TV in the Woods

I’m not a rich guy. I haven’t been anything other than self employed since I was a twenty something. I’m unemployed now only because I stopped doing what I used to do for money. Just stopped, thus ‘self’ to ‘un’ in the employment category. These are the realities of my current station in life. Yet when I look around at my small castle, a one-bedroom apartment, I cannot help but feel rich. For comfort and luxury are relative.

I didn’t grow up thinking this way. But it is because of how I grew up that I think like this. I have two TVs. Not small ones. Not blow your socks off huge ones either. Much like most of me. But two, generously sized, black rectangles of pure enjoyment. At least I see them in that regard. I love TV. But that is not the extent to which I can waste my time. I also have two computers and a smartphone, all of which are marvels. These things of productivity and connectivity I can reduce to TVs. I can watch a show anywhere as long as I have one of them. From my kitchen, to the small space between my kitchen and my living room; or in the bathroom, anywhere really.

To understand my TV worship I need to show how it all got started. As a kid the idea of so much entertainment would have been unbelievable .When I was forming my relationship with televisions it was a very humble beginning.

I grew up in New York, not the city but upstate. There is a whole stretch of land that shares the name with the city. It is there where I was most at home. Thanks to the pandemic of twenty twenty a lot of people from the city and elsewhere have discovered the Fingerlakes. Unlike those that vacation there I lived year round at the top of a hill and down a dirt road. I grew up with my three siblings and our mother after the divorce. The nearest shop was eight miles down in the village. In winter the snow could reach such heights that no plow could make it through to us.

In that house atop that hill is where I got to know TV for the first time. In winter it was with the ever present and oppressive heat of the wood stove. My family and I would stair into the tiny box that my mother called the ‘boob-tube’. She always paraphrased that with ‘it’s what my father called it’. I, embarrassingly, didn’t equate the word boob with anything other than the TV reference my mom used for some time. I think it was in third grade that Mrs. Barry, angry as ever, educated me with a trip to the principal’s office.

Unlike TV, third grade was a misery. Mrs. Barry kept her room hotter than our wood stove. Rather than Saturday cartoons her programming was work books. All work books, all the time. I can’t recall what had begun it that morning but I remember being in an mood the entire day. A classmate was kicking the back of my chair and it was enough to break me. “Don’t be a boob!” I shouted back at them. I meant it as a simpleton, an idiot, a dummy. The only definition I’d gotten up till that point. Snickers and some out right laughter rose as did Mrs. B. She took me a bit to firmly by the bit of flesh between my shoulder and my neck. Such a grip was considered restrained, since kids could be lead about by ears or hair back then, despite the bruise that later surfaced. Once out side the class room with the cord of the phone stuck between the door I was instructed, the first I’d gotten from Mrs. B. other than to do work books, to make my first trip to the principal’s office.

It was a long walk past the cafeteria converted to a music room after lunch. Then around the corner and down a narrow hall. I don’t know why kids voluntarily take themselves to the principal’s office. I don’t know why I did that day. But there I was, standing before an impossibly tall counter reporting for punishment. I was expected from the phone call earlier and waited on a chair to big for me until I heard my name. When the time came I defended myself: “He was being dumb and people who are dumb are boobs!” The truth of the matter came out and later I would have it explained to me that I could not use that word any longer in the context to which I’d grown accustomed.

Despite this vocabulary lesson and the danger that watching to much TV could turn me simple I loved and continued to love TV. It is a window into worlds and people that can come from anywhere; deep space to the bottom of the ocean. Saturday morning cartoons were my first true obsession. After three hours of cartoons and then a hurried stacking of wood I was free for most of the afternoon. That’s when I’d run up to the woods with my head still filled with the stories from earlier.

Once in among the trees I lived those stories and added my own. Sumac trees and bamboo were my enemies, the sentinel robots or enemy mutants of the X-Men. Oaks and maples further up the hill made up my cities. I could climb well and would scamper up them, moving around the branches as I patrolled for crime on the leaf carpet that became the crime riddled streets below. The tall saplings, twenty feet high or so, would bend under my weight when I reached their tops. They’d arch over dropping me down to the forest floor as I imagined myself as Batman or Spiderman. Swooping down to take on a villain.

Most days the dry forest air smells like absolutely nothing or perhaps perfection. It is simply fresh. What countless products claim to be but never are. Some years when everything went just right in the growing season the undertone of grapes was everywhere. Like somebody had opened a jelly jar in the next room. I don’t know what it took to produce this from the acres and acres of vineyards, but it was a welcome visitor when choose to show. When it grew cooler the unmistakable sent of wood burning takes over. To further my fantasies I imagined wood smoke to be the smog I’d heard about in cities. A very unpleasant surprise awaited me in the future. But for my boyhood the wood smoke would do as a stand in for car exhaust and factory outflow. Little did I know how much more personal human scents would be present in the perfume of a real city.

The familiar rustling of leaves, creaking of branches, buzzing of insects and the occasional scamper of a squirrel or chipmunk were the sounds of my cities. Normal forest background was comfortable, but occasionally there would be a sudden intruder that would startle me, grabbing my attention. A half heard phase spoken right against my ear. To this day I don’t understand the acoustics, but sound can apparently travel down one hill, bounce off the water of a lake and travel up another hill to the ears of a boy in the woods. I’d pause in whatever narrative I was acting out and listen. It was rare but occasionally I could make out a couple words. I’d hope to catch some secret spoken far away, as if I possessed Superman’s hearing. Sometimes I’d match it with his vision and imagine I could peer right through the trees and hillside down to the lake below and spy the boat the voice was coming from. Or look across the lake to the opposite hill right through the wall of a barn to reconnoiter my suspect. A rare delight to a child spying on an adult conversation, even if he couldn’t understand what was spoken. Those were the welcome intruders, the unwelcome were the piercing blasts of firearms.

I’d cling to the top of a tree for an hour or more. Looking around while keeping very still like a rabbit and listening for any crunch of leaves or snap of a stick, hoping to find the true criminal. All the while, too scared to descend and seek them out. In those childhood moments, I learned myself a coward. A trait I would spend long years trying to shake without knowing what it really was I felt. Now having grown up just a bit I have a better measure of those moments and what bravery is. It was a kind of bravery to remain there on watch. Having not climbed down the tree as fast as you please and ran like wolves were at my heels.

When shots were not being fired and my play fulfilled, I could climb those trees in peace and look down the hill to my house and the lake and take it all in. Rising above the house, just off to the side, was the massive TV antenna that helped connect me to the wider world.

It was very close to the house, but not near where the TV was. Picture a room maybe forty feet long and fifteen feet wide. The TV was on one end and the wood stove was on the other. That was our living room. From the living room through the foyer, we had a proper rich people foyer, or what I perceived all wealthy people had in their homes. A special room with a special name for people to take shelter from the outdoors without quite being admitted into the house. Where ours had no doors and was open to the rest of the house it still made me feel we shared something with those who’s wallets were always full. Today I believe it would be called nothing more than a mud room. Beyond this was the dinning room and on the far wall of the dining room were two windows flanking a chimney. One of which opened out to where the antenna pole was.

It was incredibly tall but not sunk deep enough to keep it from swaying, let alone spinning. It was hippie engineering at its worst. A guessing game of depth and concrete producing a lightening rod that hoped to pick up radio waves. It was struck a few times when it was first put up, I’ve been told. The deadly problem was solved with another makeshift solution, tacking a line from a real lightning rod and running it down the side of the chimney into the ground.

Over time the improvised construction gave out. Weather and wind slowly loosened it until it would spin like a weather vein in any kind of wind or rain storm. We’d see it coming as the picture on the set would grow in fuzziness until reaching a state of all black and white ants in a few moments. To fix the picture my mother, the teacher, found a way using us children and a large pipe wrench.

Problems with the picture came and went with the weather but fixing it was always a necessity during football season. My mother was a football fan to her brittle bones. The gist of her plan was this. One child, or her, would be in the living room watching the set. They would call out to my sister or brother if the picture was improving. The second kid would be near the wood stove at the other end of the room. There they hollered at another sibling in the dining room who would pass that on to the kid at the open window. This final sister or brother of mine, at the end of our unique game of ‘telephone’ shouted through the window to whoever was at the antenna outside.

The whoever was usually my mother or I. The weather could be all sorts. I remember wind blowing a light rain into my back as I worked the wrench. The wrench was the biggest one I’d ever seen, to this day. Like a cartoon sized one. It was tightened around the tall pipe with the thin fingers of the antenna atop it. My sister or brother would call out to me from the window. “A little more,” “too much, too much, go back!” and so forth. It could take just a couple of minutes to get the picture back. But sometimes it took much longer. If the weather was particularly nasty I used an old wooden shovel handle and wedged it between the wrench and the wall of the house. Sometimes this held for a while other times it came free before I’d even made it back in the shelter of our home. I saw a lot of football games in pieces because of this.

In this makeshift way, the programming of four stations was brought into our living room, lighting up our isolated and peaceful world. When the picture was clear everybody would rush back into the living-room. Whatever was on was clear again and enjoyable to some, of passing interest to others. We’d worked together to get it back and we watched the fruits of our labor together. Perhaps it is not my many TVs that make me feel so rich, but those I share its stories with.