Mrrrrr Friends,
What did you do today? Me, I joined our local public radio station (and, yes, I had to use my peoples’ bank account). But not just any public radio – North Country Public Radio. NCPR is really wonderful. Why? In a nutshell, NCPR is one of the common threads that knit our wonderful new community together.
I speak with some listening experience, having lived in very different NPR communities in both Wisconsin and on Long Island. My people have also been listeners of NPR in Chicago, Minnesota, New York City, and Washington DC. We are of accord that NCPR is something special.
Perhaps it is the fact that our world is fairly remote, winters are long here, the full-time population is relatively small, and services are sparsely scattered. It is safe to say that folks who have come to live here full-time and folks that were born here and choose to stay here, find value in these things that many others would find inconvenient. Nevertheless, knowing what is going on in your community is pretty important to staying in touch, engaged and enjoying life.
The Adirondack Park is 6 million acres of public and private land knit together by the protection of the NY State Constitution and the principle that public lands will remain “forever wild.” Hamlets and villages are scattered throughout the old mountains that reach up to 5000 feet into the sky, east across the Lake Champlain Valley, west and south to the Black and Mohawk River valleys and up toward our neighbors to the north and Lake Ontario. It is a lot of space…a lot of wonderful mostly forested and, yes, critter and flora-filled space. Tying the human elements (resources, controversies, news and society) together intelligently, democratically and creatively and integrating them with flora, fauna, waterways, and mountains in a way that complements the remoteness, is important.
NCPR does a bang-up job of giving us all the cool usual stuff of NPR:
Morning Edition,
All Things Considered,
Fresh Air, Click and Clack…but then they also weave a very local touch throughout the day and with the
8 O’Clock Hour and the
All Before Five news and information segments, lots of wonderful music and art news, and the especially cool
Calendar which tells us what’s going on right in our own park. I especially like a nice segment called
Natural Selections with a very nice-sounding lady named Martha and Dr. Curt. They’ve done some excellent educational work on turtles and how they breathe – how cool is that?
But perhaps the coolest thing about NCPR is that the folks are all from here. They are broadcasting and mostly living right around us. They drive on our local roads, shop in our local stores, show up at many of our regular local events and they bring that intimacy to the radio. The folks on the radio are us. They can look out the window and talk about the weather as it happens, they talk about cool critters they see on their drives. Case in point, from my feline perspective: they report the adventures of cats and dogs. I’ve noted this here before, but they do announce when people “lose” their animals. It is true that the NCPR announcers seem to couch their language in a very ethnocentric manner - “lost dog,” for example (why
do dogs get lost more than cats?). But, to be fair, they might be considered a little loopy if they catered too much to their cat audience.
And they handled my membership well. During their now close to complete 2-day fund drive, I decided that my people should belong…they had talked about it. So I hopped online (let’s face it, humans just don’t even try to understand Meowese, so I couldn’t call) and filled out the form – I got a carbon credit that had been donated by the Adirondack Council, another cool group up here. I was the 102nd new member to join in the past two days and, I believe, their first cat member. I checked the box that said they could announce my name on the radio and made sure they knew that I was getting the membership with my people in mind.
At the next break, they mentioned two human names and then mine! The nice lady didn’t pronounce it right – she said Diesel The Cat not Diesel T. Hecat – but I didn’t mind, indeed, it might have been the best route to take for a radio broadcast. I could tell they were a bit unsure if I was real or if someone was playing with them (like a cat and mouse kind of thing), but they were gracious and quoted me as writing “NCPR is essential to our wonderful community.”
Turns out, in a brief correspondence with June, who is the membership front-lady, they actually have a few dog members! She did confirm I was their first cat…and stated that they were always glad to add a new species to their membership rolls.
I’d say they are pretty far along the species-relative curve.
Please note my new blog list to the right. Here you can go straight to the cool NCPR news blog and to another invaluable Adirondack blog resource, the Adirondack Almanack.
