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.

It Grows as It Goes

or No. 47

When the snow in New Mexico's northern mountains starts melting in late spring, the seasonal streams come back to life.   A few drops at first, then a trickle, and then the icy waters start gurgling and chuckling over the stones in their beds, growing as they go along.  Soon they're cascading over little falls on their way down the mountains, meeting with other brooks, gathering speed, rushing toward the larger rivers—the Rio Chama, the Pecos, the Rio Grande.  Various flood-control systems stem the tide; without them the power of those melting snows could be fearsome when it reached the plains.

The rest of the year, on the other hand, the Rio Grande is the longest mud puddle you ever will see.

I've been browsing this week through bits and pieces of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things looking for the context of the words "Crescit eundo" (it grows as it goes).   Lucretius seems to have liked his weather fierce:

...so grievously,
As gathers thus the storm-clouds' gruesome might,
Do faces of black horror hang on high-
When tempest begins its thunderbolts to forge.
Besides, full often also out at sea
A blackest thunderhead, like cataract
Of pitch hurled down from heaven, and far away
Bulging with murkiness, down on the waves
Falls with vast uproar, and draws on amain
The darkling tempests big with thunderbolts
And hurricanes, itself the while so crammed
Tremendously with fires and winds, that even
Back on the lands the people shudder round
And seek for cover.

When the clouds bulge with murkiness, get out the umbrellas.  A little later in the passage, Lucretius describes a thunderbolt gathering speed and power on its journey through the heavens.  "It grows as it goes" and strikes with ever greater vigor, so that it "shivers all that blocks its path."

And that, apparently, was what Territorial Secretary William Ritch had in mind when he added "Crescit eundo" to New Mexico's territorial seal in 1882, and why it was kept as the official motto when New Mexico became the 47th state in the Union 100 years ago this week, on January 6, 1912.  Those who guided the passage to statehood saw New Mexico as being full of dynamic growth and energy and wanted it to keep gathering momentum.  (And perhaps they liked the idea of "shivering" those who had blocked the path to the Union for so long, when New Mexico had been a territory since 1848.)

Long before Spanish-speaking, Catholic New Mexico was deemed "American" enough to achieve statehood, though, and long before Europeans arrived, rich cultures thrived here, from the Anasazi cities in the north to the Mogollon communities in the south.

Gila Cliff Dwellings, October 2010

Later the various Pueblo Indians, Navajos, and Apaches made this region their home.

Red Rocks, Jemez Pueblo, May 2010

And while New Mexico may be one of the youngest states, it was one of the oldest colonies.  Coronado and his men arrived in 1540; Juan de Oñate established the first settlement in 1598; Santa Fe became the capital in 1610.

San Jose de los Jemez mission church, est. 1610-ish, Jemez State Monument, May 2010

The centuries rolled by.  After a few wars, a couple of national handoffs, and a heavy dose of politics, New Mexico elbowed its way into the United States of America, and its new leaders expected it to steamroll right into prosperity.  In many ways it did, as the thriving artists' coteries and the new science labs made New Mexico a force to be reckoned with on the national stage.  In other ways, it didn't.  A hundred years later, we're still near the wrong end of too many state ranking lists (number of teen pregnancies, percentage of children living in poverty, academic nonproficiency) for that to ring true.

Despite its important centers of activity, I think New Mexico is a fairly sleepy place.  The whole thunderbolt thing—that sounds more like New York, not like us.  Zapping the obstacles in our path isn't really our style.  (Except in the Whole Foods parking lot.)  Like the cultures that preceded ours, modern New Mexico seems to flower and fade, flower and fade.  I think we're less like a thunderbolt and more like the Rio Grande, moving placidly along for the most part, with the occasional overflow of energy.  We hope that tomorrow will be a little better than today, that our lives will grow as they go.

Candelaria Wetlands, Rio Grande Nature Center, January 2012

Maybe I've just been watching the river too long.