldsmobile Cutlass, there lies a huge pile of damaged, bent, and paralyzed phonemes from that night which will never find their way to a radio receiver.
It still makes me sad to think about that image: a field, somewhere in Georgia, littered with letters and sounds fallen into disrepair. A cow pokes its head at the grass growing around a discarded “-th,” a goat stands on top of the sound of the word “investments.”
As sad as that image may be, that night, its lightning, and my dad’s compulsion to keep up on baseball scores are the first time I remember ever being aware of the universe’s sheer physicality.
Forces I cannot see act strongly on everything around me. Especially the radio and the thin antenna laminated into the windshield of my parents’ Oldsmobile, now probably rusting somewhere in an Indianapolis junkyard.
(photo by Divine Harvester on Flickr)
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