High Wire

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 6, 1935.

“My radio,” said Jimmie Frise, “is on the bum.”

“The same here,” I said. “Last night, I couldn’t get anything but sopranos and dramas.”

“I mean,” said Jimmie, “mine won’t work. It hisses and squawks and when you do get a program, it throbs and wavers.”

“You should have heard the soprano I had on last night,” I agreed. “Talk about throbbing and squawking.”

“What I mean is,” persisted Jim, “there is something mechanical wrong with mine.”

“Don’t be too sure,” I argued. “Even if you buy a new one, you’ll get sopranos that hiss and squeal worse than if your tubes were worn out. And dramas – there are certain hours, nowadays, where you can twist right around the dial and find nothing but dramas, tense-voiced men and terrified women. My idea is that we radio listeners should be able, at all times, to get what we want on the radio.”

“Oh, is that so?” said Jim.

“Certainly it’s so,” I said heatedly. “Why shouldn’t it be?”.

“Did it never occur to you,” demanded Jim, “that the people who put on that free entertainment are doing a rather magnificent thing for us?”

“Free?” I shouted. “Do you call it free entertainment when I pay $300 for the machine that allows those guys to shove their commercial advertisements right into the sanctity of my home?”

“Er-ah,” said Jim.

“Er-ah, exactly,” I said. “You are like a lot of other people. You sit down with a sappy grin and listen thankfully while hundreds of commercial enterprises come and yell at you.”

“But some of those advertisers,” pointed out Jimmie, “pay as much as $10,000 for a half-hour program.”

“Why shouldn’t they,” I inquired, “when there are potentially 1,000,000 listeners? We shouldn’t have to listen to baloney. There should be a law against baloney.”

“You could easily turn it off if you don’t like it,” explained Jim.

“Why should I have to get up, in my own home,” I shouted, “and turn off my own machine because some public nuisance is allowed on the air?”

“I never heard that argument before,” admitted Jim.

“Well,” I said, “there are too many sopranos and too many dramas on the air. And too many public speakers. And too many comedians. And too many gabblers. Gabble, gabble, gabble. Do you know, there is a fortune waiting for the announcer who will speak in a slow, dreamy voice? The way some of those announcers talk, you’d think they were describing a hotel fire.”

A Kind of Electric Scum

“Well, even so, I wish my radio was working right,” said Jim. “There are enough lovely programs to make it worth while.”

“Sure there are,” I agreed. “There is the Booka Boola hour. They don’t even announce the program. They just start a vast, heavenly orchestra and a more than heavenly choir. And for half an hour, without a single yammering, stuttering human voice to spoil it, they fill your house with ecstasy.”

“And the symphonies on Sunday,” said Jim.

“You can always turn off the commentator,” I admitted, “the guy who needs to clear his throat. He’s got me coughing so hard by the time his turn is over, I can’t hear the rest of the program. Curious about commentators, isn’t it? They’ve all got a bad cold.”

“I think it’s my tubes,” said Jim. “Although I got a new set just before Christmas.”

“Maybe it’s your aerial,” I said.

“I haven’t got an aerial,” said Jim.

“What?” I cried. “No aerial? How do you expect to catch the music out of the air without an aerial?” Hah, hah, hah, “so you’re radio isn’t working right?”

“Lot’s of people haven’t got aerials,” affirmed Jim.

“Nonsense, my dear boy,” I assured him. “You’ve simply got to have an aerial. Don’t you understand the first principles of radio? Don’t you appreciate the simplest everyday facts of radio?”

“I do not,” confessed Jim.

“The ether,” I showed him, “is full of waves. Not little waves like on Lake Ontario or even on the Atlantic ocean. But great big waves, as you can understand, seeing how big nothing is as compared with something. See?”

“Certainly,” said Jim.

“So these colossal waves go waving along, sometimes more than other times; for instance, when there is a storm, the waves are rough, as you can see from your radio. In bad weather, it is harder to catch the music with your aerial than in nice smooth weather.”

“I always understood,” interrupted Jim, “that radio was instantaneous. That we heard the music at the same instant it was heard in the studio away off in New York or London.”

“That just goes to show you,” I said, “how fast those ether waves are. But they have to be fast. They have to travel from here to the moon, to the sun, to the farthest star. And naturally, if a wave has to travel that far, it has got to be moving. That is, if it wants to get there in any sort of time at all. If the ether waves were slow, they might get so tired going a billion miles that they would lose interest altogether in where they were going. So you see the scientific principle there? They have a long way to go. So naturally, they go fast.”

“I think I follow you,” said Jim.

“Anyway, there on the top of that illimitable sea of ether, with gigantic waves flowing away in all directions, floats a sort of wreckage, a sort of flotsam and jetsam, of squeaks, squeals, moans, groans, words, notes, howls, yowls, bawls, squalls.”

“I can see it,” said Jim, closing his eyes. “A sort of scum.”

“A kind of electric scum,” I corrected, “to put it scientifically. You have to understand the science of physics these days, Jim. And this is where your aerial comes in.”

“Ah,” said Jim.

“You stick your aerial up into the air,” I demonstrated, “and it has, as you may have noticed, a kind of fish net or trap of wires on it. It catches that scum. That floating wreckage from a thousand ships. And down the wire into your house comes that stuff you catch in your aerial trap.”

“Mmmmm,” agreed Jim. “But how do you select only certain wreckage from all that must get tangled in your aerial?”

“That is done,” I said, “by the dials. That would be too technical for a beginner like you to understand. But you can see how important it is to have an aerial. My dear chap, without an aerial, you can’t expect to trap anything. No wonder you have been getting nothing.”

“I wonder how much it costs to put up an aerial?” Jim mused.

“Don’t be absurd,” I said. “You can put up the aerial yourself. Just get some wire and make a sort of bird cage out of it.”

“I have an old bird cage down cellar,” said Jim.

“Perfect,” I assured him. “Nail the bird cage on to a clothes prop, fasten a wire that will run to the ground, and nail the pole to the roof. Simple.”

“Lend me a hand?” asked Jim.

“Sure,” said I.

So we arranged to attend to the matter before supper, when we would still have daylight. It was only a matter of a few minutes to fasten the old bird cage on to a clothes prop and to attach to it the end of a long piece of telephone wire that would run down and in Jimmie’s side window. Jim borrowed ladders from a neighbor and we set them up to the roof.

“Which end will you carry?” asked Jim.

“You don’t need me up there,” I smiled.

“Of course I do,” cried Jim. “It’s the only place I do need you.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Jim, but I get the jimjams up any heights. You know that.”

“Listen, you’re on a roof. A big broad roof. Don’t be silly, I can’t hold it and nail it, both.”

“Absolutely no, Jim,” I assured him. “I get dizzy even hanging pictures.”

“What did I ask you to help me for?” cried Jim. “Was it to help me nail this thing in the cellar?”

“You’ll need somebody to stay on the ground and tell you if you have it straight up,” I pointed out. “I’ll do that part.”

“Then,” said Jim, “I’ll have to put it off until I get somebody with enough insides to climb a ladder on to a practically flat roof.”

“Being afraid of heights is not a matter of insides,” I protested. “It has to do with deep and hidden complexes. It is due…”

“Never mind,” said Jim, starting back to the cellar door.

“All right, then,” I said. “I’ll help. I’ll take the lower end. You go first.”

Alone On the Ridge

So Jim went up the ladder first, hoisting the bird cage end of the pole, and I followed, bearing the heavy or bottom end of the pole. Jim went carefully. So did I. Jim got to the roof.

“Wait till I take off my boots,” he called down. “Hold everything.”

“You’ll catch cold,” I warned, for the evening was growing dark and chill. Jim’s boots passed me going down. Then I saw his legs vanish slowly over the edge of the roof. Only his hands showing, he hoisted the pole, and I lifted.

“Hold steady,” said Jim, quietly, when I came to the top. He was sprawled out. What had looked like a big flat roof was now a steep and precipitous cliff.

“I’ll stay here,” I said, clutching the rungs and hooking my feet.

“Take off your boots,” said Jim, “it’s easy then, in your sock feet.”

“Never,” I assured him. “Just never.”

Jim shoved the pole and cage ahead of him, and with arms and legs spread wide, hinched himself up that awful eerie slope.

I closed my eyes and just hung tight.

“All right,” called Jim. “Come along.” When I opened my eyes, Jim was sitting straddle the roof peak, holding the pole upright beside the chimney.

“Come and hold it while I nail it here,” said Jim unsteadily.

“Jim, I’m sorry,” I said. “It couldn’t be done.”

Jim stared grimly at me in the twilight. The air was growing colder. Grimly, he stared.

“So,” he said, “my old friend, my dear old friend, gets me straddled up here and leaves me flat.”

I hooked one leg through the rungs. I slowly untied my laces. I heard my boots drop sickeningly to the distant earth.

I spread my arms wide on the shingles. I inched myself forward, my sock feet clinging pathetically to the last rungs. I thought of the war. I remembered crawling like this, so flat, across dark hushed fields, and I wished I was back at the war again, in No Man’s Land, out from Mericourt. It was better there.

I felt Jim’s grip on my arm. I got up straddled beside him. I held the pole. Jim nailed and hammered. He wound wire around the chimney.

“Now,” he said, “wait here until I go down and attach the wire to the radio, to see if we have the connections right.”

“It’ll be all right, Jim,” I said. “Let’s both go down together.”

“Wait,” said Jim, already leeching his way down the slope. “I’ll holler as soon as I find it’s working.”

“Don’t be long,” I called, as his head vanished over the edge.

I sat astride the ridge. The darkness was settling. The houses far below me across the street were all warmly lighted.

The Roof Gets Steeper

Suddenly, up the chimney, through the house, out the windows of Jim’s house, I heard a great orchestral boom. The radio was working. Working immensely. The house seemed to tremble, to vibrate with it.

“Ah,” I said, clearing my throat and getting ready to make the descent. I would call Jim up on some pretext, so that he would be standing at the top of the ladder to receive me.

I heard the program change. I heard it loud and then soft; I heard men’s voices jabbering fiercely in the supper-time children’s hour.

“Hey,” I roared.

A man passing quickly on the street, homeward bent, paused and looked all around him. Then hurried on.

Down the chimney, I roared: “Hey, hey.”

And in the Frise house, the tumult and thunder of a radio in good working order filtered through cracks and windows and walls and chimney. It was dark.

“Hey,” I bellowed, covering my sock feet with my coat tails.

I thought of taking my penknife and throwing it at a window of a neighboring house. But there were no windows near enough. I watched for passing pedestrians, but everybody in Jimmie’s district comes home by car. A dog went by. I yelled at him. He just ran.

“Help, Help, HAAAALP,” I get go.

I drummed with my heels on Jim’s roof. But all I heard was a constantly shifting faint series of programs, as Jimmie and all his family tried out the beautiful radio.

And every single minute that passed, that vanishing roof grew steeper.

“I-I don’t even know exactly where the ladder end is,” I quavered to myself. “Oh, haaaaaalllp.”

Then I solved it. I reached out and caught the aerial wire. I gave it a sharp yank. It parted.

I waited.

“Hello, up there,” came Jimmie’s voice from the backyard.

“Come up,” I said, “something has happened to the aerial.”

Jim came up. I saw his head emerge over the edge.

“Wait there,” I said. And down the slope I crabbed, my feet feeling for him.

“It suddenly faded,” said Jim.

“The wind shifted the pole,” I said. “I think the wire parted.”

So while I went down the ladder, Jim removed his boots and clawed up to the bird cage.

“Physics,” I said to him, as he came down and joined me at the foot of the ladder, “is a thing everybody ought to know a little about in these days.”

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Editor’s Notes: This story appeared in Silver Linings (1978). I like the fact that in the introduction to that book, they call out this story as an example of “the old days”, because imagine that you need an aerial on the roof for your radio! But then aerials for television would go from common for 40 years only to become scarce again for 20-30 years, but you now see some digital aerials back on houses.