A Voice from New Zealand at Two in the Morning

My father got his ham radio license when he was sixteen. He's seventy-four now. Last winter, I finally asked him to teach me, and he lit up like a Christmas tree.

We spent evenings in his basement shack, a cramped room full of glowing dials, headphones and a map of the world covered in pins. Each pin is a person he's talked to over fifty-eight years. I studied for the exam at his kitchen table. I passed in March.

My first contact was a retired farmer in Ohio. We talked about the weather for ten minutes. I was shaking with excitement.

But the night I'll never forget was in June. Conditions were perfect. At two in the morning, through crackles and hiss, a voice came through: a woman in Christchurch, New Zealand, eating her lunch on a sunny afternoon. We talked for twenty minutes about her sheep and my kids.

My father sat beside me, grinning, with a fresh pin in his hand. He let me put it in the map myself.