An Honest Noise |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. Today, commentator David Clark remembers an 'honest noise' of this year's dry, hot summer:
"Greetings from Cochran, Georgia.
I'd just as soon hear the sound of raindrops on my tin roof.
But at five o'clock in the morning, the silence of the countryside is broken by the drone of the same irrigation pump that sung me to sleep last night. The pump is across the road, on the other side of the field. It's a diesel machine, and draws the water out of the pond over there and sprays it out.
I love peace and quiet, but the sound of that pump across the road doesn't bother me. The vague harmonies of another pump down the road chiming in make it sound like some wild creature, like some sort of giant frog with a steady croak.
My neighbor's irrigation pump is honest noise, like a dog that barks when a strange car pulls in the driveway. The man who owns that pump is hearing it all night in his sleep, even though he lives out of earshot of it. He'll hear that sound as he adds up the totals of his harvest; as he says "not bad considering I had to water it to get it out of the ground". The sound of that pump is like the bell on a church, reminding all who hear it to pray.
An outsider will hear it as racket; but those of us who live around here know that the sound of that pump means a particular line on our neighbor's face. Every time he switches that pump on, the line will get a little deeper. Like the different widths of the rings inside a tree, these lines connected to turning on the irrigation pump tell the history of the rainfall in this man's life. In a city, the sound of this pump would simply be another part of an endless racket. But out here in this part of the world, it's a strain of the honest noise of the landscape."
David Clark is a regular contributor to The Weather Notebook and to our show's new companion book, Soul of the Sky. For more information, visit our website at mountwashington.org. Thanks to Subaru and the National Science Foundation.
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Purchase David Clark's CD "Kindly Curious" 'Memories are made up of events and pictures of life preserved in stories. These stories tell us about life in a way that no book, photogragh, or movie ever can, for they allow us to involve our own imaginations in the creation of the story as we hear it.' -David Clark |
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