4.07.2005

Hear the hollow, the absence of sound? Sometimes you can't hear it until the noise stops and sometimes the noise never stops. And sometimes your thoughts are too loud you don't recognize the silence when the world is hushed.

Years ago one wet winter we lived in a shotgun shack with crooked doorways, a rice field on one side and a corn field on the other, down below the levee of the Sacramento River and within sight of Sacramento's skyscrapers. When the wind blew from the south we could hear the traffic at the monolithic crossroads, Interstate 5 and Interstate 80. This was years ago, before 20,000 new homes were built ticky tacky on the floodplains and let's pray the old levees hold the big river another 40 years.

We lived alongside a slough, let me tell you about mosquitoes and blackberries and spiders and skunks, and we saw thousands of migratory birds. Songbirds, water birds, upland birds, once I made a list of all the types of birds we identified and it covered a page and a half, typed. I loved the hawks, the mag-pies, and the bitterns with their strange calls.

I recall the little black and white phoebe, his face stuffed with a big hairy moth, perched atop the fence screeching a triumphant "phee-BE!"

We had a barn swallow family under the eaves of the front porch, and we would watch them sweep the yard on their long blue wings, gold bellies flashing in the dusk. They would hold little swallow conversations in raspy chirping voices and in the thick of evening we would sit and listen to their soft banter. They left when their baby fell out of the nest.

On one of our walks along the slough's dirt levee we surprised a gathering of white egrets, normally solitary creatures but we counted twenty of them in the cold fog, and they took slowly to the air with wide white wings beating hard and sounding prehistoric with deep calls, "Graaaak, graaaaaak!"

We had five big elm trees encircling the puny little house. Elms are uncommon, most either succumbed to the Dutch elm disease or were cut down in an effort to prevent the spread of the disease. They are lovely trees, and in winter without their leaves their shapes are revealed like champagne flutes, a graceful upswept reach to the sky, and long thin branches cascading back down. Oh little blackbirds, how uncountable, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds came flocking to the elms.

It was an early morning and damp cold, and we had only a small radiator heater in the middle of the room. He had left me with off-to-work coffee-flavored kisses, and I was alone in bed writing, waiting for the fog to burn off and the sun to warm the house. I did not hear them until they flew away, I did not recognize their small cacophanous continuous hundreds of "cheeeep-chereeep" bird conversations, but I heard the big rush when they all beat their wings and lifted away in a black cloud, off across the fields. And then there was silence. I could hear only silence. Out of curiosity I went outside and the whole world felt hushed, not simply muffled by the fog but hushed, silent, still.

Sometimes it takes the absence of noise to hear it.