# Shifting Schools I’m writing this while waiting for my tires to be replaced. Trixie, Fern and I are driving out to Niagara Falls early Sunday morning — a twenty-hour drive — and I’m just now finally replacing our car’s tires after having had a flat while Trixie was in labor, as earlier narrated. I thought perhaps it wouldn’t be good to make the long trip without a spare. I bought two slightly used tires to put on the front two wheels, and brought them to the mechanic. When he saw the ones I’d bought he nodded approval, but when he looked at the rear tires I’d planned on keeping for a bit, he grew visibly concerned, just as I’d expected him to, knowing that all mechanics are consummate salespersons as well. I’m still not sure, at a general level, if that’s just because mechanics love to prey on the wallets of the ignorant, or if they end up _having_ to be consummate salespersons around people like me because of the legitimate alarm roused in them by our vehicles when we finally do bring them in to be serviced. In this case, however, my ears pricked up a little when he pointed out to me the markings indicating the date of manufacture of my rear tires: 1992. Those tires actually pre-date the car itself by four years. He sold me another pair of used, 2011 tires for the rear pair, and I put up only token resistance. Total cost, $55. We’re loaded up on podcasts and audio books for the trip, but one of my favorite things to do on long drives, especially at night, is to just turn on the radio and scan around for something interesting. I remember being sent on long cross-country road trips for disaster relief in the early 2000s, in large, amenity-free vans that were basically gas cans on wheels. If we were lucky, someone would think to bring a CD stereo, and we’d pass the long nights on the freeway catching fragments of Adventures in Odyssey or a clammy Frank Peretti novel in between snatches of sleep, which combined with gas station food and many hours of close confinement with men of wildly varying temperaments, could usually produce an experience which would seem in hindsight like a kind of Christian LSD trip if you had never actually taken LSD. But more often, the radio was our only source of diversion. On these drives we would occasionally listen — and this should give you some idea of how bored we were — to an entire show of Dr. Laura Schlesinger, and then, just as we were driving out of the listening range of the station, we would come within range of a new station that was just starting a rebroadcast of the same show we’d just heard. So we would spend then next couple of hours listening to the whole thing _again_, playing along and accurately predicting, word-for-word, what tough love advice Dr. Laura would give her callers, which were clearly selected by her screeners for their deleterious limpwristedness. But it made for good memories anyhow. My writing is littered here and there with references to the experience of stumbling across that static voice in the darkness while driving late at night: that sensation of being dropped into something, a conversation or a darkened theatre, with absolutely no context, and thinking “What is this? Where did it come from?” And, a few seconds later: “Where can I get more?” It’s not really the same with podcasts; As a listener, podcasts require you to take on the job of editor and talent scout, culling through shows and building your own program schedule, so there is very little opportunity for chance serendipity. At this point I’m dangerously close to making this a nostalgic piece, aching for the golden age of AM radio; a much better perspective is to recognize that, like schools of fish, the sources of serendipity shift, grow, shrink, and migrate over time. The real secret is to know where to go dragging for them. For now, the nighttime freeway and the airwaves are still a pretty good place to cast your net; in a couple dozen years they may not be. Don’t waste time pining for them: hoist anchor and look for the schools of serendipity in another medium. * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio. I’m Joel Dueck. I wrote this address over a small bowl of soup in a Subway while getting my tires installed. A good companion episode to this one is [the Howell Creek Radio address for January 21, 2008][hcrjan08]. If you listen to it, you’ll see why. It’s only the sixth episode I recorded, it’s six minutes long, and there’s a link to it on the show notes at our website, . ## Synopsis Radio address for October 12, 2013, which finds me getting ready for a long drive, thinking about the radio and those static voices in the darkness, and where they might be found once radio is really dead. A good companion episode to this one is [the Howell Creek Radio address for January 21, 2008][hcrjan08]. If you listen to it, you’ll see why. It’s only the sixth episode I recorded, and it’s six minutes long. Another great piece of further reading is [_The Quest to Save AM Before It’s Lost in Static_][qsar] by Edward Wyatt, a medium-length NYT article published on September 8, 2013. [hcrjan08]: http://howellcreekradio.com/episodes/january-21-2008 [qsar]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/us/a-quest-to-save-am-radio-before-its-lost-in-the-static.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0