It is remarkable how much sound is associated with our notions of peace and quiet. Whether we sit in the shade of a palm tree on a deserted island, or on a sunny rock in the middle of a forest, or just slouch in a chair on our own back porch, natural sounds massage the hard knots out of our daily experience. Peace isn’t really quiet at all. When you think of it, is there anything quite so unnerving as total and absolute silence?
Perhaps the silence we seek, then, in our quest for peace and quiet is the cognitive hush that attends those rare moments when the incessant clatter of our own thinking stops to listen to something outside of ourselves. Natural sounds always rock the cradle of my own relaxation: waves on a beach, wind in the trees, and birds – always the birds. For me, these sounds carry no messages, need no interpretation, and require no response, which can be quite a relief. They are nothing more than quiet sensations of the moment, passing manifestations of an untethered present. My ignorance is bliss.
And it is ignorance. There are few natural sounds that are not fully freighted with information about the past, present, and future for those sensate creatures who have learned the language of nature’s aural articulations. Even the pampered pets that loaf around our house in a super-sated state have a fluency in the language of random sounds that I can only guess at. Mid-snooze, their ears pivot and pirouette picking up information out of thin air about the doings of proximate bugs, rodents, mailmen, and the occasional ghost. And this is just inter-species information. The signal goes to hi-def when species are trading sounds with their own kind.
Three men started their work week at our place Monday, arriving early to knock off a small job we had for them. Two diseased and blighted crabapple trees planted too close to the house 30 years ago by a previous owner were coming down. Each tree bore the Dayglo orange mark of the condemned, casually sprayed upon their trunks the week before by the arborist who came to give us a price.
Kate and I had decided that the failing trees had to go for the sake of the garden beds beneath them, for the sake of the utility wires threading through their branches, and for the sake of our backs which seem to be perpetually bent to the task of cleaning up the blighted leaves beneath them. The flocks of birds that shuttled to and from feeders from the protection of these two trees would soon find out that none of the morning’s activities would be for their sake – they would be simply forsaken.
We had convinced ourselves that getting rid of the trees was the best course, but we weren’t prepared for the swift and skillful violence that did them in. Within one hour, both trees were transformed from the elegant architecture of branch and budding leaf, designed over the years by light, wind, and rain, to two sap-seeping stumps and a pile of chips. Three men with saws and a wood shredder with a monstrous maw undid decades of cell by cell photosynthetic construction in plenty of time for the morning coffee break.
The bullheads lolling in the muddy shallows of Connecticut ponds aren’t big on concepts. They aren’t the thinking sort. These catfish don’t contemplate the arc of their lives, the way we do. They just spawn, eat, and die, never once leaving the sensate stream of right now.
So it was left up to me to wonder about the last few moments of a particular bullhead’s life last Friday morning. I had pulled over on my way to work to watch a great blue heron go about its early morning routine at a roadside pond. The heron claimed the pond as his own early this summer and seemed to favor the watery vegetated margins of the west side of the pond, which is where he was standing, stock still, that morning.
From the bullhead’s perspective, the long reedy heron legs rising from the muck looked rather ordinary against the cattail backdrop. They may have been the last ordinary sight he saw. The heron’s S-curved neck lunged like a lightening bolt, and its spear-of-a-bill lanced the unsuspecting catfish, jerked him up into the air, and after skillfully juggling the fish into position, swallowed him whole. If there were bullhead philosophers, I imagine they would fashion some fantastic end-of-life myths from this common scenario.
Great blue herons have the look of mythological birds, probably because we have seen them portrayed glyphically by the ancient Egyptians, who represented the mythological phoenix or benu, “the ascending one,” as a heron. In the floodplain of the Nile, the bird was associated with the sun as it would glide over the waters, or roost high up in the trees. Thus it became connected in spirit to the sun god Ra and was revered. It was created in the fire of a holy burning tree, according to the myth.
A dead cardinal turned up on the doorstep of The Bee Monday morning. How it met its end was unclear, but there he was lying intact, vibrant and portentous — an inauspicious omen at the threshold of a new week. He was buried in the weeds across the road in a quick odd ceremony involving a snow shovel and a newspaper publisher in a bow tie.
Interested observers of nature know that the process of life on this planet, when taken as a whole, is complex, elegant, and beautiful. But when taken in particular, element by element, incident by incident, and creature by creature, nature routinely and rudely trespasses on our personal preferences. For example, I prefer flying, perching, and preening cardinals to underground dead ones. On Monday morning, I didn’t get what I wanted on that score, so the week seemed to start off on the wrong foot.
We would all be a lot happier if we had no preferences and could take the world as it comes; there would be no disappointments, just undifferentiated experience. But that’s not how things work in this dualistic world. Sensations and perceptions in all their various forms, from the cellular level to the spiritual, seem to exist to help differentiate between “good” and “bad.” The whole tilt of evolution sits on the fulcrum of preference. And members of our species in particular are notoriously preferential meddlers.
A joyful society of birds has gathered in our neighborhood for their rites of spring, and the trees around the feeders are full of travelers, some just arrived, some just about to depart.
The cool weather has kept the winter guest juncos around even as April slips away, but it hasn’t deterred the redwing blackbirds from getting started on their accommodations for the summer. The male redwings arrived from the south more than a month ago, and the females are just now beginning to show up, complaining, I’m sure, about how little has been done by their slacker mates to find a nest site and secure a territory.
For all their full-throated singing at this time of year, inspired by the imperatives of the mating game, all of them have a lot of work ahead: building nests, incubating eggs, feeding ravenous nestlings, and fending off threats from hawks, and raccoons, and even snakes. All of them, that is, except the cowbirds.
