Sounds

I was just out in the back yard, standing there in the dark while the dog patrolled and marked her territory. It’s a nice night here, moon through the trees, still warm, starting to get a bit muggy — but what really struck me were the sounds.

From inside the house I could hear the Angels-Twins baseball game on the television. As I mentioned the other day, even if you’re not watching or paying attention to the game, even if you don’t care about the outcome, if you’ve been raised with baseball in your life there’s a rhythm, a form, a patois to a baseball game broadcast that’s all its own. That’s a sound that can take me straight back to childhood, back when there was only one game on television all week, the NBC Saturday Game Of The Week, and it was never my team. (At that point it was the Kansas City Athletics.) Every game was listened to on the radio, with Monte Moore calling the action. I’m sure that for other folks there’s a similar attachment to the sounds of soccer or basketball, but for me it’s baseball.

From down the block I can hear the high school football game, the first home game of the year. It’s a private high school, not the public school our kids went to, but it’s always great to hear the crowd, the band, the totally unintelligible blaring from the PA system. It would have been great to be back in Kansas City for this weekend’s season kickoff festivities for the Chiefs, but lacking that, the sound of night high school football games tells me at a cellular level that football season is here.

As Jessie finished her business, over the hill by the county line I could hear a siren start up. I remember as a kid being surprised to find that (as a general rule) different siren sounds indicated different emergency vehicles. Fire trucks don’t sound like ambulances which don’t sound like police cars. What I was hearing tonight was a police car, which made sense given that it came from that direction while the fire station was over that way and the hospital over that way. A minute later, off toward the Valley, the sound of an incoming helicopter indicated that something was indeed up over toward the freeway.

When we were in Vermont and upstate New York in June, one of the things that struck me after a couple of days was the total lack of sirens and helicopters. Between police, fire, and ambulance sirens and police, private, and traffic helicopters flitting about, you never go more than a couple of hours without hearing sirens and choppers in Los Angeles. It’s so routine you don’t even think about it until you start hearing a LOT of them. (If they’re fire engines, you live near the hills covered in dry brush, and you suddenly catch a whiff of smoke on the breeze, that’s a whole different alert level.) But in ten days in New England, I didn’t hear a single siren, nor did I see or hear a single helicopter. As with the dogs that did not bark in the night, it stood out once it was noticed.

Finally, off in the distance, going through the Santa Suzanna Pass, a train whistle could be heard. There’s a reason that sound is so synonymous with loneliness and longing, the call of the road, the desire to be off seeking adventures or a new life, all debts paid one way or the other, a clean slate wherever we end up. It made me wonder what sound evoked those feelings before the train was invented. There must have been one, the feelings aren’t new. I’m thinking it might have been the sound of honking geese heading over the horizon.

Where do those geese go, and when can I follow?