Voices in the Dark: Night Vale and a Small Town Radio Memoir

There are so many things to love about "Welcome to Night Vale," the very original podcast created and co-written by Joseph Fink along with Jeffrey Cranor, and voiced by Cecil Baldwin. If you're not familiar with it, each episode takes the form of a community radio broadcast from the fictional desert town of Night Vale.  News, local announcements, traffic, and "weather," emanating from a town where existence is multi-dimensional, metaphysical, metaphorical and deeply, delightfully, quirkily spooky. Now 40 episodes and almost two years in, Night Vale remains fresh and original, featuring regular developments surrounding the mysterious dog park, which must neither be entered nor even acknowledged to exist, the glow cloud that has become a member of Night Vale's city council, the man in the tan jacket with the deerskin suitcase full of trained flies, and the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your house.

For me, the show's quick-witted conceptual originality inspires and feeds my imaginative life. Examples abound, but here's one, from episode 16, "That Phone Call," in which Night Vale Community Radio host Cecil Baldwin announces renovations to the Night Vale library:

"The City Council has announced several improvements for the public library....  An entrance is being constructed at the front of the building, so we will no longer have to enter by waking up between two shelves in a dizzy haze, unsure of how we got there, and then wandering around, trapped, until we wake with a start in our own beds, covered with sweat, and with a few books we checked out on our nightstand.  Drinking fountains are being installed in the lobby, as well as dunking chambers, and a state-of-the-art fainting pool.  Librarian repellent dispensers are being placed throughout the building.  Remember, if approached by a librarian, keep still.  Do not run away.  Try to make yourself bigger than the librarian."

On a moment-by-moment basis, "Welcome to Night Vale" illustrates some of the transformative principles of surrealism that keep imagination alive.  The idea of dunking chambers and fainting pools as standard library features, or of librarians as wild animals dangerous as bears, brings to mind Lautreamont's famous formulation, "as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Art should surprise and keep our perceptive faculties nimble and responsive, so that we can act in the world with original minds, beyond the restrictions of commercial culture or petty competitiveness that often drive shallow and destructive behaviors.

In my small hometown in central Minnesota, there's a small AM radio station--5,000 watts during the day, powered down to 38 watts after sundown, so that its nighttime broadcast range doesn't even reach the edge of the county. I don't want to name the station, because the story I'm going to tell involves some real people, with real lives--people who're out there trying to live down their pasts. And my facts aren't really facts: I've tried to research the story but can't find anything on it, so I'm stuck with the rumors that I remember hearing 25 years ago.

One of my first jobs was working early Sunday morning shifts as on-air host and board op at the station--it was Christian rock starting at 6 am, leading up to Minnesota Vikings or Minnesota Twins games, depending on the season.  I worked there from age 17 on and off until I was out of college--coming home to cover vacations and fill in on holidays throughout the year. I loved the alone-ness of working there. The offices were on the top floor of an old downtown building--the studios at the end of a long narrow hallway leading from an old theater that had been modified into office cubicles for the sales and management staff. When I worked, I was almost always alone in the place, and there was a lot of downtime between spinning records and ripping news of the UPI wire for the top of the hour break. I loved the mental spaciousness of the time I spent in there. I was young and I don't think I understood myself very clearly--I don't think I knew then that I was a person who valued alone-ness.  Working at the station helped me discover an introspective side of myself that might have stayed buried in the busy-ness of young adult social life.

I have some specific memories of the place, like bringing my saxophone to play along with records up in the studio, being visited late one night by a girlfriend, and doing some early writing up there, trying to capture some sense of the perfect loneliness of working the sign-off shift at a tiny radio station in a small town: most of the time, by midnight when we played Sinatra's "Lords Prayer" and went off the air for the night, I figured exactly no one was listening. In fact, I remember opening the mic and, softly, singing along with old blue eyes, imagining my voice drifting over the snowy empty fields of rural Morrison County.  Sadly, I remember working the Sunday morning shift after my friends and I had learned of a classmate's suicide. The station's news manager met me at the door at 5:45 a.m. to make sure that a) I was okay to work and b) I wouldn't say anything about the event outside of the brief script she'd written for the morning newscasts.

One image stays with me in particular. One haunted event.

The owner of the radio group was a small, kind of dwarfish looking man--a notable citizen of the town, and a really good guy. He had a son who was in his late twenties or early thirties and who was a little adrift in his life. He was working for his dad in a nepotistic managerial capacity, and had a bit of a reputation as a partier in town. No big thing, but at the time I found the stories a little intimidating--I was pretty naive and a little scared of the adult world, I think. Anyway, soon after I began working there, a terrible thing happened. The owner's son failed to attach his boat trailer correctly to his hitch and, pulling the boat home from a day at the lake, the boat and trailer came unattached, crossed the center-line of the highway, and hit an oncoming car head-on, killing at least one passenger in that vehicle--I never knew who the victim or victims were; these were stories I heard in snippets of conversations that my parents and co-workers tried to keep from me. From what I understood, the owner's son ended up serving prison time, although I think the sentence was pled down to something like negligent manslaughter.

During my years working there, the owner's son was in jail, I think. I never saw him, anyway, and a bit of a shadow hung over the station, but I didn't feel it too often.  I was fairly oblivious to all of these events, and busy with the typical concerns of an 18-22 year old. During winter break of my senior year of college, I agreed to cover some shifts for regular djs who wanted vacation, including the Christmas Eve night shift. I didn't mind. I needed the money, and my family would do Christmas the next day. Knowing that it might be one of my last times in the station, I decided to do some exploring around the building.  I was curious about the mysteries of the old theater, where the offices were, at the opposite end of the hallway from the studios. So, I put on a long song, probably "Riders on the Storm," by The Doors, and headed down the front hall, around the reception desk, and back through the offices. It was dark back there, but there was enough ambient light through the windows that I could navigate. Past the cubicles, there was a solid, wooden door and I could see, in the dark, a faint light underneath it. I quietly turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped through into the back of an old auditorium space. I had heard that the historic theater still existed back there, but I'd never seen it. I stood at the back of a small theater: it probably seated around 100 people, but the stage was elegant--black, polished wood framed by high, red velvet curtains, and the auditorium seats were plush, upholstered in a deep red that matched the curtains.

On stage, a brass floor lamp with a white shade had been pulled just past the curtains into stage left, an extension cord trailing away from it. It was the source of the faint light I'd seen under the door. Next to the lamp sat a weight bench set up for bench presses, with a heavily loaded bar. Before I had time to puzzle much about it, the station owner's son stepped out from behind the curtain, shirt off in the lamp glow. I hadn't seen him in a few years, and he was much thicker then I'd remembered--he'd always been tall, probably around 6 foot 4, but he had bulked up in prison, I guessed. Standing there shirtless in the lamplight, he took a long drink out of a plastic squeeze bottle, then sat down, laid back under the bar, and started pumping out bench press reps, exhaling as the bar went up and pulling in air as it came down. He hadn't seen me or heard me, and I snuck back out the door and tiptoed back to the studio in plenty of time to catch the thunder in the fade at the end of "Riders on the Storm."

I don't know where the owner's son is now--I tried to find anything about him online but couldn't. The station still operates, though its studios & offices have moved to a new building near the tower at the edge of town. That old theater building is now an architect's office.

I'll just never forget that image--Christmas Eve night, just out of jail, lifting weights under a lamp on the old stage.  The quietness of it.  The darkness.  The sense that there were very real worlds out there that I didn't understand, worlds from which I'd been protected through my youth. The sense that my grace period was coming to an end.