Reverie by Denise Kline

The transmitter is in the hills.  It’s all by itself and so remote that if I had to tell someone how to get here I’d say drive and drive some more until you see the radio tower standing beside a rusty metal shack.  I’ve never liked coming to this place.  When I’m here listening to the wind and the rustling grass, it’s as close to being the last human being on earth as I want to be.

          I’m standing in the shack that houses the transmitter’s electronics as the wind whistles over the roof and makes the tower guy wires vibrant and whine.  The sound reminds me of my days crawling out upon yardarms when I was a Signalman in the Navy, clinging to the metal that held me aloft as the wind tore past my ears and the safety harness pressed against my ribs.  I didn’t think much about falling to the deck below or into the great open sea because I was a young man and life unfurled endlessly before me.  The world back then was still a stage and I had a big role to play.  Now, hearing the wind around me, I know I could never do what I did when I was young.  I fear death, especially a painful, messy one, and the world is not a stage with all of us ordered and carefully fitted into our roles.  Instead the world is disordered and confused with each of us doing what we must do in the moment.  Our big and our barely discernable decisions, our indecision and our lack of decision aren’t done in a vacuum, but each action and inaction is a tiny gear in the midst of millions of gears that are all turning, each tiny tick moving the bigger gears tied to the heart of a great mechanism.  I guess all of this is, to a simple man like me, a metaphor for the universe.

          The transmitter is for the radio station that puts out the word of God.  A man’s voice comes through the speakers hanging above me.  His voice is deep and lyrical, rising and falling and relentless.  He talks about damnation, lakes of fire, and the eternity of hell.  Eternity.  It’s suffocating to think about time rolling on and on.  I grow edgy as I listen to the preacher.  Damnation feels at home in the dry hills far from town.  I turn off the speakers and go back to work, but keep my eye on the needle bouncing in the VU meter so I know there’s still signal.

          I step outside the shack to cool myself since the space is hot and the heat of electronics has always made me feel as though something physical and faintly malicious is pressing against my skin.  I once worked with wood—a living thing compared to electronics.  My father taught me carpentry so I could make my way in the world.  You’ll never starve if you work with your hands, he told me.  He built nearly every stick of furniture in our home, all of it sturdy and ornate, but I knew I didn’t have that kind of talent.  I was a roofer, a nailer of two by fours, a good ditch digger, too, when I had to be.  And then off I went to join the Navy.  And here I am, retired, and sometimes itch to do some carpentry after all.  When I smell sawdust I think of my father standing in his work shed, sawdust clinging to his arms, his head bent over the worktable as he fashioned something grand out of a block of wood.    

* * *         

          I tilt my head back to look at the radio tower.  Its red lights blink on and off, hypnotic almost.  I am solitary, quiet, reliable and steady; I am not empty, but I am full of what is forever gone.  I wonder if those I once knew remember me as I remember them. Sometimes when I’m awake at night I remember the faces I’ve known from the time I was a boy.  My memory is remarkable, if I say so myself.  I wonder if my face or my name flits through other minds and I guess that it does and maybe this is all that we can expect to leave as any kind of legacy unless we cure a disease or paint a masterpiece.

          I’m cooler now that I’ve been standing in the wind.  Off in the distance, the lights of Bakersfield shimmer in the valley like bright, shattered glass.  I’d never been here until I pulled off the interstate while driving north, trying to decide my next move after retiring from the Navy.  All I wanted was lunch.  But there was Vern, my soon-to-be boss, helpless the only time I’ve ever seen him helpless as he tried to move his stalled truck out of an intersection.  I gave him some muscle and he thanked me by taking me to lunch.  As we ate at a diner that sat behind a row of squat palm trees, Vern offered me a job in his one-man company as a broadcast engineer when I told him I dabbled in electronics.  So I stayed.

          I trudge back to the shack.  The electronic gear charges the warm air.  The touch of a ghost, I think.  I calibrate the meters and turn the speakers back on.  The preacher’s voice is quieter.  He’s talking about forgiveness and salvation.

          When my work is done, I pack up my tools, walk out of the transmitter shack and lock the door behind me.  I stand in the wind, the grass rustling around me and the guy wires singing over my head, as I check for coyotes.  They slink through the tall, parched grass at night.  I imagine them prowling to the strains of a cello, the bow drawn across the strings slowly.  No coyotes tonight.  I’ve never seen one, but I don’t get complacent.  I open the gate, step into the wilderness beyond the fence, lock the gate and go to my car. 

Inside my car, the silence is like velvet against my ears.  No guy wires moaning in the wind, no rustling grass.  I slip a CD into my car stereo.  Tonight it’s Respighi’s “Pines of Rome.”  When I was on liberty in Rome years ago, I saw the pine trees dark and thick on the hillsides.  I’d already heard Respighi’s music by then and my memory of it made the pine trees more alive than any trees I’d ever seen.

          I drive to the lights of Bakersfield.  In my rearview mirror I see only the tower with its red lights flashing slow and steady.  I’m driving in blackness, in a valley made by the hills around me.  The wind flattens the grass alongside the road.  The stars are shining and below them are the lights of the city I can’t see.  My tires hum on the asphalt.  Respighi plays.  The strings, the plaintive horns, the orchestra rising and falling like wind through the pines.  A single horn begins to play a lone melody, the orchestra quiet for a moment.  Maybe that’s the way life is.  We all get our moment to play our lone melody while all around us fall silent.  It’ll come suddenly and you might not be ready for it, you might not even know what to do, but you have the moment all the same.  And there’s something glorious about that.  I drive on, my car ascends, the lights of Bakersfield are scattered before me.  Closer now. 

# # #

Denise Kline is retired from the U.S. Navy and lives in Virginia. She has been published in Onetitle, Origami Journal and a handful of stones.

Photo: Hans Braxmeier

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