Within Range

Alright, the Giants may be one of the worst teams to lead their division this late in a season. Their pitching is poor and their hitting, though better of late, doesn't promise to hold up for much longer. But I'll take beating the Dodgers to move back into first, no matter how fleeting the pleasure turns out to be. Steven has the right idea:

The best part wasn't the game itself, though, but getting into New Silver after another heinous errand to Wal-Mart and hearing Jon Miller call the final out on KNBR. I vividly recall the drive home from the Bay Area a year ago, when I kept expecting the station to give out -- the Grapevine, L.A., Palm Springs, Blythe -- and was amazed to discover that it carried all the way to the Pinal County line. I barely listened to CDs over the whole fourteen-hour trip -- with a break in Pasadena for Thai food with Greg -- because I was so happy to have a little bit of home follow me home.

I'd had a foretaste of the delight years before, when the Liz Phair demo tape -- thank you Florence Dore! -- we'd been listening to on Utah's Highway 12 ended and we heard, to Kim's chagrin, a Bay Area traffic report on KNBR, clear as a bell. Of course, we were at 10,000 feet at the time, with no stations of consequence for hundreds of miles. To hear KNBR slowly fade to a crackle in the heart of L.A., only to revive on the way out of town, do the same in Phoenix, then come back for one last burst through Casa Grande -- that seemed considerably more impressive.

Then came the coup de grace, a few weeks later, when I got into the car for a nighttime trip to the store and discovered, after inadvertently selecting AM, that KNBR can, under the right conditions, barely be heard in our driveway. A Mexican station intrudes. The crackle makes Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot seem timid. And I'm lucky to catch every other word. Nevertheless, I feel the ligature, however tenuous, and rejoice.

Now I know, if the internet radio thing -- I paid for the not-very-reliable Major League Baseball service, but at $15 for the year, it's hard to complain -- isn't working and I'm too edgy to watch the Game Update window refresh itself, I can go out to the car and get lucky.

Tomorrow, of course, I begin the long drive to the Bay Area. Rest assured that KNBR will be part of my listening, if only because I desperately need to hear a dozen ads for the Diamond Center: "In Concord, at Willow Pass Road. . . on Stevens Creek Boulevard, just east of the Lawrence Expressway. . ." The sound is like a favorite blanket.