by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1997 by Michael Finley

This is the story of one of the humbler information technologies -- the lowly analog microcassette recorder. I buy them not quite like candy, but often enough that there are several around the house.

They are great for taking notes when driving, or out for a walk somewhere. Sometimes people see you and think you are shizophrenic, talking to your hand, but that is small price to pay, in my mind, for being able to "write" on the fly.

OK. Imagine it is a beautiful fall morning, and I am walking my big poodle Beau at Crosby Farm Nature Area, alongside the Mississippi River in Saint Paul. It is an undeveloped park with lots of paths cutting through the trees along the shore. A perfect place for a scofflaw to let his dog run wild for a few minutes.

And I have the microcassette machine in my pocket, a generic blister-pack Sony. The morning is gorgeous, with newfallen leaves ankle-deep, and white vapor rising from the river. Once, a four-point deer poked his head into a clearing.

My dog begs me to chase him. It's his favorite game, a role reversal because chasing others is the center of his life otherwise. But I'm game, and I chug along for a hundred yards with him. We take several switchbacks, going deeper into the trees. When we arrive at the riverbank, I feel in my pocket for the recorder. It's gone.

You know how when something is gone you check every pocket eleven times to make sure it's gone? Well, this was gone. I figure I either dropped it when I made my last note, or it fell out of my pocket during the little jog. So I begin backracking. The dog wants me to chase him some more, but I my mood is rapidly darkening and I decline.

Leaves have been falling in large numbers, so the ground is covered with brown shapes and jagged shadows, all of which look like my little machine. I begin calculating in my mind the loss of the unit -- maybe $40. Besides, they wear out quickly because you are always dropping them and knocking them on tabletops. I look everywhere I walked -- about a two-mile distance -- for the little machine. No luck.

I was nearly reconciled to the loss when I spotted it, lying on a patch of bare dirt. The battery and tape compartments were both sprung open, and the tape and batteries lay splayed out on the ground, as if a squirrel or crow had given some thought to taking them home, and then said, nah.

I popped the machine back together and pushed the play button, still ready for the worst, a dead unit. But instead I heard my own voice. I was talking about Sao Paulo Brazil, which I had visited on business two weeks before. On the tape, I was sitting in a bus on a smoggy artery heading out of town, talking to myself about the beggars I saw crouched by the highway signs, and the advertising, with the nearly naked models, and the infinite pastel rows of high-rise apartment buildings.

And now I am standing in a clearing in the forest, 7000 miles away, hearing my high, sped-up voice. The woods are so quiet that this little machine and its tinny little speaker ring clear through the air. Nearby birds, hearing my recorded chatter and finding it supicious, take wing and flap away to a safer roost.

If you have ever stood between two mirrors and seen the illusion of infinite regression in them, you have an idea what I was felling, addressing myself electronically from a place so different and so far away.

And if that was not stunning enough, I flipped the tape over -- I did not want to tape over this interesting travelogue -- and there was my daughter's voice, talking to a caller on the phone. I re-use my answering machine tapes in my hand recorder, and this tape was perhaps five years old, when my little girl was eight. Her voice sounds so clear, so young and lovely. I had forgotten what she sounded like then. I knew I couldn't tape this over, either.

The dog, meanwhile, was standing there looking at me with that panting grin dogs wear when they are in their element to the hilt. But the look on his face just now is all wonderment and admiration. He "understands" very little that I do, but this latest trick, picking something up in the woods and having it talk to me in my own voice, takes the cake.

The insurance-company-executive-slash-poet Wallace Stevens once wrote a a simple thing called "A Jar in Tennessee," a tiny poem that said that placing a human artifact on a hill in Tennesee changes everything about the hill and Tennesee. Consciousness places frames of meaning on the wildernerss.

That was what I saw in the look in Beau's eye. It's entirely likely, as Stevens is his favorite poet. And it was a gorgeous day, with the scent of sand and pine adrift like microscopic confetti in the morning breeze.

Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of THE NEW WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com

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