An old friend and regular visitor to this site writes to ask if I’m still alive. The answer is yes, according to doctors at the University of Utah Medical Center. That said, there have lately been days when I suspect my best years are behind me. For example, recently I ran into a retired colleague with whom I once worked at an NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City. Bruce surprised me by recalling a human interest feature centering on a crusty old sheepherder in rural Nevada—a story that supposedly we both worked on, although I have no memory whatsoever of the event. It made me a bit sad to think that Bruce’s mind is beginning to slip.
Bruce made a career of television, whereas mine ended after just a few months for reasons that remain unexplained. Surely it wasn’t because I had no talent; in fact, Bruce remembers me as the most “literate” news writer he’s ever met.
Meaning, perhaps, that I was TOO literate? That perhaps “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” isn’t a really great live lead-in? Well, probably not a good fit for the current Ken-and-Barbie anchor team and the gigglefest repartee that precedes each and every weather forecast segment. Speaking of which, HOW MANY TIMES must we be warned that heavy winter snowfalls result in dangerous avalanche conditions and equally dangerous high river runoff in the spring? And what’s the point of alerting hikers to potential flash floods in slot canyons when nobody hiking a slot canyon can receive a television signal?
Getting back to that crusty old sheepherder, it occurs to me that I have now become just as old and crusty as the old-timers who were once my stock-in-trade. What I would do is just drive around until I came to a place that received no television reception and whose inhabitants were thus obliged to entertain themselves. So basically what I was doing was documenting the lives of non couch potatoes for the amusement of couch potatoes.
Not so today. Thanks to the ubiquitous satellite dish, you can pretty much watch television anywhere—that is, except for the bottom of a narrow sandstone slot canyon in southeastern Utah. In which case, take comfort in the fact that in your final moments you’ll be surrounded by natural beauty and blissful quietude, and that the last thing you will hear will be the rumble of an approaching flash flood and not the barbaric yawp of Donald J.Trump.