When I was young, I blamed the black radio. It was a demon of a thing.
It was a very old shortwave radio that, inside its liftable top, had a set of rows of glass vacuum tubes that, when the radio was on, would glow orange. It took a moment to warm up. Leave it on long enough and the metal top of the radio would get comfortably warm, like a heating pad, but never really hot enough to burn you if you touched it.
Most of the time, as a teen in Halifax in the ’70s, I used it to listen to local radio stations. But late at night, especially on some cold clear nights, you could turn the big black knob slowly and traverse the radio universe. You might, for just an instant, cross the path of a stream of ultra-fast Morse code. It was too fast for the uninitiated to figure out, and always in the same place on the dial, easy to find; I suspect anyone would have to capture it and slow it down to make the translation back into one language or another.
Once, memorably and never repeated, a British voice, a cultured accent, doing nothing more than reading a string of numbers.
You might find distant, scratchy music, sounding like it was being played inside a large cardboard box being transmitted, or else, like the microphone was propped at one end of the tube from the centre of a roll of wrapping paper.
Angry Spanish voices (I spoke Spanish then) reading the news with spat-out words, or people speaking what I thought must be Russian, from far away, with the radio waves ebbing and flowing so that the sound of the voices swelled and faded, swelled, and faded. Once, memorably and never repeated, a British voice, a cultured accent, doing nothing more than reading a string of numbers. I have no idea why — every possible explanation sounds like a work of fiction.
Drowsy, face on my pillow, I would spin the dial through station after station — or at least, signal after signal — stopping for a moment at the interesting ones, sometimes letting my hand fall from the knob, sometimes unintentionally falling asleep.
You might wake up to just the gentle buzz of the vacuum tubes, the station that had been there now quiet. Or you might wake up to something new, something that hadn’t been on when you fell asleep.
And sometimes, you’d wake up and suddenly realize that whatever thing you were hearing, expected or unexpected, had woven itself into your dreams. That martial music had somehow informed whatever your mind was working on, or that urgent foreign language voices had restructured your night, driven it in darker directions that suddenly seemed a little bit more explainable than they had been as simple dreams.
When I fought fires and worked in medical rescue, I fought terrifying blazes and watched people die in my sleep as well. Some of them, many times. So I know that, however scrambled and odd and terrifying dreams are, they can really just be what you’ve lived, chopped up in strange ways and restructured into nightmares to pander to, and play with, your worst and darkest fears.
There’s a lot of symbolism and a lot of off-gassing of whatever darkness you’re facing.
I spent last night fighting a fire in the wooden props holding up the side of a deep trench during wartime while people around me died of disease. I don’t know exactly where that came from, but I have my suspicions that it had less to do with fires than with fears more pandemical.
Just to say, these may be hard times even though your daytime seems just fine.
It’s easier when you can blame it all on the black radio.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
