In the summer of 2006, my brother and I worked on our uncle’s ranch northeast of San Diego. We cleared trees, fed horses, split wood, mowed grass, laid rubber pellets in a horse pen, and (in my case) got a scorching case of poison oak.
In the bucolic mountains, before the era of the ubiquitous smart phone, there was extremely limited cell service. (A stump you could stand on in the driveway of the main house marked the spot.) The only things you could hear besides the tractor and machinery were the lows of cows, whinnies of horses, and tinny Panic at the Disco songs from the under-cabinet radio in the workers’ house kitchen, which picked up three stations depending on the time of day.
Aside from weekend trips into town for groceries, all we had for entertainment was that radio and a Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine that he’d yanked on his flight out, because it had an article about wiffle ball.
We read every page of it, repeatedly. Every page. The tantalizing ads for Vegas restaurants. The wiffle ball tips, though we had no wiffles. The Donald Trump real estate seminar (featuring George Foreman) in the back. The crossword prompts, cursing the son of a bitch who did it in pen. The corporate ephemera and infographics. Towards the end, the fine print on ads. Every page. “It’s my turn,” we would angrily mutter halfway through our sandwiches.
It felt like stilted, abject boredom at the time, but I just paid $22.75 on blessed eBay for a copy of the June 2006 Spirit magazine. What a great memory.
