Peace

After last week’s post about my ridiculous schedule I took the weekend off and went with Paul to a friend’s cottage in the Driftless region of Southwest Wisconsin. It was great. On the way up we explored Aldo Leopold’s shack and on the way home we toured Taliesin, and in between we wandered around Viroqua, shopping for Amish basketry, dandelion jam, and used books and records. We drank stiff Old Fashioneds at a kitschy supper club in the Dells and ate the house salad to which all other house salads shall forevermore be held accountable at the Driftless Cafe. We slept, a lot. And, as he always does when we get out of the city, Paul set up his recording equipment to document the nighttime soundscape of the acoustically resonant valley behind our friends’ house. 

He has an attic full of gear to serve this purpose: microphones and tripods and battery packs and fleece windscreens and waterproof cases labeled “Bioacoustic survey in progress. Please do not disturb!” The last time we were up here he recorded what sounded like three coyotes howling to each other across the valley in urgent 4 am communication. It was breathtaking.

I don’t pretend to understand the technical nuances of field recording (or any recording) but on Sunday, as we tromped around in the woods retrieving the stuff, I recognized one of his homemade microphone arrays as the result of a trip shopping for foam balls at the craft store many months ago. Consisting of two mics mounted on a small pane of plexiglass, with a half-dome of styrofoam about six inches in diameter wedged between them, this is called a hemispheric boundary array. As I understand, vaguely, there are a lot of variations on boundary arrays; this kind was invented by a Minneapolis-based nature field recordist named Curt Olsen, who writes on his website that the half-ball of foam acts as a baffle, eliminating anomalies he was picking up in other microphone arrays as the source of the sound – the coyote, the deer, the owl – moved from one mic to the other. It provides a little break for the inputs on the competing mics to resolve and, in Olsen’s words, render “a much more stable center image without spoiling the beautiful depth and spacial definition I so very much appreciated.”

OK, don’t come at me, sound recordists – I know I’m no expert here – but I like the idea that with two competing pieces of information warring for attention some sort of sound-sink, a moment of quiet, is needed to produce clarity. I feel like this concept has legs.

As we walked along Paul reminded me that Olsen was the recordist responsible for capturing quite possibly the saddest nature recording ever: the heartbreaking cries of a male beaver who, returning at sunset to his home on a small lake in the Chippewa National Forest, realizes that the DNR has that afternoon for reasons unknown dynamited his lodge, destroying his home and killing his mate and kits. As he swims in circles around the lake, he wails in confusion and despair. 

You can listen to it here.

I’ve mentioned before, maybe, that my sisters and I call each other “beaver” – it’s a pet name, a term of affection and solidarity and a double-entendre salute to our shared cis-womanhood. I can’t even remember when it started, it’s just part of the fabric of our family now.

This time last year they both descended on Chicago to help carry me through chest surgery. Sure, Paul could have handled it fine on his own but having them here was just such a comfort. Two extra parts of myself to drive and cook and make terrible dark jokes and just generally take charge of things. I felt so lucky to be lifted up and loved on all sides just then.

In recent years my brain has started drifting more than I’d like to the possibility of catastrophe – I find myself worrying about earthquakes, car accidents, random acts of violence in ways I never did when I was younger. I don’t like it but now, on the precipice of global catastrophe, I cast myself forward, trying to feel in my body the terror of having my own family of beavers destroyed in an instant, whether through hate-fueled brutality or the cruel anonymity of a bomb. I imagine wailing, impotent, swimming in circles, trying to understand.

I’m neither Jewish nor Muslim, Israeli or Palestinian, but I’ve been trying to listen to those with standing. I signed on to calls for a ceasefire to allow aid to reach Gaza, to stop the killing of innocents, to bring the hostages safely home, as part of the campaign run by Jewish Voice for Peace, but there are many others calling for the same end.