What Actually Gets Said on the Radio

Morning check in is at seven, evening at seven, and it doesn’t move much either direction unless there’s weather worth reporting early. It’s a little routine that taunts me, same two voices, mine and Hank’s, twice a day, and if you pictured it as some kind of meaningful daily connection between two people who’ve never met in person, you’d be picturing something that doesn’t match what it’s actually like.

It goes like this. I key up, give the station name, he answers with dispatch and his own call sign, and then it’s visibility, wind direction, wind speed, temperature, relative humidity if the instrument’s behaving, and anything worth flagging on the smoke front. That’s maybe ninety seconds if I’m being efficient about it, which I mostly am, because Hank’s got four other lookouts to get through before he can do anything else with his morning. He reads it back to confirm the numbers, I confirm the confirm, and that’s it. Over.

What doesn’t get said is most of what you’d think a person alone for five months would want to say. I don’t tell him what I’m reading. I don’t tell him about the light the evening before or the elk that came through the meadow below the tower or how long it’s been since I’ve heard another human voice that wasn’t his. None of that is radio traffic, and both of us know it, and there’s a kind of unspoken agreement to keep it that way. The channel’s shared with three other stations and dispatch has actual work to do. You don’t clog it up talking about your feelings.

Every so often, maybe once every couple weeks, there’s a little extra on the end of a check in. He’ll ask if I caught the storm the night before, or mention that Teresa or somebody like her called into a different station asking after conditions on my trail. I’ll ask how the fire season’s shaping up down at the district office, whether they’re still short-staffed. It’s never more than a sentence or two, tacked on after the real business is done, and then it’s over and out again and I’m back to whatever I was doing before seven o’clock interrupted it.

I used to think, my first season, that I’d come to dread those two minutes or look forward to them too much, lean on them the way you’d lean on the one meal you get a day. Neither happened. They became something closer to a heartbeat than a conversation, a small mechanical pulse that tells you the rest of the world is still out there running on its own schedule whether you’re part of it or not. Some mornings I’m halfway distracted doing something else and give my numbers almost without thinking, the way you’d answer your own name. Other mornings, especially early in a long stretch of nobody, I notice how much I’m looking forward to hearing that dry voice come through, and I try not to make too much of that either.

Hank’s never asked me a personal question in five years and I’ve never asked him one back. I don’t know if he’s married, where he lives in town, what he does the other seven months. I know his voice at seven a.m. and seven p.m., and the shape of his patience with five stations’ worth of numbers, and that’s the whole relationship, and somehow it’s still the steadiest one I’ve got up here.