Please Stay ff

or In Which We Think About Noise

The thing with living in an urban in-fill neighborhood, is that it keeps on getting filled in.  More or less across the street from me, in an area formerly graced by asters and weeds, a couple of new houses are being built.  The process hasn't been quiet, but at least the parts involving heavy machinery seem to be over with.  Now the walls are being raised, and the sounds of hammers, and cheerful voices shouting, "No, don't put that there!  Over there!", and music blaring over tinny speakers rule the daylight hours. 

I've been taking some more vacation time, a day here and there, so I'm more aware of work-day sounds than I normally would be.  When the cement-mixers arrived and ground loudly away I hid inside, but now they're gone.  In the mornings I've been planting bulbs, a few at a time, and enjoying the feel of autumn sunshine across my back, and the house-finches' fussing.  While I'm working in the garden I like hearing the sounds of construction close by.  The tinny music is either sentimental '80's stuff—Kenny Rogers, Bob Seger—or sentimental New Mexican/Mexican stuff, melodic and cheerful.  It's good gardening music, and the workers' voices calling to each other, ribbing each other, across the street, have a camaraderie I enjoy from what we might as well call afar.  Finches, music, other people, sunshine, your own work—they all make you feel like part of the same grand project somehow.

Once you're ready to rest, though, sounds change.  What used to be a kind of company turns into an intrusion.  You become aware of volume rather than content.  And so you seek quiet wherever you can find it.  The closest and best quiet at hand is to be found in the bosque at the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park.

I say that it was quiet there and realize anew what a strangely relative idea "quiet" is.  The wind can clatter through every leaf on every cottonwood in the bosque; it can roar among the treetops.  Every Canada goose that loiters in the wetland can grumble and honk all the live-long day; the sandhill cranes can creak and the ravens croak, and somehow all of that counts as quiet.  Is the difference between wild sound and urban noise about anything physical?  About the amplitude or frequency of sound waves acting on the ear?  Do the hammer, anvil, and stirrup resonate more comfortably to some sounds than others?  Or is the difference all in our minds?

I have no answers, of course, but it was lovely to ponder the questions in a lazy, meandering way while literally meandering among the cottonwood trees along the path.

The quiet of the bosque is partly a visual thing, I think.  The cottonwoods are so very tall, and the undergrowth so very small that the "forest" is airy and open.  You could (and some people do) actually ride a horse through it without getting tangled up in brambles or low-hanging branches.  The canopy is open, too.  Cottonwoods shed branches in time of drought, so even among the oldest trees the crowns are seldom thickly leaved.


You can stand directly under a tree in the middle of the bosque and still watch a Cooper's hawk (I think) soaring overhead, or see the outstretched necks of a flock of cranes heading for the wetlands.  Nothing in the bosque crowds you; nothing hems you in.  But those big trees do shelter you from the wind.

The river was quiet, even more so than usual.  After two years of extreme drought the waters are extra-sluggish and low.  They barely seem to move as they make their tired way south.  If rivers were mythical people, the Rio Grande would be a Lotus Eater.  It doesn't inspire you to do much but take a nap on the bench beside its banks in afternoon sun.  It certainly would, you just know it, if given half a chance.

In the still waters of the wetlands beside the river Canada geese were looking sleepy themselves, in an afternoonish sort of way; a little drowsy, a little peaceful.  No feeding or flying, just aimless floating.  Floating, sailing, drifting.  Occasionally some of the geese would take it into their heads (or wherever) to drift somewhere else.  And so, eventually, without really exerting themselves, they would.

In that atmosphere of sleepy quiet it made me laugh to see this sign:

"Please stay ff," is what I read:  fortissimo, the musical term for REALLY LOUD.

The bosque??  Loud?  REALLY LOUD?   I thought about the soothing, wild sounds I'd heard and about the spaciousness and ease and safety of this little nature preserve, and fortissimo became an impossibility.  The sign dwindled to State Park reality, with a typical bit of pointless vandalism:  "Please stay (o)ff."

Like quietness, though, loudness is about more than sound.  It's about vibrancy, about the vitality of small lives, the lizards and towhees and sparrows rustling through fallen leaves, the geese and wood ducks and coots dabbling their way through the wetlands, the cranes feeding in the corn fields beside the river, and the red-eared sliders still basking in the sun   It's about the cottonwoods, standing tall above them all and extending sheltering arms, leaves rattling in the wind, and glowing like small suns with October and the sun behind them.

I turned for home, toward the honest, urban sounds of staple guns and hammers and jovial shouts and tinny music, and the neighbor's dogs barking at it all.

And I thought, Yes, indeed, dear bosque—please stay ff.