Soundings

Most mornings I wake to birdsong. Oftentimes, I just lay with my eyes closed, awake, but just. It’s a welcome moment in a day whose silences no longer lap around human endeavor but threaten to drown it.

I talk to myself a lot. Always have, although rarely on so many diverse matters. The cat gets his share of house ape gibberish. Much of the time these days, for both of us, it’s French. Which helps I guess.

Often, I think of that early afternoon run on 9/11. It took nearly two miles along the Santa Monica oceanfront before I figured out what had been picking at the edge of consciousness. There were no airplanes, or rather no sound of airplanes, which being just north of LAX was—until then—a constant and unremarkable part of the soundscape.

Now too, there are no airplanes overhead and the sound of private vehicles rare, that of people even more so. There are the farmers of course; but even the rumbling of their machines seems muffled by the grasses and the flurries of falling fruit blossoms.

The sound cycle of the day begins while it is still dark, with the hissing and hooting of the owls. Then the song birds and occasional crows, then the doves. By mid-morning the wings of honeybees, flies, various beetles, and other things Charlemagne the cat would like to eat add counterpoints and sub-themes. By evening, once again, the birds. Then it is only the quietude of the hunters and the hunted.

There are exceptions, of course, but those only underlie this new sort of quiet. Just now, a French Mirage, just shy of the sound barrier, taking advantage of open airspace, followed by a short scream of irritation as the hamlet’s cats continue to negotiate territories and human attention.

Just as the air is clearing in our cities, revealing unseen vistas, so too with the omnipresent loudness that has characterized the tradeoffs we’ve made to be modern, and rich, and in denial of our own thoughts. La Bu is a quieter place than most, and was even before the world slowed down, but the respite is real, everywhere.

We’ll trade it back, of course, as we will so much else when the engines of capital roar back to life. But hopefully it will be gradual enough for us to notice it. And miss it.