Drooling Banjos

The other night I lost my way as I drove home from work at 1:30 a.m. One minute I was barreling down the monster hill 2 miles from home, the next I was tooling along a dark, narrow lane that I didn't immediately recognize, hemmed in by hemlocks on both sides.

I can account for the missing 5 minutes. I was listening to an audiobook which had just reached an exciting part. So wrapped up was I in the story that I was pounding the steering wheel, screaming, "Stephanie's in on it! Stephanie's in on it!" Alas, the protagonist paid me no attention.

As I pounded and screamed, I drove two miles, turned right, went past my own road, stopped at a stop sign, crossed an intersection and drove about another mile. It's scary how I managed all that and yet have no memory of it. But I do remember that Stephanie had a tell-tale tattoo on her inner thigh that was all that was left of her after she was tortured and killed by her former OSS handlers.

It's a good thing the book was over, or I might have ended up in Vermont.

Actually, Vermont sounds pretty good to me these days. I'm having escapist dreams. They come to me whenever I venture into my yard and forget to look away from the pile of junk in front of the 30-by-70 Quonset hut my husband stores his important extra parts in. They come to me when I hear my gelding coughing from excess dust in the paddock. They come to me when the mornings are crisp and clear and the day, now that my daughter goes to public school, stretches ahead of me like a long, intriguing road.

They also come to me when I look at the schedule at my newspaper job and see that I've drawn maybe two four-hour shifts in the coming week. My job is dwindling away to nothing. Everyone who's anyone at the paper is jumping the print publication ship and signing up with the online crew. No one seems to be the least bit interested in the print side of the operation. I'm having what one of my co-workers referred to recently as a "crisis of relevance."

Even I can see that print news just cannot compete with electronic news. I worked the wires the other night -- pulling stories off the news service wires and laying them out for the next morning's edition -- and at the end of my shift, after putting the paper to bed, I visited Verizon Online. Its headlines were pretty much the stories I had just put in the paper. No one need read the paper in the morning. Just power up the computer and they'll get the same thing.

I do find it difficult to accept that eventually print newspapers will not be wanted at all. As a kid I loved spreading the funnies out on the floor to read, and I loved the columns and classified ads and editorial cartoons and the serial Christmas stories. As an adult, I've loved putting them together and reading all the funny stuff that doesn't get in and being part of a newsroom. I don't know what people will read in the bathroom if there are no more print newspapers. I guess they'll have computers mounted directly in front of the john. Now that I think of it, I'm surprised my husband hasn't installed one there yet.

One thing I am sure of, though, is that I don't want to be part of the newspaper Webolution. This is why: Because there are too many people spouting just about everything on the Internet, myself included, and there doesn't seem to be any quality control. Where we expected to be able to trust our print newspapers, where print newspaperpeople committed themselves to earning trust, the Web just doesn't seem trustworthy to me. It seems rampant and wild.

But I suppose I had better get used to fossilization, because that's where I'm headed.

And I thought it was only Vermont!