Searching for sneakers on the shore

What a flotilla of shoes and a small-town message board taught me about news and information. 

By Ray Salvatore Jennings

Long before I moved to Blue Hill, I taught at a college in Sitka, Alaska in the early 1990s. Sitka is nestled beside the ocean and mountains on one of the bigger islands in the state’s southeast. Along the town’s 16 miles of drivable roads, life is intimate and insular—even more so among the households and smaller communities scattered throughout the other islands and coves in the archipelago. Every day around noon, I, like nearly everyone else, would tune into Muskeg Messages on our volunteer-run public radio station, KCAW, also known as Raven Radio.

The name Muskeg Messages came from the boggy, mosquito-thick ground familiar to northerners everywhere. Anyone could call in to the show or leave a message to be read. A birthday greeting, a ride request, a hello to friends on the outer islands, or a gentle ask of the wider community. Some days brought apologies; or voices longing for those who moved away; or calls for people to attend a ceremony for someone that passed. More often than not, you spent part of the day talking with someone else about what you’d heard. 

One May, word came that a cargo ship had lost several containers full of Nike sneakers in a Pacific swell. Soon, fishermen and beachcombers began collecting single running shoes in mismatched colors and sizes. That summer, Muskeg Messages turned into a kind of island shoe exchange. My friend John called in: “I’ve got a size ten blue and orange Nike, right foot. Looking for a left—size eleven or nine might work, too.” By late summer, most of the town had at least one good running shoe, a pair if they were lucky, and a story to tell.

Even today in the age of social media, email, and mobile phones, you hear versions of Muskeg Messages all over Alaska—Bushlines in Homer, Tundra Topics in Fairbanks, Caribou Clatter up north. Each is a relic of the same need: to reach one another across distance and weather. As journalist Nina Sparling would write, in one of the rare articles about this bush telegraph, some of the messages are tender, some practical, some both:

“To Brenda Carter. I’ll be in late tomorrow night. I love you. — John.”

“To Mr. O in Fairbanks. Please clean the snow off my roof.”

“Passed police exam. Love, Jim.”

“Planning to have the baby born at Lynette’s cabin. Ellen and Jim. Eagle.”

“Found a baby river otter. Need advice on how to care for it – Anna in Port Alexander.” 

This kind of on-air messaging was—and is—illegal, by the way. Federal Communication Commission rules stipulate that radio and television broadcasters are not supposed to carry messages intended for an audience of one. Decades ago, though, Alaska’s Senator Ted Stevens worked out a handshake deal with the FCC chairman to look the other way—recognizing, rightly, that these weren’t commercial transmissions but something closer to a public lifeline. 

What those messages carried wasn’t just information. It was presence. The signal wasn’t only what was said, but who it reached—and the quiet knowledge that someone, somewhere, was listening. It was communication as relationship, not infrastructure.

We have far more information now, and somehow less of that kind. Our tools are faster and louder, but they don’t always bring us closer. The need behind Muskeg Messages hasn’t gone anywhere; it’s just migrated—into Facebook groups, neighborhood listservs, and the small-town newspapers that still double as gossip, obituary, and civic record. We still look for ways to be known, to broadcast the coordinates of our lives, hoping they land somewhere kind.

There are important efforts to preserve this relationship between information and the neighborhoods that consume it, though. Projects like the Listening Post Collective, the Rural News Network, and the Democracy Fund’s local media work have taken up this same challenge in a new form: how to rebuild or measure the connective tissue between information and belonging. They ask what happens when people not only receive information but help shape it—when local radio, print outlets, text surveys, and community reporting aren’t just one-way broadcasts but conversations.

The Listening Post, a program run by my wife’s organization, Internews, has helped local stations in places like New Orleans, Oakland, and Puerto Rico build two-way loops with residents - swapping microphones for notebooks and asking simple, durable questions: What’s going on where you live? What do you need to know? What’s missing? The answers ripple back into reporting, programming, and public conversation. It’s Muskeg Messages for the modern city: still human, still a little messy, still a lifeline.

The Knight Foundation, the Pew Research Center, and the Aspen Institute also place a high value on access to this kind of information in their measurements of the health of communities in America. It turns out that when people have ways to share and hear credible, relevant information about their own communities, they’re more likely to vote, volunteer, and look out for one another. That may sound obvious, but in an age that rewards outrage over understanding, it’s worth remembering trust grows in the same places where information circulates freely and locally—and where it helps us understands the lives of the people around us.

The Rising Tide is a new and welcome addition to this space. It is yet another determined attempt to bring local reporting back to the center of civic life. It aims to do what papers and radio once did best: carry the voices of a place, the shared details of daily life, and the threads of connection that make a community whole. Information like this, at its best, is a form of care. It’s a way of saying, I see you. You matter. You’re not alone out there. 

That was true on the docks of Sitka thirty years ago, and it’s true in every town or city now where someone is trying to keep a local news outlet alive, run a call-in line, or make sure the community board is still updated. And it is true in every country recovering from war and disaster that I’ve been in over the thirty years of my professional life since I left Sitka and settled in Blue Hill.

We don’t need more data. We need more signal—the kind that carries human voice, place, and context.

These things won’t fix the noise of the wider world, but they do shape how we live with one another, close to home. In their absence, the silence and the distance grows between us.

—Jennings is a writer based in East Blue Hill and the founder of Durable Good, where he shares essays on quiet heroism, public service, and the work that holds communities together. He originally published this piece for Durable Good.