Traveling by AM Radio

I grew up in rural North Carolina, about as worldly as Huck Finn without a river. My lone trip beyond state lines during my school years was a visit to Uncle Julian’s home in Arlington, Virginia with a quick detour to the free museums in Washington, D.C. Otherwise, our vacations were strictly local: the same Carolina beaches, the same sand, the same sunburns.

Our black-and-white television offered glimpses of the wider world, but none of them felt like destinations. Gotham City seemed much too dark, and who wanted to meet Joe Friday or a bunch of hillbillies in Los Angeles? Popular music, though—that was a different kind of atlas. My imagination ran in full Technicolor. In San Francisco, everyone wore flowers in their hair. In Motown, they danced in the street. Kansas City was full of crazy little women. When most kids dreamed of running away with the circus, I thought western Missouri was a better idea.

I was the nerdy kid who read record credits and memorized the names behind the three-minute masterpieces that lived in my head. That’s how Jimmy Webb entered my life. He gave the Fifth Dimension beautiful balloons and Richard Harris a soggy cake in MacArthur Park—nothing to entice me to ride along. When he turned to songs with pensive, place-named lyrics that Glen Campbell interpreted, I became his travel companion. 

You knew the poor sap in “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” would never follow through, but I traveled with him anyway—through Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Oklahoma, though I mentally skipped the Oklahoma leg because even my daydreams had standards. While he was focused on his jilted lady’s reactions, I wanted to stop and explore these arid locales. 

When Webb introduced the lonely lineman in Wichita, I pictured a flat, endless landscape under a cloudless blue sky. And when Campbell sang, “And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time,” even my adolescent self recognized the ache in that line. I forgave Webb for ending the stanza with the false rhyme of “time” with “line,” which always struck me as the lyrical equivalent of socks with sandals.

Then came “Galveston.” I couldn’t find the town on a map, but I understood the soldier Webb imagined—stuck in Vietnam, dodging explosions, longing for home. The war in Southeast Asia hovered over my adolescence like a chandelier swaying on a frayed chain. “Galveston” wasn’t just a melody; it was a warning flare. I feared being drafted into killing someone or being killed, and I couldn’t decide which was worse. I wanted to run with that soldier onto a bright beach among the seabirds where the only shells to avoid were washed up by the surf.

For years, Galveston stayed on my private bucket list—a place I’d never seen but somehow already missed. After decades of traveling there in three-minute increments, I finally made it to coastal Texas. I found a narrow island, 27 miles long and never more than three miles wide. The streets form a perfect grid. Cruise ships crowd the harbor. Downtown offers the usual inventive ways to separate tourists from their money. The gray-planked wharf held a whiff of salt air and diesel fuel, a smell foreign to Peachtree City.

There were seabirds, just as Webb promised, soaring above a wide, sandy‑brown beach. The water was gray, whipped into whitecaps by an insistent wind. But no one stood at the shoreline looking out to sea, waiting for a soldier’s return. 

Galveston has weathered Mother Nature’s artillery. In 1900, a hurricane and accompanying tidal wave—the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history—devastated this island and killed an estimated 8,000 people. The survivors rebuilt and added a 17-foot seawall that now stretches ten miles.

At first glance, the Galveston I imagined while listening to a tinny AM radio in rural North Carolina bears little resemblance to the Galveston I just encountered. My adolescent version didn’t include a long seawall shielding the beach or tourists drifting through downtown, daiquiris in hand. But a deeper look reveals something more profound.

Jimmy Webb’s Galveston was never strictly a place. It was a refuge. The longing to be out of harm’s way and near the people who matter most is universal. Sometimes we build our refuges 17 feet high out of concrete. Sometimes it means demolishing walls and being vulnerable with a trusted friend. And sometimes all it takes is a melody—one that lets you walk along a safe, sunlit stretch of Gulf beach where the wind blows through your hair and nothing can touch you.

What’s in your playlist?