I am old enough to remember when television arrived through the air and a person could lose a channel only by driving into a canyon or insulting God. Now I pay actual money every month for a streaming service that occasionally informs me, with a smooth corporate face, that the local station has become unavailable due to a planned outage. Planned by whom is never made fully clear. Not by me.

I do not need television for prestige. I need it for local weather, fires, school levies, road closures and the reassuring cadence of a Montana person explaining that the weekend will be wet in a way that sounds survivable. If I wanted only national programming, I would simply stand in a hotel lobby.

A planned outage recently left some viewers without local station access, replacing nearby reality with generic network content. This is what technology calls convenience. A company has removed the valley from the valley and asked us to continue pushing buttons as if nothing intimate has occurred.

“Most people stream now,” my nephew told me, in the tone of a man describing gravity. That is exactly my point. We were told streaming would liberate us from cable’s petty tyrannies. Instead it has recreated them with worse customer service and less shame.

Local television is not a luxury in a place like this. It is how a community keeps one eye on weather and the other on itself. When that signal disappears, so does one of the few remaining institutions still willing to place a reporter in a windbreaker near standing water and call it public service.

I am aware this sounds dramatic. So did driving 35 on North 19th, until we admitted the woman had a point.

Restore the station. Restore the forecast. Restore the possibility that a citizen may learn something nearby without first troubleshooting a login.

Gloria Settle keeps three remotes in a decorative bowl and mistrusts each of them equally.