There's Farms And There's Farms

I once lived on a farm in Vermont, the kind with cows and chickens and milk and eggs and cow manure and hay. Ages ago, I remember reading a book (sponsored by Ralston Purina Feeds) with drawings about this very neat and clean farm. Ha! You'd think the animals never pooped.

Now I live near a farm on top of a mountain, an antenna farm. That's what it's called in broadcasting. All the tv stations are there, as well as most of the FM stations and a few business radio transmitters. You look up there at night and it’s a big area of tall rows of flashing red lights.

To the average citizen, it’s just a bunch of blinking lights on the mountain; to anyone in radio or tv, it’s the glowing curtain in front of the Ark of the Covenant, nearly worthy of worship. It’s a symbol of electronic energy transmitted to radio and tv sets within a sixty mile range, people in a small studio whose voice and/or face will be in thousands of homes and cars.

It’s racks of equipment with lights flickering and meters waving back and forth, digital dials with numbers going up and down or holding still and only we know what they mean. It’s leaving the building, looking up on an overcast day and not being able to see the top of the tower in the clouds.

It beats shoveling cow plops any day.