I’ve always resented that "it’s a small world" notion. Sure, sure, it’s boringly true that the world’s wired, that e-mail, instant messaging and texting mean that you can annoy your best friend traveling in Tanzania as easily as you can your pal the next cubicle over. But really, the world’s a big place, right, and it’s not like you’re going to see regular ads, say, for the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk on say, some tiny Micronesian island — are you?
Bzzzzt! Wrong!
I might have to revise my quaint resentments: not long after I moved to Kosrae, a little speck of land a notch off the equator in the North Pacific, my wife, Alice, and I hooked into their cable TV system. Now they’ve only had TV for a couple of years on Kosrae — it’s an island of 8,000 people, and it’s poor; you thankfully don’t see the latest fashions from "The OC" on the island teens.
We were happy to be on an essentially unspoiled island, but we were also eager for a little TV, since there aren’t any movie theaters, clubs or anything resembling nightlife on the island.
Imagine our surprise when we found that the network and affiliate stations (channels 2-7, plus 9) are the same stations we see in Santa Cruz. I’m not simply saying that you can see here how Ted Koppel’s hair is thinning, I’m saying that we see local news stations — San Francisco Bay Area news stations here — if you call "local" some 5,000 miles away.
I was taken aback when I first viewed them, thinking that we were getting some special tourists’ programming, miraculously packaged for our eyes only. Strangest yet was that we’d arrived in summer, so that a goodly number of commercials were for the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. It was truly unnerving seeing the giddy faces of roller-coastering Cruzans and hearing the Boardwalk theme, while we were digging into our new digs on the other side of the Pacific.
We soon found out that the fact we were seeing the Cruz on Kosrae was a weird fluke: The telecommunications company here had been able to wrangle the best deal for purchased programming from the Bay Area. We could have gotten corn-fed communications from Des Moines, but instead we got the Beach Boardwalk in all its glory.
Santa Cruz is big-time miles (and the distance in cultures seems at least that big) from here, but everyone seems to have heard of the Boardwalk, because of the commercials, and thinks it’s a great thing. But if you have a deeper conversation with the locals, it seems like some might think that Santa Cruz itself is a big Boardwalk, which may be true as well.
| The Cruz/Kosrae connection was strange enough, but I must elaborate on some technical aspects of the arrangement. Everyone thinks it’s a digital age, but "progress" is measured in fits and starts, which keenly describes some of the television viewing here. |
We see news that happened long ago, sometimes agonizingly long ago. You think TiVo does time-shifting? Try Kosraean TV. We got to see Bush elected twice (and for me, the first time was bad enough). Recently, the tapes didn’t arrive (the Micronesian mail is very iffy), and they broadcast the previous week’s tape, so that we saw the exact same news and shows from the previous week, moment for godawful moment.
And the technical quality of their broadcasts is something else again. It can be exactly like watching a bad videotape play in a funky home machine. VERY frequently, the screen will go completely blue and will come up with an onscreen message in white letters, which will say "PLAY" or "Video Calibration."
When it first happened, I thought I was playing a tape on my own machine. It’s very weird when it happens for a few minutes at a time (also frequent), because the audio often doesn’t go out, but the show is blanked, and then just resumes mid-stream. Of course, that’s a sight better than when you just see a static screen, with a box that says the channel number and "no signal" and nothing else, for hours.
Very soothing.
Trying to tape from the tapes is an exercise in madness too. They don’t broadcast shows on the hour here; they will sometimes start six minutes later, eight minutes later, 11 minutes later. Before I wised up and slotted a half-hour leeway on either side of a taping, I missed the beginnings and endings of many a show. Instead of "24," I got "22 1/2."
I should have taken the warning I received when I went to pay my first bill at the telecommunications center here. They have a bunch of clocks on the wall, representing times in various major cities and some of the nearby island groups. But those clocks too aren’t synced on the hour: some are six minutes past, some 26 minutes past...
When we pointed out that there might be a wee bit of inaccuracy there, the counterperson just smiled. Time is elastic, you know. And just to bring it all home, once in a while, they will broadcast shows completely out of time whack, by hours — and sometimes move them from channel to channel as well.
TV watching: It’s not for sissies.
However, if you tire of the hijinks of broadcast television, you can always switch to the truly local channel: Kosraean TV.
Here you can see an incredible mélange of island events — feasts, speeches, religious gatherings, public celebrations, sporting events — broadcast over and over, without virtue of any judicious editing, introduction or conclusion.
It’s Kosrae in the raw, where the cameraperson relaxedly pans the audience at any given event for l-o-n-g minutes at a time. Focus and subject interest aren’t the overarching concentrations, just volume of tape, done at a very leisurely pace. We watch it just to point out people we know (it’s an island, after all), and when we need the least demanding visual stimulation.
I like to think that somewhere in Santa Cruz, you’re getting a broadcast from Kosrae. Perhaps seeing a parallel world to the Boardwalk, but it would show the Mangrove Swamp Ride, The SweatStop, Hot Rain World, Giant Clam Hunt and other Kosraean worthies to compete with The Giant Dipper, clanging arcades and carousels from long past. Resistance is futile: I’ve got to give in — it’s a small world, after all.
Contact Tom Bentley at svreeken@santacruzsentinel.com.
