ning news. The only difference is that the definition here is going to be sharper. r or a few months after the dish ■ was hooked in, nothing much ■ seemed to change in Huxley. One thing that was noticeable was that the bar at the hotel experienced a sharp dip in business, particularly around dinner time. In the old days, people' got off work and came down for a few beers before dinner. After the dish, only a few single men came in after work, and most of them left after one or two. Not many of them came back later, either. The local stores had a slightly different problem. Merchants complained to one another that what had previously been their best hours were now the deadest, and that they were now busiest at lunch hour—their stores were filled with workers booking off for extended lunches to do their shopping. It was hard to get parttime help at lunch hour, because the high school kids weren’t available, and none of the women seemed interested in working. The reason for this was simple enough. Detroit is three time zones ahead of Huxley. What happens in Detroit at 8:00 p.m. happens in Huxley’s future. Carson and the late movies go on at 8:30. And in the Global Village, three hours is a practical eternity, an entire prime time. A future. And who wouldn’t want to live in the future if they could? The people of Huxley made their choice without second thoughts. iving in the future gave Doris LKlegg a very specific leg up in an important family argument. From the time Doris and hseer e—the town didn’t look any differhusband Herb moved out to Huxley, her sister-in-law Sue in Vancouver had let her know, and not very subtly, that she thought they’d moved to the middle of nowhere. Each time Doris and Herb visited her in Vancouver, Sue took pleasure in relating the details of her sophisticated city life, with its fine restaurants, its aerobics parlours, the better class of people, even the better selection of television programming available, things like the special sports and movie networks, or PBS and the local cable stations that provided extensive coverage of city events. One night after a few too many drinks, she actually phoned them up to tell them they didn’t even have a lifestyle. But with the satellite dish hooked up, Doris knew what went on in the world three hours before her sister-inlaw did. She knew the plots of the soap operas and of DallasandDynasty before her sister-in-law did. Hell, when the Network ran a special movie about Mussolini, Doris knew what happened to him before Sue even started to watch. Doris racked up some hefty telephone bills demonstrating her new-found lifestyle superiority, but that was a cheap price to pay for living in the future. ■ immy and Janet Wilson got marf l ried three months before the H satellite dish. They were both local kids, fresh out of high school, and they got married because Jimmy got a full-time job in the booming yard loading logs onto Japanese freighters. Getting that job was a big confidence boost for Jimmy. He’d always been a skinny, shy kid. He’d be the first to admit he wasn’t any genius, and right after that he’d tell you he didn’t have the kind of personality that would get him a job as a host on one of those game shows he liked to watch. He felt lucky to have his job, and even luckier to have been able to marry a good-looking lady like Janet. Janet’s parents gave them the down payment on a house for a wedding present. The house was a new one, too, but it was in a subdivision nobody seemed to want to live in— maybe because it was next to the Indian reservation. Jimmy and Janet liked the house just fine. Jimmy’s parents bought them a 26-inch RCA colour television for a wedding present. Jimmy bought a waterbed, a dresser, and a couch from one of those cham discount stores in Vancouver, and he scrounged a kitchen table and some chairs from a trailer someone had just up and walked away from. They were making do for the rest of the things they needed. Times were getting tough in the logging industry and a lot of folks were moving back east where the jobs were more plentiful, so household goods came pretty cheap. Jimmy and Janet weren’t in a hurry to do anything or get anywhere. They liked life in Huxley. They had everything a young couple needed. He had a secure job, they had a good house and a top-rated television, and when the satellite dish started operating, it gave both of them a sense of the finer things in life, as tineas anything they’d get in Vancouver or anywhere else. Jimmy came home right after work each day and he and Janet watched the prime time programs with supper, sitting on the couch. They were in bed by 9:30 at the latest, after Carson and maybe a little hankypanky. Janet wasn’t pregnant yet, but she was already putting on quite a few pounds. From the in s id e the changes weren’t easy to ent, unless you were driving down the deserted main street after 9:00 p.m. But since few people in Huxley were out at that late hour, nobody thought much about it. Other changes were similar. Huxleyites went into the city just about as often as they did before, but few of them did much except shop. Vancouver just didn’t seem quite as exciting as it used to. It wasn’t a very big city, and now it had a kind of foreign feel to it. Even fewer Huxleyites went skiing and fishing. There was more baseball in the summer, and the winter after the dish started up the high school gym got taken over by people wanting to play recreational basketball. A motion was made at City Council the following spring to fund the construction of some outdoor halfcourt basketball facilities. The motion received swift assent: it would give local kids something to expend their energies on. Over at the high school, the principal was mildly disturbed by the formation of two tightly organized and competitive social groups among the students. He d idn’t care for the change in student dress patterns, either. The kids had taken to wearing leather jackets, denims and sneakers no matter what weather conditions prevailed. The two groups wore what they called “ colours,” jackets with crudely drawn pen markings, often with obscene slogans. He also noted the appearance of tattoos on both male and female adolescents. That one he reported to the School Board. More disturbing to him was that the two gangs appeared to be aligned racially. About thirty percent of his students were native Indian, mostly coming from the reservation that adjoined the town. He’d always maintained that as Indians go, the Huxley band was a pretty progressive lot, and he’d been an enthusiastic supporter a few years back when the band leaders petitioned the Government to extend the television cable system into the i ‘ j | reservation. He wrote a letter saying that the Indian band had as much right as anybody to enjoy the fruits of modern technology and its cultural amenities. Up until recently, there’d been very little racial tension between the white and native kids in the school or anywhere else in town. If you worked hard and could hold your liquor, people would think you were okay even if your skin was green with purple polka dots. Now Indian and white kids weren’t even talking to one another. Another thing that disturbed the principal was the lack of interest in the kayaking club, long a fixture at the school. The principal was an avid kayaking enthusiast, and his main reason for moving to Huxley, years before, had been the abundance of first-rate kayaking streams in the area. Over the years he’d taught hundreds of youngsters the skills of the sport. For the first time, not a single student had signed up for the club, nor could he coax or cajole anyone to apply. t People stopping in town noticed kids who were standing around a 7-11 store just outside the reservation. “ I’d like to talk with a few of you for a moment,” he said, clambering out of the truck and popping his I.D. card at them. A heavy-set youth, obviously the leader, ignored him, and walked over to the cameraman who’d gotten out with Chuck and had trained his camera on the group. The leader placed his hand over the lens, smearing its surface with his fingers. “Say what, man?” “Could you please remove your hand from in front of the camera?” Chuck asked, politely. “ I’d like to film your entire group.” The leader’s hand s tiffened around the lens in a crudely threatening gesture. “ I’m the dude does the talkin’, man,” he said. “You wanna talk to the Chieftains, you talk to the Man.” “ Fine with me,” Chuck squeaked, thinking that maybe he should try to sound more like one of those MTV hosts the kids watched. “ Hey! You’re the action here. You’re the news.” The leader stepped back, and Now Indian and white kids weren't even talking to one another. the changes. The easiest things to spot were the unusual numbers of people wearing Detroit Tiger baseball caps ; Magnum P.l. fans , they guessed. But then they saw the paraphernalia of the Lions, Pistons and Red Wings. That caught the eye of an investigative reporter by the name of Chuck Cambridge. Chuck worked for a Vancouver television station and he stopped into Huxley on the way back from a fishing trip upcountry. He thought it curious enough for a novelty story, and a week later he returned to Huxley with cameras and a crew. huck decided to talk to the Ckids first. He figured they’d be more open; he knew that they’d been raised on television, and that they’d be more spontaneous with cameras around. But he couldn’t find any young kids on the streets. They were inside, he discovered later, watching Mickey Mouse club reruns or the cartoon channel. The older kids were around, but they weren’t interested when they discovered he wasn’t with MTV, the rock video network, and that he wasn’t offering money or prizes. He did record one conversation with a group of denim-clad native CKlegg. She was more accommodating. She knew that her sister-in-law would probably see the interview, even if no one in Huxley would. Doris tried to be philosophical, but it was hard to hide the pride she felt about living in Huxley, in the future. She said a few words about what it was like knowing things before people in Vancouver did, and she talked about how wonderful all the new technologies were. Chuck was bewildered. “ You hitched his thumbs in his belt loops while Chuck’s cameraman rearranged his equipment and focused in. “ Hey man. Which station you working for?” the leader demanded. Chuck identified his station. “ Never heard of it. You from Detroit or Dearborn?” “Vancouver.” “ Vancouve r? ” the leade r sneered, raising both hands to the sides of his head and snapping his beaded Adidas headband in a gesture of contempt. “Vancouver’s noplace. Chieftains don’t talk to cameras from Vancouver. Get out of my face, y’hear?” huck interviewed Doris know,” he told her just a little sternly, Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1989 3
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