Actual Airwaves

What will it be like when oral storytelling returns?

They left their electronics at home and drove to Presqu’ile Provincial Park. It was dusk, early winter. Nobody was around. The woman who knew the story was in her seventies. She said it had come to her from a friend in Charlevoix, who had heard it from a Russian traveler. 

Someone built a fire on the beach. They huddled down and listened to the story. 

Afterward, they went home in a daze and fell asleep without telling their partners or their children a word of it.

Several days later, a member of the Presqu’ile group invited her friends to a snowy meadow outside Gananoque. One friend drove in from Whitby. After the story was over, they all spent the day together. At six, they ate at an Irish pub, surrounded by phones and watches and TVs. They talked, of course, about nothing: old movies, the forecast, the artwork on the tablecloth.  

The boy from Whitby drove home, desperate to tell his mother, who loved stories more than anything. She spent most of her time in bed due to a chronic illness, and it was too cold out to consider even a few minutes in the yard. So the boy climbed into bed with his mother and got up close to her ear, lying side by side, an intimacy they hadn’t shared in years, and he breathed the story into her. Nobody, nothing, could have heard it.

And so it went, inching outward, from Whitby to Thunder Bay, from Thunder Bay to Shebandowan, from Shebandowan to Atikokan, from Atikokan to Wabigoon, from Wabigoon to Lac du Bonnet, and on and on and on, people huddled around fires in the winter, passing along the story.  

A few months later, as the ice was starting to thaw, it reached Banff, Alberta, where a grandfather (who may not have understood the rules when the story was passed along to him) told it to his four-year-old grandson (who was too young to comprehend the rules). He told it at midday, at full volume, in his living room. The unblinking eye of a home assistant took in the story between requests for a Duke Ellington suite and the local traffic report.

Soon the story was everywhere. It was content. It was raw material. A visual model turned it into a painting. A musical model turned it into a song. A language model turned it into a twelve-hundred-page novel on the spot, then translated it into every Romance language, serialized it, abridged it, chewed it up, and spat it out as a dozen retellings. The retellings entered the ecosystem, begetting new paintings, new songs, new chapters.

The storytellers were unfazed. There had been many stories before this one, and every story was eventually appropriated by technology. It was part of a story’s lifecycle.

In the summer, the Presqu’ile group met again. There was a new story to tell. A girl from Cobourg had brought it with her. The rumor was that this one had originated in Vladivostok, but nobody could be certain. It may have come from Winnipeg. It may have come from Ajax. It may have drifted in on the wind.