At 2:00 am a couple of nights ago, I awoke suddenly to the sharp cracking sounds of gunshots. But as I lay listening in the dark, snug in my cosy bed with the night breeze stealing in the open door, I realized there was either gang warfare underway or…it slowly dawned on me, it’s a humpback whale. Whack, smack, crack, the sounds carry, sharp and loud, and I begin to count. I’m up to seventeen rapid cracks, when after a momentary pause; I hear the almost laughable bugling noise a humpback makes sometimes as it expels its breath. Maybe I am the only one that finds that squealing noise funny but I can’t help it. I smile in the dark at the certainty of my identification and briefly contemplate dressing and tootling out in my boat. A moot question as I have hurt my leg by falling on our dock and cannot walk without a cane at the present moment; low tide is impossible. In the end I count over fifty remarkable loud sharp cracks, too rapid to be breaches I surmise, likely tail whapping. At 7:00 am my eyes pop open as I hear again the unmistakeable breath of the whale and get up to watch it make its unhurried way down Cramer Pass.
I am still lying in my bed as I write this, thinking about how many people confess to bed being the place where they are best able to dredge and sift from all the words, the ones most precisely descriptive. Under the eaves of the front deck of our house, onto which our bedroom door opens, hangs a bird house Billy made, for violet-green swallows. All day their incessant cheeping has been constant background music to my every activity. I have snoozed, read, written; meditated on the pain in my knee and the cough in my lungs, and snoozed some more. The parent birds fly a continuous loop out high to load up on mosquitoes and other little bugs, then swoop down to the nest box to stuff the hungry bills of their offspring. The chicks barely pause chirping long enough to swallow before starting up again.
Wind sighs through the trees, a steady breathy hum; it’s a westerly wind pushing a soft repetitive splash up against the dock and further out in the pass I hear the red-throated loons calling plaintively..”Al, Al” or maybe it’s “ow, ow”, high pitched and sad sounding. When Nikki motors up to the dock I know it’s her boat without looking.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat, the sound explodes from the back of the house when the cheeky sapsucker spots bugs, or just thinks it does, in between the cedar siding. A kingfisher drops from the fir tree over-hanging the water with its braying “I’m going in!” pre-dive shout. The clunking sound of rolling rocks on the low-tide foreshore draws me down the dock to get a better view of the bear I know is lunching on handsful of crabs.
Next door my neighbour fires up his chainsaw; the important work of fire-wood accumulation is underway. Further out across Cramer Pass, the mail plane banks and drops to come in with a roar, the sound escalates as the planes speed decreases.
Sound surrounds me here, information leaks out everywhere and it is mine to heed or not. Even the sudden cessation of noisy little chirpers amongst the flowers, gorging on seeds late in the summer is an informative moment. I look for the kestrel or merlin that has struck them dumb.
It isn’t only the sights of the our island world that bring us so much; information, great pleasure, healing of the spirit….a profound and acute sense of hearing is as great a gift and the one I offer my gratitude for, today.
Yvonne from SeaRose Studio
I am still lying in my bed as I write this, thinking about how many people confess to bed being the place where they are best able to dredge and sift from all the words, the ones most precisely descriptive. Under the eaves of the front deck of our house, onto which our bedroom door opens, hangs a bird house Billy made, for violet-green swallows. All day their incessant cheeping has been constant background music to my every activity. I have snoozed, read, written; meditated on the pain in my knee and the cough in my lungs, and snoozed some more. The parent birds fly a continuous loop out high to load up on mosquitoes and other little bugs, then swoop down to the nest box to stuff the hungry bills of their offspring. The chicks barely pause chirping long enough to swallow before starting up again.
Wind sighs through the trees, a steady breathy hum; it’s a westerly wind pushing a soft repetitive splash up against the dock and further out in the pass I hear the red-throated loons calling plaintively..”Al, Al” or maybe it’s “ow, ow”, high pitched and sad sounding. When Nikki motors up to the dock I know it’s her boat without looking.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat, the sound explodes from the back of the house when the cheeky sapsucker spots bugs, or just thinks it does, in between the cedar siding. A kingfisher drops from the fir tree over-hanging the water with its braying “I’m going in!” pre-dive shout. The clunking sound of rolling rocks on the low-tide foreshore draws me down the dock to get a better view of the bear I know is lunching on handsful of crabs.
Next door my neighbour fires up his chainsaw; the important work of fire-wood accumulation is underway. Further out across Cramer Pass, the mail plane banks and drops to come in with a roar, the sound escalates as the planes speed decreases.
Sound surrounds me here, information leaks out everywhere and it is mine to heed or not. Even the sudden cessation of noisy little chirpers amongst the flowers, gorging on seeds late in the summer is an informative moment. I look for the kestrel or merlin that has struck them dumb.
It isn’t only the sights of the our island world that bring us so much; information, great pleasure, healing of the spirit….a profound and acute sense of hearing is as great a gift and the one I offer my gratitude for, today.
Yvonne from SeaRose Studio
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