Longwave Dream #4

Once several years ago I had this dream, as is recorded in my Book of Dreams:

A couple of weeks ago I had a dream that I was living out in the open, as if amidst partitions of corrugated sheet metal. It was a refugee camp, somewhere out on the Great Plains of Kansas or Nebraska or Oklahoma, in a time after things had fallen to pieces. I was like some character out of a Kerouac novel, dirt poor, beat, grapes of wrath, trampled down into the dust by the press of vast events, and I was living there in this fellaheen refugee camp with this woman, and a young daughter of hers. And I had this radio I had gotten somewhere, a big gigantic oversized silver boom box type radio, with all sorts of arcane controls and buttons and knobs and dials on it.

And then I couldn't find the radio, only this woman showed me where she had hung it up on a hook up high, on the corrugated sheet metal, out of sight of the random pilgrims roaming around in this sheet metal settlement. And I was filled with warmth that this woman, my woman, had understood me so completely and cared so much as to put my radio up out of harm's way like this. And I got it down as she busied herself with the cooking and the wash, her wavy black hair and her snapping black eyes, spaghetti boiling in a large open four-gallon metal pot above an open fire, wash strung out with clothespins on clotheslines strung amidst the walls of corrugated sheet metal.

And then this woman went off somewhere on some task or errand, walking barefoot, her sweet dusty feet, and I sat listening to the radio, with the young girl listening with me. And somehow this scene brought a misting of tears to my eyes, at the warmth of this impoverished refugee life we lived amidst sheet metal steel.

And then the radio had a longwave band on it, and I was pulling in one voice broadcast station you could receive even by day, on 315 kilohertz from Olathe, Kansas. By night this longwave station would come in loud and clear, and you could also get broadcasts on more distant longwave stations from all over North America. And it was some Bible-thumping religious broadcast, warning us to flee from the wrath to come, warning us to flee from the wrath which was already upon us, "and pray that it come not in winter." And I understood that this station had simply gone on the air, without a license, and without fear of reprisal in these latter days.

And then I woke up.