My route to work every day from Hollister to Monterey takes me
on two, three or four highways, depending on how you account for
Highway 156. It also takes me through uncountable radio zones, so
that the stations I like to listen to become static and disappear,
only to reappear later once I’ve passed around a curve or a
hill.
My route to work every day from Hollister to Monterey takes me on two, three or four highways, depending on how you account for Highway 156. It also takes me through uncountable radio zones, so that the stations I like to listen to become static and disappear, only to reappear later once I’ve passed around a curve or a hill.
I’ve learned to cope with this by punching another pre-set and listening to another station for awhile. Sometimes, though, the only station that’s coming in clearly is in the middle of a long string of ads, most of which I’ve heard enough times that I not only recite them but imitate the different voices.
It particularly baffles me that KBOQ, a classical music station, has so many ads for debt-reduction, mortgage relief, nutritional supplements, and home-based businesses (never specified). I guess this reveals my bias that classical music listeners aren’t susceptible to the same kind of financial predicaments as the rest of us, or at least that advertisers would know better than to use such sleazy-sounding voices when addressing them.
Then there are a couple of rock stations that I like okay, that strangely carry women’s names: Alice and Delilah. Just today I discovered a new one, called the Hippo. They sound kind of strange and plastic compared to my favorite rock station, KFOG out of San Francisco, but I need music on my drive, so they’ll do.
You would think the Monterey area would have a jazz station, since Monterey has both a Jazz and Blues festival. But jazz seems to be a taste few have acquired, like peanut butter and pickle sandwiches.
Sometimes, though, the airwaves produce nothing. Ads everywhere, or only static, or KBOQ is coming in okay but playing something unbearable, like Elgar or Mahler.
That’s when I resort to a little game I made up. I punch the “scan” button and let the stations roll by. I realize that the traditional use of the scan button is to let it search for receivable signals and then punch it again to stop at one you like. But being ready to re-punch the scan button requires almost as much attention as talking on a cell phone, and they just made that illegal.
So I punch the scan button and let California speak to me.
I’ve noticed that there’s sort of a spectrum of station types: starting in the lower frequencies, the public radio stations, then some evangelical Christian stations, then Spanish-language, then country & western, then rock.
There are probably some subdivisions I’ve missed since I only listen to each one for a few seconds. Sometimes, for example, I catch an Asian language or one I don’t recognize at all. (Farsi? Tagalog?)
I’ve also noticed that with every pass through the frequencies, the audible ones seem to change. So every trip around the dial results in a different assortment of voices, languages and music.
In my imagination, if I keep listening, the different genres, languages, and musical styles will converge to produce an important message.
Elizabeth Gage is a Hollister resident. Her column runs Tuesdays. Reach her at [email protected].
