Two weeks on the road visiting family and attending
to business and now back in the woods where last night I walked out on the porch
and watched the International Space Station clear the horizon to the west then
skirt the edges of our atmosphere along the northern sky. When it disappeared in the east I noticed a
passenger plane riding the winds somewhere in between and wondered about the
people in both the plane and the space station and how they had no idea that
far below and many miles away a man sat at his cabin looking up into the
heavens. It’s like that at night. For the only things I usually see are the
stars and the only sounds I hear are those of coyotes wailing at the moon and
pauraques whistling in the dark and the ever present fiddling of crickets. Now and then, as if a reminder of the world beyond
this tiny enclave, comes the droning of a US Border Patrol helicopter. The space station, the passenger plane and
the helicopter but glimpses of a world driven by other needs and desires; for
here there is simply the woods and the silence.
As I write these notes I hear mourning doves cooing in the trees next to
the cabin and at one of my feeders I see that a pair of curved-billed thrashers
has stopped to snack. There’s not an
hour that goes by that I don’t peer out at the birdfeeders to see who has come
to visit. Indigo and painted buntings, ruddy
doves and Inca doves, white-winged doves, and my favorite dove, the ghost
dove. You birders out there are asking: “What’s
a ghost dove?” That’s what I call the
white-tipped dove—a moniker used by most without any semblance of romance or
creative thought. So I’ll continue calling
it the ghost dove and listening to its haunting coos as I have done since
childhood, and I’ll revel in the silence that fills the gap between each melancholy
note. For me silence and nature far
outweigh other needs. Not but a few
miles south trucks race along the little paved highway en route to distant
markets. A man who comes out this way tells
me he visits in order to get away from the noise. And yet, for most people noise is so endemic that
they seem, or at least think they are, immune to its presence. Some people won’t come over here because they
claim it’s too quiet. Then there is that
odd batch that seem both uninspired and perhaps even incensed that anyone would
prefer the silence of nature. They have
other problems as well.
For example, I know a man who asks, “Why would
anyone want to walk in the woods?” As if
his desire to drive from place to place (sometimes one place is no more than a
hundred yards from the other) is superior to those who choose to walk. But then I read an article recently saying
that the act of walking has been denigrated in our modern society. We are a generally obese population. I wonder why?
Perhaps it might be nice to devote a number of posts
to the understanding of silence, the meditative powers of woods roaming, and
the quest for a lifestyle removed from what has become known as modern society. So let’s work on that for a while.
