HEAR, HEAR
Like good berry patches or good picnic ledges, good echoes used to be prized places in Vermonters’ personal landscapes. For some reason, particular vantage points made it possible to yell something into the distance, wait, then have it return, fainter but clearly the same words in the same voice. At some point I want to see if the one south of the Eddy Farm in Middlebury still answers the call.
But for those whose ears have not been damaged by loud music, loud machinery, or loud anything (if it’s loud enough to hurt, it’s loud enough to cause damage, says one general rule), the rewards of taking precautions include hearing subtler echoes. Or the lack of them: visiting the Houston area with my first wife, who had gone to high school there, I was struck by the way sounds didn’t return. As a New Englander, I expected to be surrounded by neighborly heights, not to have sounds fall into nothingness, answered only by tremulous far-off sounds that seemed stretched to cover the distances.
Coming back to New England, I remember one barn that changed sounds as a person walked toward it. It had a clapboarded back wall three stories high, and each clapboard edge reflected sound back from a slightly different distance. Noises twanged back.
I’m reminded of all this because a few nights ago, I decided to take a walk around midnight on a cool, moonlit night, and heard something utterly unexpected. Here in Middlebury, there’s major bridge and road construction going on in the business district, and the contractors try to do as much as possible at night to avoid impacting the shops, restaurants, and so on. So in the distance, I could hear the steady roaring of heavy machinery.
At the same time, I could hear a massive, high-pitched sound from a different direction. “Massive” may seem like a strange word to employ here, but it was a massed sound, like that of a swamp full of frogs—but this was a very cool evening, and no critters were courting. Turning in other directions, I couldn’t hear the sound. What could it be?
Finally, walking back to the house, I realized it was our willow tree. It was tall enough to catch the construction noise, and dense enough with thin branches and twigs to bounce that sound around in enough directions to send a discernable noise toward the house.
I am talking about something very high-pitched, well above anything on the piano keyboard. Tinnitus, ringing of the ears, was a possibility, I realized, but that wouldn’t account for the clear directionality of it. Had I not decided to start using earplugs back in high school, and had I not continued to so since (always while sleeping or driving or when surroundings get loud) probably I would have missed this phenomenon entirely.
Life magazine once carried a microphotography picture of the inside of the ear. Sounds create pressure waves in fluid, and the fluid bends things that stick up almost like tuning fork handles—a forest of them. Clearly, a hurricane in the fluid would buffet those projecting sensors and probably break some of them. That convinced me that using earlids, as I sometimes call them, makes as much sense as having eyelids.
Take good care of your tuning forks. I’ll be hearing from you.
Comments