The soundtrack of your summer

Summer is when you want a little change. As the proverb says, “A change is good as a rest.” If you’re in the hot city and “the back of your neck’s getting dirty and gritty,” you want some shade and peace. If it’s flat and brown and dry where you live, you long for the water and the peaks. If you shuttle between a busy desk and crowded streets, you want to stretch your limbs and take in a view. So you hit the road for the North Country, or somewhere equally blessed with woods and mountains and lakes and rivers.

I’ve been blessed to grow up in the North Country, so summer travel out of the region was much less appealing to me. Winter is when I could use a change. But my family did hit the road in the summer, too, visiting kin in river valleys other than the Raquette—the Wabash in Indiana, the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania.

And one of the changes summer brought was a switch from the usual summer media fare—fraught with game show and sitcom re-runs—to great radio. Driving the four-lanes at midnight listening to exotic call signs from far-flung transmitters, sitting in the porch glider at sunset with music on low while old friends caught up with each other’s news, or floating with the bowline tied up to a tree in a shady baylet, drinking camp coffee from a thermos with the local station for company on a portable radio.

If NCPR is that station for you, the soundtrack of your summer, the place where you tune in when you need a little change in your life, we could use a little change, too.

Please support your summer station with a small gift before you strike the camp flag and put the cedar sachet in the drawers and try to fit all that stuff back into the car. That way, you can be sure we’ll still be here next summer when you need a little change again.

Thanks, and have a great summer.

Tags: listeningpost