"Real Television"


By


Karen W. Waggoner



 “Real” Television

            Since we installed a satellite dish out on a point of rock jutting into the lake, we’ve alternately enjoyed and cursed the addition of “real” television at our summer home in Ontario.  Previously the silent solitude of our days was relatively unbroken by messages from the outside.  The country/western radio station in Sault Ste. Marie relayed “camp calls” every day to other isolated people, and our television reception, aided by a homemade antenna, was so poor we usually stowed the little black box in a closet until we wanted to rent a film.  If we really wanted to know what was going on in the outside world, a place so remote from us that it seemed foreign, we drove to town and bought a day-old newspaper from Toronto.  We rarely cared enough to make the effort.

            We were doomed by the inexorable march of technology and the fact that we extended our stay to three or four months.  The two of us ran out of conversation, though we never ran out of books and crossword puzzles or fish to catch.  One day in the summer of 2000, I decided “real” television would be an asset to our existence and the rest is history.  That small, anachronistic dish strapped to the trunk of a gnarled tree growing out of the rugged shoreline, connected by a cable to our house, brought CNN to call directly from a satellite poised in the serene southern sky over the lake. 

            If I had possessed enough courage to confront the intrusion of television, I might not have initiated the installation of the dish, but like too many of my younger friends, I was impatient for gratification, hungry for contact with popular culture, and blissfully unaware of the true price we would pay.  The little 13-inch television screen seemed innocuous enough sitting on a bookcase, and we truly loved getting acquainted with the Canadian History Channel.  We limited our exposure to current events to an hour or so every morning, just to check the stock market, I would say.

            On the morning of September 11, 2001, I sat at the big oak table in our great room, sipping coffee, idly filling in the blanks of an acrostic, and half listening to the voices of CNN anchors.  When their conversational tones changed abruptly, I looked up at the screen across the room and sat while the film of some fictional disaster scene played in front of me.  There were the Twin Towers of the New York City skyline, one of which had just erupted in smoke and flames at the side of its uppermost floors  While I watched, the excited voices of the newscasters filtered into my consciousness.  They were saying this was not a film.  It was live coverage of an actual event happening at that very moment.

            They say the human mind works at a speed we cannot begin to calculate, and that morning I was catapulted back in time to the November morning in 1963 when on my black and white television screen, a man wearing a fedora stepped forward out of a crowd, aimed a gun, and shot Lee Harvey Oswald dead right in front of my eyes.  At that time, I didn’t believe it.  There was nothing in my experience to prepare me for the enactment of a crime in my own living room except for the dozens, if not hundreds, of similar scenes I had witnessed in fiction forms. If I could see it in my home, it had to be phony.  People don’t do such things except in the minds of screenwriters.  Then I recalled how the newscasters kept assuring me that what I saw was real, and continued to assure me and continued far into the rest of that day and night and through all the years since the event.  It still didn’t seem quite possible.

            What I was seeing on the screen in the familiar surroundings of our summer living room was inconceivable.  All around me were the pine walls and floor my father laid.  The table under my elbows was the one my mother refinished at the time my second son was born.  These were reality.  The second plane crashing into the second tower must be someone’s idea of a monumental hoax to divert jaded Americans from the ordinariness of their daily existence.  I thought of my husband.  I needed a second witness.

            I made my way down to the dock between trees growing out of rocks and over the roots and snags they create to trap unwary toes, not hurrying, but intent on saying, “It’s not Armageddon.  But it sure looks like it,” when I reached the point where he could hear me.  He looked up; then his gaze returned to task of rewiring an old outboard’s electric starter.  I repeated, “It’s not Armageddon.  But you’d better come into the house.”

            This time he walked up the path behind me, wiping his oily hands on a rag, calling to one of the dogs to come home from her daily routine of chasing ducks into the water.  The screen door banged behind us.  We walked halfway through the room to where we could see the just the tops of the two burning towers and the specks of debris falling outward.  One of the broadcasters said the objects we saw weren’t bricks or windows but people plummeting to their deaths.  Lee Harvey Oswald’s body folded when the bullet hit him.  The stain of his blood spread instantly across his white shirt.  It was real.  This was the end of being the world’s most blessed people, blissfully unaware that such hatred could be directed toward us.  Innocently oblivious.  Stupidly secure.

            We spoke very little that morning while outside chipmunks and squirrels quarreled in the trees, the last greedy hummingbirds staged battles over the deck, sea gulls and terns shopped for tidbits around the shoreline, and the dogs barked, I think, because dogs always bark.  By the time the second tower crumbled and fell, the resulting plume of dust and smoke resembling photos of nuclear mushroom clouds, our cell phone rang.  Like the satellite television, it was our other direct link to the outside.  First one, then another, then a third Canadian friend called.  Each asked if we needed anything; each stumbled over the words, “I’m so sorry.”

When we went to town the next day, American flags, some of them hand-drawn and colored, decorated nearly every store and house window.  A spray of red roses spread across the marquee that said, “To our American neighbors.  Our hearts are broken too.  God Save the United States of America.”

            The condolence was appropriate.  Part of us all died that day, and like the times we suffer deaths in our families, we are forever changed.  I expect it was also appropriate that we share the experience with the rest of the world via live television.  I will cherish, however, the memory of days before the intrusion of reality and try to recreate them for my grandchildren when they come to visit.  For them, for a little while, the black box will return to the closet.

           

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