No Escape

I have been on vacation in the Thousand Islands, which are a bunch of beautiful billion-year-old boulders sticking out of the St. Lawrence River between the U.S.and Canada.

No TV, no radio, no Internet.  A break, as it were, from the fast-news window I man in my day job working on the magazine and the Internet and the TV Fax.

I was picking up some kayaks in Ogdensburg, a half-hour away, being stored at a bed and breakfast, The Wayback Inn. As I walked in, my "get away from it all" vacation only a couple days old, I was greeted by the proprietor with the news that she had just seen CNN correspondent Bob Franken down at the dock in Morristown.

The local paper also included a big story about Franken and CNN, who were in town to do a story about how porous the northern border is to terrorists with a powerboat. Just what I needed as I tried to forget, for a moment, the world I am emersed in the other 51 weeks of the year. CNN is inescapable.

But the world was not done intruding. My friend bought a newspaper and read it at breakfast. What to my wondering eyes should appear on page one but the initials "FCC" in a headline. Seems a Syracuse station was one of the 77 the FCC is investigating as it looks into video news releases.

I called the office to make sure they had the story. They did, of course, making me feel briefly expendable, then relieved the world motors on efficiently without me.

I avoided newspapers and bed and breakfasts the rest of the trip, but it just goes to show that the news cycle wheels on inexorably, or something like that.