Howling Moon

There are times when the wolves are silent, and only the moon howls...

I related intensely to that imagery when I read it. I picture, in my mind’s eye, a sort of moonlit, rolling hill country with low, shrubby vegetation - like the English heaths or the rhododendron balds in the Smokey Mountains (but not as dense and impassable). Or the place could be a marsh like the ones described by Charles De Lint in his dream sequences. ("The Moon Is Drowning", perhaps?) Either is lit by a gibbous moon. I know - perhaps by the total silence - that the moon is howling.

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I spent my earliest years on a farm at the edge of the Florida Everglades. It was at the base of the central ridge, where it flattens out into the prairie country that segues into the Glades as the elevation slopes imperceptibly toward sea level. Until I was about seven we had no electricity. Our lighting was by kerosene lamps. We had a wonderful, cacophonous silence: only a battery-powered radio for news programs and, occasionally, a radio "show" like the Lone Ranger. We had no television, and only a few human voices.

For the grownups, evening recreation was getting together in the "Canasta House", a little screened-in shanty open to the humid breeze, where they played canasta or just told stories. For a small boy with no other kids to play with, it was sitting in the darkness on the screened porch - comic books exhausted, but not yet sleepy - listening to the sounds of silence.

When you live away from lights, with only dim lights around you, the night takes on a palpability unknown to the residents of towns and cities. Visibility was so good in those days that it was common to sit and watch thunderstorms raging over the Gulf Stream 75 miles to the east. I sat and watched the show, and the sounds closed around me.

At first, prairie nights seem deathly still. Then you begin to realize that it seems so only because the sounds are omnipresent. Just as a person with rheumatism takes for granted the ringing in the ears caused by aspirin, you don’t at first notice the rich texture of the night sounds. When you listen carefully, however, the aural tapestry develops myriad subtle colors, accented with bursts of more distinct hue that probe the consciousness almost like a flash of light in the visual world.

The background ring of small frogs and insects is ever-present. The fiddlings of crickets and their relatives tend to go unnoticed until the one or two nearest - frightened into silence by your approach - decide to once again take up their bows. Then it is as though an unseen guest has crept up on you, and you start ever so slightly before relaxing and enjoying the tune.

The basses of the evening orchestra are the bullfrogs and pig frogs, the former with their deep "jug-o-rum, jug-o-rum," and the latter with, well, a noise demonstrative of their name. Pig frogs are often mistaken for a ’gator’s grunt by newcomers, until they actually hear a ’gator.

The woodwinds and strings are the smaller tree frogs and toads, and - of course - the crickets. Chuck-will’s-widows, close cousins to the whip-poor-wills of more northern regions, join the performance during much of the year. Their other cousins, the nighthawks, or "bull bats," add their electronic peent in the late evening, but their performances end when it is full dark and they can no longer see the flying insects that they snatch from the air on the wing. During the full moon, they hang around until closing time.

A mockingbird may be up late, or awakened from birdy dreams, and begin declaring its ownership of the surrounding territory. An occasional "peep" or quiet mutter from nearby shrubbery attests to the presence of other grounded aviators, too sleepy to venture away from their perches or nests - or too leery of the farm cat or the Great Horned owl hooting off in the distant woods.

On rare occasions, we used to hear the scream of a Florida panther, a voice now all but silenced. The smaller bobcats were common in the area, and added their quieter yowls to the concert. Raccoons chattered, fighting over a fat crawdad down by the ditch, or a particularly choice morsel of garbage from the compost heap. A ’possum might be heard rummaging for some marsupial treasure in the darkness at the side of the house. The spotted skunks who lived under the back porch would rattle the cat’s dish as they came out to share his food, a presumption that seemed not to bother the big yellow tiger at all.

Mosquitoes whined. There were unidentified scrapings, scrabblings, and slithers in the grass. An armadillo might bump its shell beneath the wood flooring, and the weatherworn boards of the porch and the house itself would creak with changes of temperature, or as it settled slightly on the pilings that extended through the muck soil to the bedrock below. You might hear the buzz of an insect, caught inside the screen, but drawn to the light of the full moon. Those were the night silences of the wet prairies.

In my memory, though, the most evocative and lonely sounds of all were the sounds of men. Today we curse the sound of cars, and trucks on the highway. Sound barriers are put along interstates to reduce the impact that the hundreds of tons of displaced air and engine noises have on our streets and neighborhoods. People who live near airports mount petitions to eliminate the same noisy contraptions that brought them to the Land of Retirement. Men are not much moved by the sounds of moving men.

But back then the skies were not crowded. For the small boy on the screened porch, the sound of an airplane was an exciting rarity. The occasional drone of an "airliner" overhead was sure to make every head raise and try to spot the location of those closest - too soon receding - human beings; people unknown but envied for their trip to somewhere. On a calm night the slower, lower aircraft of those days might be heard for ten minutes or more, until finally the lonely drone receded into the distance, and its perception back into the sound of the orchestra.

The sound of automobiles on the nearby "hard road" also amplified the solitude. Depending on wind direction, these too could be heard for minutes at a time. The sound of a car approaching from far away - a single car more often than not, on those lonely roads - always got your attention. The change in pitch if it began to slow for some reason was always a hopeful moment: "Maybe they’re going to turn in. Who could it be?" Then a vague disappointment, as the windy sound dopplered into recession and quickly faded away.

The whine of the occasional big truck didn’t raise the same hopes, but was unusual enough to get your attention. The massive manual transmissions and gigantic differentials created a distinct whine that carried even more than the sounds of automobiles. A small boy, lying in bed beneath the sound of the wind in Australian pines, could listen to a truck until he fell asleep, while the orchestra played on.