There is a dual nature to the mornings here, an impossible combination of stillness and frenetic activity; interdigitation more than combination, perhaps. It’s just after six a.m. on a Wednesday. I have forced myself out of bed so that I can spend some time writing before I make the brief but crowded commute to my office: four miles, eight poorly synchronized stoplights, and five stop signs, all while in constant near-collision stop-and-go proximity with a hoard of zombified fellow wage-slaves, most with their head angled downward toward a screen held just out of sight beneath the lower reach of the steering wheel. As a pot of coffee slowly fills on the kitchen counter, I slip the harness on the dog to take her out for her morning constitutional before I settle down in front of the computer—she has had a touchy stomach lately, and I don’t want to risk another mess on the living room carpet.
The sprawling apartment complex houses several hundred people, but at this hour there is very little activity, with the exception of an occasional car making its way up and out of the narrow, winding, speedbump-studded parking lot, its sole occupant off to join the zombified, cellphone-poking hoards to offer their diurnal blood-sacrifice to the machine. A high school girl passes by on her way to the bus stop, eyes glued to the screen in her hand, stooped over from the weight of her backpack and the steep uphill grade of the roadway; she walks past us as if the dog and I were two ornamental shrubs planted along the curb. An elderly man, perhaps only a few years older than me, emerges from a breezeway with his two dogs, both spaniels of some type, on retractable leashes. The dog and I avoid the spaniels, which have immediately started barking at us, and head toward the small off-leash area that was recently added to the complex by wrapping a seven-foot unstained cedar fence around a shady corner of grass near the back entrance.
It is on our way back from the dog area that the dual nature of the place, its alchemical blending of quiet and noise, starts to work on me. The man who was previously walking the two barking dogs now leans against his second story balcony rail, smoking a cigarette and staring blankly off into the distance in the direction of the highway as if he was a passenger on a cruise ship gazing out to sea while waiting for the onboard casino to open. Although it dominates the sonic space, the highway is not visible from here. The apartment complex is built into a hillside, one of a thousand infinitesimal bumps on the tips of the bent bony fingers of the Cascades as they curl down into Puget Sound, just over a mile in the opposite direction, and the land slopes steeply, hiding the highway behind a large natural berm dressed in blackberry brambles. The traffic noise still has an hour or so before it reaches its morning crescendo, although it has increased orders of magnitude from what only an hour ago was a lone eighteen-wheeler, a car with an exhaust system altered to be extra loud in order to mask its owner’s insecurities, and maybe one or two emergency vehicle sirens. I want to use the word drone to describe the traffic noise, but only because that has become a standard descriptor of such things—standard to the point of being cliché. It’s not a drone, though. The resonant mechanical growl of engines is not the dominant feature. Rather it’s an admixture of passing tires playing their perpetual circular game of catch and release with the oil-seasoned asphalt, and the air being pushed aside violently as the cars force their way through, more like the violent wind of an impending Midwestern storm against a row of tall poplar trees at the edge of a flat cornfield, steady and yet pushing past begrudging limbs in irregular gusts, or maybe the pulsing torrent of spring snowmelt over the boulder-littered course of a shallow mountain river. The mechanical engine noise is an afterthought, a throbbing background doppler-effect whine set against an acoustic surface built from motion itself. It is this sound of the traffic that dominates. And it will do so for the rest of the day, waxing and waning according to the circadian rhythms of commerce and industry, exploitation and destruction, the flowing and ebbing tide of a kind of desperation unique to the civilized, a desperation born of false hope, a frantic but ultimately futile effort to brace against the crushing weight of helplessness that defines a life of obligatory consumption.
But there is another sound, another layer to the acoustic space that runs a parallel cycle, starting early in the morning, well before dawn, reaching its peak rapidly with the emerging morning light, and then striking a slowly trailing sustain that reverberates until the last few traces of twilight fade into a moon-shadow and streetlamp-speckled quasi-darkness. It’s the birds. This time of year, late May, the bird chatter is at its most frantic. And it is hard to decide which truly dominates this morning’s acoustic space, the highway or the birds. The birds are more proximal and more omnidirectional, and there are calls from individual birds—the crows especially—that are loud enough to momentarily nullify the highway, eclipse it, supersede it. But there are gaps in the birdsong, short, punctate, and irregular intervals of local silence, spaces in between the avian pointillist soundscape where the pulsating but gapless highway noise resolves back into focus, returning instantly because it never really left, it was only momentarily overwritten.
The traffic noise and the bird chatter, however, do not compete. They seem to occupy distinctly different rooms, inhabit entirely separate strata in the overall sonic structure of the morning. Although they exist contemporaneously, simultaneously shaking my eardrums, they don’t belong together. A Fourier analysis would be able to parse out the separate contribution each makes to the complex timbre of the waveforms that move my basilar membranes, but there is something more than that. They are occupants of incommensurate perceptual realms, and my mind never confuses the two. A sonogram of a spoken sentence appears as an unbroken series of spikes and troughs on the page, and yet we hear distinctly separate words—and the words themselves are built of phonemes that register as unique and unmistakable despite the fact that they blur into each other seamlessly. It is something like this that individuates the cars from the birds.
I suspect that part of this is due to my evolutionary preparation for life embedded in a soundscape dominated by other beings rather than machines. The birdsong, for instance, is communicative, it is sound with purpose. And its purposes can be recognized as such—if not entirely understood—by a primate such as myself. I know not what the bird sounds are expressing, but I know that they express. The traffic sounds are epiphenomenal. They are not expressive. They have no purpose, there is no intention behind them, they do not make reference to something else. They are mere side effects. The traffic noise does not communicate anything. Or if it does, it is only to serve as an unconscious reminder of where I am—and where I am not.
But despite the birdcall and the highway and the large, low-flying airplane that is just now directly overhead, there is quiet here. Other than the man coughing heavily between drags on his morning cigarette while staring in the direction of the highway—really probably staring toward the light of the sun that has only now started to filter though the brambles on the hill—and me pulling my dog off of a juicy tidbit of garbage, a chicken bone scoured clean, voided of its marrow, and left in our path by a careless crow, it is quiet here. And quiet is the right word, although it makes no logical sense. That’s the impossible duality: the penetrating quiet that fills the morning in spite of the overcrowded acoustic space.
For a brief moment I wonder if maybe it is the relative lack of movement. Maybe I have mistaken stillness for quiet. Maybe I have conflated the visual with the sonic. Other than me and the dog and the occasional car leaving the parking lot and the man with his barking spaniels and the high school girl, there has been very little that has moved. I look to the trees and see that they are also still, there is almost no wind at all and even the broad, triangular leaves of the large cottonwood that overhangs the corner of the dog area barely flex in what little breeze happens to find them. But that’s not it. There is movement here. And stillness as well. And yet the quiet is pervasive. Despite the constant noise, there is a peacefulness—not silence, not absence, but a positive calmness, a quietude. On the surface it doesn’t seem to make any sense. It’s as if alongside the furious avian chatter and enwrapping the hectic whirring and grinding of the highway, there is an additional something, a nullifying presence, a continual injection of calm into the storm. I have been in carefully-engineered music halls, where distance becomes distorted to the point of near elimination, where an on-stage whisper can be heard from the farthest balcony seat as if it was spoken directly to your ears without intervening space, echoless, without any lingering trace. The sound here has something of the same quality, and it takes only a few moments to track its source.
Trees.
Like singing in the shower, where the splashing streams of water neutralize the errant notes and stray overtones, the trees are buffing off the rough edges and absorbing the dissonant tones before they can propagate, cushioning the pulse of the city traffic and dampening the shrill death howl of the passenger jet, buffering the perpetual mechanical scream of civilization while, at the same time, somehow foregrounding the birdcall, accentuating the pauses, the brief boundaries of silence between individual notes. There are trees here, everywhere, and it is their doing. They are the keepers of the morning quiet, the guardians of quietude.
