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Another 15 Minutes I've always had a special interest in publishing, particularly if I could generate an interesting reaction, a meaningful controversy or gain some sort of positive notoriety along the way. But when you are born to a little Montana cow town, it's hard to have much information to publish, or find an audience interested in reading it. |
| I grew up in a town of about 8,000 people. The next larger city was 150 miles away. It had a mall. Before they finished the freeway it took three hours to get there. After it was completed, I could make the trip in an hour and a half, driving an average of 100 M.P.H. That was okay in Montana at the time, but not anymore. After I left, they reverted to posting an unreasonable speed limit for the long drives through wide open spaces. When I started driving, there was no daytime speed limit. I got pulled over for a warning when I was clocked going 95 in my little VW Rabbit that I had optimistically rebadged an "Audi 50." I got the warning only because it was approaching dusk and my tires were hella bald. A few years earlier, I would have risked getting the Montana natural resource conservation ticket, a $5 fine for going significantly over 55, that didn't go on your record but did allow the state to comply with Federal quota laws designed to keep drivers throughout the entire nation from driving speeds that might be unreasonable for a crowded east coast turnpike. But I digress. Often, actually; I must be ADD. Anyway, I told that story to tell this one: when you grow up in the middle of nowhere, to connect with the rest of the world, you either need to go where people are, or bring people to you. I was tired of failing to get enough reaction from people in my little town. My most explosive stories through high school were only making old people angry. I published a series of articles questioning the safety of the local municipal swimming hole, which was really just a diverted pool of stagnant river water. I invoked the wrath of Ms. Laird, a teacher and lifeguard at the pool, by connecting the annual spring epidemic of earaches and flu amongst the kiddies with the opening of the pool, as well as the ineffective use of chlorine to make the raw greenish run off water safe enough for your offspring. I even interviewed a pharmacist. The town frowned. This was not a place for Erin Brockovichism. Similarly, my well meaning attempts to expunge the county's high school graduation ceremony of its customary religious prayers in my senior year bent a number of people out of shape. Particularly incendiary was my photo interview with a cross-section of peers against the county's establishment of religion, including the president of Key Club and the son of a preacher man. But the biggest stink came from an article on the RSVP (retired senior volunteer program) plan to hand out the phone numbers of old people to latchkey kids so they'd have someone to call when they got home. I didn't say the plan was bad, I just suggested some sort of intermediate switchboard, to make sure the old people didn't get rung off the hook by hooligans, and kids didn't get anonymously hooked up with lecherous old men for private alley rendezvous. Drawing the most contention was my use of the word "activist" in reference to the RSVP. I was imagining 'community activism,' but to this World War II generation, being called an activist apparently was synonymous with branding them Nazis, Communists, or worse. Clearly I needed to write about things outside my town. But when my articles on the current music scene in my school newspaper has classmates asking what "dee peach mode" was, and prompted my instructor to insist that there was no such thing as "alternative music," only alternative types of music, I realized I needed to write to an outside audience as well. That would be made possible through the miracles of computer technology. Part II > Electronic escape |
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