hearing things

I.

During the storm a few nights ago, I sat on the back porch and delighted in the rainfall and the crickets.   Last night I again went out around dusk to listen to the cicadas.

I've realized that what I hear without really hearing it (because it is so constant, so continuous) is the sour whine of the air-conditioning unit next-door, which hums all night and all day.  Everything else - insect or animal or thunderpeal - is muffled by this sound, edges blurred.




II.
Beginning with the boom of the last decade, this island has been increasingly built up by owners who've decided to wring all they can from it.  So I have been cataloguing in photographs and in memory the way things were and the way they are going: the slow transformation of wilderness into something resembling suburban Atlanta.  Housing collapse or not, there is still no virtue here in living modestly.  In some places, what is coming is merely hinted at: ominous platforms to nowhere erected at spots overlooking the marshes, to help the developers chose their sight lines.  In other places, the trees and brush so friendly to deer and bobcats and birds and bugs are already gone.  7,000-square foot shingle-style "cottages" are surrounded by sod grass or pine mulch, which looks desolate compared to the riotous, wonderful mess of undeveloped lots.  In the twenty years I've been visiting, I have never before seen so many deer, and I know that it is only because there is nowhere on the island left for them to go.  Bucks root outside the window while I write; I pass by does on my runs and fawns on my bike.  Yesterday, a tiny fawn lay in front of an empty summer house, in a yard cleared and barren of everything but pine mulch, and considered me (sweetly, calmly); and I considered it.

III.

A few days ago, I came upon an observation tower on the other side of the island (a place I've not been since I was perhaps twelve), from which, two stories up, I could see across many acres of marsh, to the main road that leads onto the island, and to the woods beyond.

As I was looking out through the trees, I heard the distinctly un-avian sound of bastardized reggae-rock (so: 2012's 311).  A group of people about my age had arrived on their bikes, some bearing cigarettes, others babies, and one man wore a backpack with built-in speakers.  I hesitated atop the platform, realizing that if they were going to climb up the narrow, winding staircase, I would have to wait for all of them before I could go down.  The music got louder and louder and the view seemed to shrink.  Music has a way of overwhelming sight, forcing you to judge what you see against the narrative of what you hear.  

But then, these views have their own soundtracks.  For years I dismissed the trend of outdoor speakers without any reason more profound than "they're obnoxious; they force musical choices upon an entire neighborhood," just as I decried leafblowers and SUV-sized lawnmowers.  In other words, I thought of what was lost to me in terms of quiet and, perhaps, the illusion of privacy.  I did not consider what was lost to everyone, music listeners included: an experience in which the rival sounds of birds and bugs and raindrops could be heard and matched with sight.  It is not merely that I saw less upon that viewing platform when the music began; rather, if I could identify the insects and birdsong that I heard, maybe I could "see" more: a different world, a larger world, a layered and a thicker world.  I had never considered that there is nothing at all quiet about being outside: there is always something to be heard, something at risk of being drowned out.

I biked out to the end of the island yesterday morning, and as I came under an overhang of dense oak and pine, the noise of the insects was stronger even than the sun.  The air quivered with sound, as it does at dusk, vibrant and synced.  When you rip out those plots of leaf and mess, you silence the song.  Cynics might rolls their eyes and accuse me of wishing to erase myself from the world (and they might once have been right).  But I don't now wish to erase myself from a space so much as to exist in it - including its sound.

This loss of beauty seen and heard has forced me to rethink the role of gardening on this island (although, to be fair, most of what I see - lawns and shrubs tortured into cubes - might be better classified as "landscaping").  Maybe gardening is something situational, an expression of creativity and facility that is best saved for those places already irrevocably changed by our presence.  I don't mean stylized landscaping of carefully-placed palms and ferns and oleander; I mean, I think, not landscaping much at all.  We have a duty not to clean everything up, to protect not only the dunes and marshes we think beautiful, but the scrub and leaf litter we find expendable.  Our aesthetics need embrace the dimension of sound: we lose this island chorus by the year, by the lot.