Overnight on the 80

There's a stretch of I-80 west of Kearney where every radio station you've been leaning on for the last hundred miles gives up at once. FM goes to static. AM picks up something in Spanish out of Denver and a preacher out of somewhere you'll never find, and if it's after midnight and the sky's clear, a jazz station out of Chicago comes in for about eleven minutes and then it's gone, like it was never there. I've driven that stretch two, three nights a week for twenty-two years. Reefer trailer, produce mostly, Salinas to Chicago and back, and the radio is how I know where I am better than the signs do. The station I'm going to tell you about was out of North Platte. Small, low-power, AM. It came in around Lexington and held until Ogallala if the weather was right. Overnights, midnight to five, there was one host. He never said his full name. He called himself Del. Del played what he wanted. That was the whole format. One night it was all Patsy Cline. Another night he played a full Miles Davis album straight through and then apologized to the "truckers and insomniacs" for not talking. He read the farm report at 4 a.m. in the same voice he used for everything, slow and a bit amused, like he was telling you about the soybean futures as a favor. He took calls. Not many. Nobody's awake in that part of Nebraska. But he'd read out the dedications, and around 2013 I started calling. Never gave my name. He called me "the Salinas run" because I told him once that's what I drove. I'd request something. He'd play it, or he'd say "no, but here's what you actually want" and play something else, and he was usually right. He played me a Gillian Welch song one night that I had to pull over for. I'm not going to explain that. It was a bad year, and I pulled over at the rest area at Brady and sat there with the engine running until it was done, and then I called in and said "again" and he said "I figured," and he played it again.

You don't know what you've got with a thing like that. It's a man in a room in North Platte and a man in a cab on the interstate, and you've never seen each other and you never will, and twice a week for nine years you talk for maybe ninety seconds and then he plays a song. He knew when my dad died. I didn't tell him. I just called and asked for "Farther Along," the old gospel one, and he was quiet for a second and then said, "Who was it," and I said my dad, and he said "I'm sorry, Salinas," and played it, and didn't say anything else about it, then or ever. That's the right way to do it. Most people don't know the right way to do it. In 2022 the station went off the air. I came in around Lexington one night in October and turned the dial to where it always was and there was nothing. Not static, exactly. Just that flat hum of a frequency with nobody on it. I figured it was weather. It wasn't. Next week, same thing. I looked it up at a truck stop in Grand Island. Sold. The signal was going to be a religious network out of Texas by Christmas. I never found out what happened to Del. I don't know his last name. I don't know if he retired, or got sick, or just got tired. There's no way to look. He's not a man with a page anywhere. He's a voice out of a window in western Nebraska and the window's shut. I still turn to that frequency when I come through. Every time. It's habit, I tell myself, like checking a mirror. The Texas preacher comes on and I turn it off and drive the eleven minutes of Chicago jazz in silence until that goes too. Last month I did something I don't do. I pulled into the rest area at Brady, around 2 a.m., and I put on that Gillian Welch song off my phone, and I sat there. It's not the same. There's nobody on the other end to say "I figured." But it was still the right song.