Red-winged blackbirds,
Western Blue Birds,
And Canadian Geese. Basically, the standard, pedestrian birds that make up much of ornithology and human experience with nature. But even though we experience these birds regularly, they are still attractive and important parts of the ecosystem.
And so are people. Valuing our open spaces and natural habitat, learning to live with these spaces around us and, in many cases, separate from us are the only way we can really preserve nature for its inhabitants.
Along the trail I, at one point, had a strong and impending sense that I wasn't alone and that, more importantly, I wasn't at the top of the food chain. No crickets chirped. No birds trilled near me. No field mice or voles moved in the underbrush. All became stillness and quiet except for the ocean-sound of a gentle breeze in my ears and the faint electrical hum that all people with a working nervous system are burdened with from birth onward. No one can experience perfect silence.
During graduate school I tried. In Park Lake, Utah, I took a mountain bike up a chair lift and rode it down a summer ski slope. I rode away from the lift toward a lower peak I scouted on an earlier trip. I rode the bike down the narrow, worn lane paved of cracked earth and dried pine branches. I rode it past a fence, too close, catching my knee on a metal shard and opening a gash that would birth a scar I would keep four some years.
Riding up the peak, my legs pedaling like a sprinting mad man but the bike moving with the speed and gusto of an inebriated log, I realized I had escaped the sound made by the chair lift. No clacking every twenty seconds as a chair passed through guide wheels. No other mountain bikers shouting to each other. In the winter this hill would be considered out of bounds. Were I under a ten-foot snow pack, there would be no help, no rescue, no noise. I would be alone, I realized, with silence. I knew then that this hill was where I would find and experience the truest, deepest silence available to man. I would understand what it meant for my ears to be, for the first time in my then twenty-six years of life, to be totally devoid of auditory input.
Would they struggle for sound? Would silence hurt? Would my ears simply shut down and not come back?
I walked my bike up the peak through grasses that came to my belt. Pin-sharp seeds and brushes raked across my knee gash, tore at the bare and sensitive nerves like an electric stove burner. The pain coursed through my leg like venom and more than once I stopped to fold my skin back into place and hope a clot would form to keep it there.
Since childhood I have suffered random, and fortunately not increasingly frequent, episodes of tinnitus. Hereditary, I will be saddled with this ringing for it is with me in the same way as my breath. My father had it and, with age, it became progressively worse. I remember periodic episodes of his tinnitus so cripplingly painful he clutched his ear like a monster attacking his face and threw his head about as though in mortal battle with the noise. I had never experienced tinnitus that inflicted pain, though I was told that one day I would and that as I aged it would become worse, and the pain would set it with time and that it, too, would become worse. In my fifties, I can expect, if my tinnitus progresses as my father's did, to, with only seconds of warning, suddenly be gripped by ringing that feels like frostbite, though with no mechanism to stop it except its own comings and goings which occur without ascertainable reason.
In time I reached the peak's summit. As I neared the top, the day's gentle, favonian breeze stopped. The air, which had done well to keep me cool, turned warmer in an instant. The temperature changed as drastically as a temperamental lover with fire for blood. I laid the bike down in the grass and set my helmet on top of it. I closed my eyes and listened to my breathing slow, my body returning to rest. The sun, unfiltered by a cooling breeze, warmed my face and brought sweat forward to my clothes.
Around me was what I called silence. I could hear no identifiable sounds. And my hearing stretched outward, seeking distant sounds. In time, I could hear a highway I didn't know existed, a plane so far away that the engine sound warped like a well-played record. My hearing reached, desperately like a starving man for bread, to hear any sound and I swore I could hear mice in the grass a mile away.
Then I realized I had never been without sound. In the background I became acutely aware of a soft buzzing, like a high-tension wire in morning fog. Variable, soft, electric, like the sound of galactic background radiation. It was not tinnitus. I knew that sound well, that ringing that sounded like a refrigerator compressor. No. This was something entirely. This sound I could not lose for it was my brain and my nerves -- the sound of my body talking to itself; the sound I make simply for being. And I realized I could never, never escape this sound and I could never experience a moment devoid of anything audible.
My leg had caked in dry blood and when I, at last, moved to pick up the bike the dried block cracked and fell in pieces like an avalanche. The thin layer of dryness that kept my loose skin in place broke and, like a frozen lake in the spring, blood seeped through and re-dried in moments. I knew it would be a thin scar, but right then it was a shin-guard-size block of crumbling red that fell into my sock and shoe and felt like wet sand.
My bike welcomed me back to my seat and I began riding back to the trail. Tinnitus has a harbinger. Seconds before an episode, an ear loses its hearing. More precisely, sound becomes filtered, like someone has stuffed a cotton ball into it. And then, after a brief moment of extreme auditory muting, the ringing begins. No jaw movement can stop it; only time and the tinnitus' willingness to leave can stop it. Halfway down the peak the hearing dropped from my left ear. I kept riding, having never before experienced painful tinnitus. I expected this to be about a minute of intense ringing followed by a return to normal hearing with a perceived improved sound quality, like hard-rebooting my ear. But this tinnitus was different. My ear felt like it clenched shut in a cramp and I clutched at it with both hands, twisting my head around involuntarily to quell the pain. The bike's front wheel, free from my hands, caught on a rock and turned. I went over my handlebars and had a brief, distinct moment where I looked at the sky and a single cloud and all was beauty and pain and ringing until I landed in the tall grasses and rolled to a stop.
Humans were not meant to experience silence. We are sound. Life within us exists as sound and we cannot escape it until we escape life. To attempt to escape sound is to attempt to escape life.
I sat up, the ringing and the pain subsiding, at the hill around me aware that the crickets and birds had stopped. No field mice nor voles moved in the under brush. Something else was there; it stalked me; in time, and later in life, it would catch me and my days would be filled with that ringing and clenching. That day in Park Lake and, later, just weeks ago on Lime Ridge, were precursors, teaser trailers for an inevitable future.
And then I heard the black-tailed deer in a bush up ahead, and the ringing stopped.
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