The Company of Strangers

I packed enough canned sardines and sourdough bread for five days, tossed a Rand McNally atlas onto the passenger seat and pulled out of Portland, Maine, for a solo drive to Seattle. Cruising through the Maine's woods and over New Hampshire's mountains, I felt a little desolate. At dusk, as I made my way south along the Connecticut River's Vermont bank, the desolation grew. I remembered John Steinbeck writing of his first day on the road with Charley: "Suddenly the United States became huge beyond belief and impossible ever to cross." Steinbeck had a dog for company; I turned to Vermont Public Radio.

There, a broadcaster named Steve also felt lonely -- no studio help this evening, he said. He stuck with me clear to Springfield, Massachusetts, holding my attention with matters no weightier than sculpture for household pets. Then, in a tide of Connecticut night-traffic moving toward New York, the big city's sounds blared from my speakers: alternate rock and Latin love ballads over FM stations; All-News-All-Day-All-Night WCBS bombarding me with bulletins on the AM side. Dave Ross at WCBA, in contrast to Steve in Vermont, seemed to have an army of help feeding him news flashes: "Traffic backed up and snarled at Union, New Jersey. Slaughter at Yonkers . . . four youths shot down."

The New York voice that held me as I skirted the city's north suburbs was Leroy Ricksy's. He describes himself as a preacher distrusted by churches, and he points a finger at churches for abandoning African-American youth. "Instead of doing their job, our churches turned our children over to bureaucracies," he told a caller who wondered why so many black males enter foster care and why society holds no roles for her 42 grandchildren.

More than any other issue, I would hear race come up again and again on stations across the country. It would trigger accusations ("If I call this station and talk black I'm treated differently than when I try to sound white") and wobbly analysis ("Black kids wouldn't be so angry if schools taught them it was African kings, not whites, who sold their ancestors into slavery"). Late at night, most places, I encountered white supremacist programs, often syndicated over weak-signal stations but transmitting a powerful rhetoric of hate.

Across the Delaware in Pennsylvania, after midnight, I listened to 50,000-watt giants: oldies via Philadelphia's WOGL, "news-talk" on Pittsburgh's KDKA and country on Wheeling's WWVA. I was hooked for my trip, from Motown Monday to Fab Four Friday. * * *

There's an emotional rawness to radio. On a morning call-in show in western Pennsylvania, I heard a woman scream herself hoarse over the evils of subsidizing health care for the poor. Two minutes later another caller sobbed for joy after winning Marilyn Monroe trading cards; she won by answering trivia questions about Elvis Presley. Elvis is alive on the airwaves: His songs are played only occasionally, but he is constantly -- and badly -- imitated by disc jockeys and in commercials. Other constants, across the continent and across formats, are miss-a-day-miss-a-lot slogans, traffic-and-weather-together, and commercials touting garlic pills. You can go for months without garlic coming up in a conversation, but turn on the radio and you'd swear it's a national staple.

Near Youngstown, Ohio, I passed a car sporting a "Rush is Right" bumper sticker. I found Limbaugh's show on a Cleveland station; I'd have the chance to listen to it twice more that day on other stations, tape-delayed. Any listener call-in show needs some disagreement, but Limbaugh's callers seemed so awestruck that he couldn't even prod them into playful discord.

"Tell me what you think," he urged an Oklahoma caller, "because after I talk, that's all there is to be said."

"Well yes, that's true," conceded the caller.

By the Indiana Toll Road I knew I had miscalculated and would hit Chicago's afternoon rush-hour traffic instead of beating it by a couple of hours. So I turned to WBBM's traffic-and-weather-together show and drove into a fray of rumbling rigs, lane-switching cars and construction funnels. WBBM's taut patter had the right beat for all the hurry, conveying a sense of urgency: "Accident on the outbound Kennedy, heavy pockets on the Dan Ryan, Eisenhower's putting on the brakes." None of it helped. I turned to Spanish-speaking WOJO-FM, grateful for voices but not comprehending a word.

Usually it's AM I listen to on the road. I like the way AM stays with me for hundreds of miles, warns me of storms with its static, and metamorphizes by night to grab voices halfway across the continent. After crossing the Mississippi at Dubuque, watching for Amish buggies on U.S. highway 52 near the Iowa-Minnesota border, I came across Minneapolis's WCCO-AM and Steve Cannon. Cannon owns not just one of the Midwest's most recognized radio voices but four: perennial guests Morgan Mundane, Backlash LaRue and Ma Lingerer are actually Cannon too, on a show that's a curious mix of storytelling, news commentary and commercial plugs.

I was intrigued by WCCO's teaser for its late night call-in show -- "miss a day, you might miss a complete psychopath" -- but by that time, speeding across Minnesota's lonely western prairie, I felt I had the whole heartland at my fingertips. I heard opera from Calgary, Jack Buck talking Saint Louis sports over KMOX, storm warnings on Dallas's KRLD.

Then I stumbled across an old friend: There at 1520 AM was KOMA, Oklahoma City, the station by which kids from Texas to North Dakota cruised to rock 'n' roll 30 years ago. KOMA is an oldies station now, playing the same music it played then. Intone those call-letters, cue up Duke of Earl, and three decades melt from the dark Great Plains.

Anywhere in the country you can find stations to convince you that you haven't left home, that you remain connected to a community sharing your musical or political bent. Or you can listen to perspectives as diverse as the American landscape. In South Dakota, after crossing the Missouri at the longitude where Midwestern fields give way to Western rangeland, I listened to flutes and drums on KILI, "the voice of the Lakota nation." KINI, from Rosebud Reservation, invited me to a rodeo "celebrating the 118th anniversary of the victory of the Battle of Little Bighorn."

By night I had reached Little Bighorn country, the only car for miles along U.S. highway 212 in southeastern Montana. I stopped along the road to eat sardines and sourdough, and pushed "seek" on the radio. It couldn't lock into a single FM station, and I picked up only a handful of distant AM ones. With nothing to listen to, I closed my eyes and got the best sleep of my trip.

Montana has put its 59 radio stations to good use in pulling its 850,000 people together across the state's vast expanse. I learned that in Laurel, people open the Billings Gazette on Sunday mornings, tune to KBSR, and collectively enjoy a reading of the funny papers. In Livingston, Kathy Schmook comes into the KPRK studios weekly to satirize local issues.

I passed on a chance to talk toll-free and one-on-one to Miss Montana on a Butte call-in show, skipped lunch despite a reminder that "it's more fun to eat in a bar than drink in a restaurant," and climbed through the Bitterroot Range toward Lookout Pass, on the Montana-Idaho border. That's mountain-shadow territory, where the landscape obliterates radio reception for long stretches. Across much of Idaho's panhandle I could pick up only KWAL, from Osburn, reporting gold markets the way Midwestern stations quote corn markets.

Then, abruptly, I was out of the mountains and entering Spokane amid the first city traffic I'd seen since Chicago. Billboards reinforced pitches I'd been hearing since New England for brand-name gas, economical lodging and franchise food. In five days I hadn't bought a single product or service because of a radio commercial -- or a billboard.

That changed an hour later at Ritzville, Washington. The residents of that town of 1,800 have erected a billboard advising Interstate 90 travelers to tune to 530 AM. For a short distance you hear a taped message about Ritzville's 117 motel rooms, 56 RV hookups and 11 restaurants. Suddenly I felt certain I couldn't choke down another sardine, and in 10 minutes I was ordering chili at the Circle T Inn cafe on Main Street. The waitress asked about my trip, a rancher overheard us and wanted to know if it was dry across the West, then a couple of other customers joined the conversation. And a conversation it was, starkly different from what I'd been hearing on the radio. There was an exchange, free of monologues and emotional outbursts.

"Three hours to Seattle," the waitress said as I stepped into the night. Just three hours, but no Seattle radio signals made it over the Cascades. I could pick up Stephanie Miller on Los Angeles' KFI, blasting away obnoxious callers with an explosion sound-effect. There was the omnipresent traffic-and-weather-together, this time San Francisco's over KGO. After Ritzville, though, I was tired of it all. I crossed the Columbia in silence.

A fog rolled down from Snoqualmie Pass as I ascended the Cascades. Within a few minutes, I couldn't make out road signs, couldn't see if there was room to pull off. Guided by roadsign reflectors, I kept driving until it seemed that three hours had passed twice, but I still didn't know if I'd hit the pass and was descending or was still climbing.

Then I thought to turn the radio back on and push "seek." The dial came alive, with talk, with oldies, with classical, country and Seattle grunge. I was over the mountains. Somewhere in the mist, finally, the city was waiting for me.