Saturday, December 4, 2010

Radio Blog: Road For The Holidays

Here is my Thanksgiving Road Trip post as radio, courtesy of Radio Vermont -- WDEV.

It is interesting turning a 900+ word essay into a 2 minute radio piece.  Short is not just short; it is different.  Fewer thoughts and details.  No side stories.  Nothing extra.  I know I could make the essays even tighter, but I don't want to contribute too much to the devolution of the modern brain any more than I have to.

DEV has a terrific engineer, Amy, and she tightens my essays even more.  I'll write an essay, edit it, decide it'd be good for the radio.  I'll sit down and edit it more -- rewrite it even -- and think I've polished it to dust.  I'll then go to the studio, talk for two minutes, and then Amy will burn me a cd.  She'll write my name and a summary comment on the disc:  A long, nuanced essay about late summer gets labeled "politics."  A ramble about a birthday at Fenway Park becomes "older", etc.

This one, which to me is about a disconnected country too much on the move, Amy labeled "home for Thanksgiving."  Nice.  Her view led me to change the title I'd originally given the essay to "Road for The Holidays".

If you click below you can read the radio version of the longer essay.  The longer version is here.  I like both versions but think the radio version is a bit better.

WDEV – Essay

Announcer:  And now commentator David Rocchio talks about the experience of traveling the roads over the holidays, and the joy of coming home:

ROCCHIO:  We drove to Washington, D.C. over Thanksgiving Break. The drive down was uneventful and fun.  The idea of roads continuing past the Edge Of Vermont fascinated the kids.  It was like introducing the concept of infinity. 

There was no real traffic until we crossed the Mighty Delaware.  We saw a long line of travelers on the Northbound side queuing at the toll for the massive twin bridge over the estuary. If our trip was a movie, that line was foreshadowing.

The short-break in DC went off without hitch:  The museums delivered as ordered; the weather was cool but sunny; we walked everywhere, shirtsleeves in late November. The memorials stirred emotions and hope.  The kids learned. We visited the National Portrait Gallery, the best art museum in all of America.  There were no politicians in town.

We were not in DC for Thanksgiving exactly. We drove home on Thanksgiving, thinking the roads would be empty of traffic, everyone in someone’s home.

So we slept in on Thanksgiving Day.  (We had been up late watching a tribute to Tina Fey on public television the night before (only in America).)  We had a full, big breakfast at the hotel.  We steamed up the car and began the return drive.  We were north of Baltimore within an hour.

And then it stopped.

Suddenly, as we headed back toward the pinch-point dividing Delaware and New Jersey, the traffic began to choke itself.  It thickened and clotted and slowed.  The large, electronic signs telling us how far we were from different milestones and how long it would take to reach these points became bleak.  We deluded ourselves.  ‘It must be a typo,’ we’d think.  

From that point to distal New York City the highway felt like an exodus. Before that drive I could not imagine so many people trying to use one road at the same time on an important, quiet, national holiday.

The final straw on our drive was sitting an hour and a half just outside the George Washington Bridge.  We sat, leaned on the horn, argued over which lane might move faster and finally slipped our last eight dollars – some of them Canadian – into the hands of a demoralized toll taker.  

The traffic eased and we let the kids pull out the laptop and watch a Bond movie.  They did not sleep.  We pulled into the driveway very late. 

Our exodus was over, we were back in the cold north, it was silent outside and pitch dark.  There would be no driving the next day.  No highways.  No road trips.

We are no longer as remote or as rural here in Vermont as we were, but we remain out of the way.   Here it is mostly true that on Thanksgiving Day, on Christmas Day, everyone’s in someone’s home.  Not Out There.


I’m David Rocchio.  Thanks for listening.


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio

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