Stirring
around at 3:00AM this morning, I thought I heard fireworks. It was far away but quickly I discerned
it was too massive for fireworks and from out of my dream state I was suddenly
worried, that it might be warfare.
What else could explain such massive explosions? Well, thunder for one thing.
The rain started falling gently and then in torrents and
turning to face the window I could see the flash of light and then seconds
later hear the thunder roll in.
And as with that memorable scene from “Poltergeist”, the seconds between
the flashes and the subsequent crash became shorter and shorter as the storm
moved our way. I was still
too groggy to open the window and have a look, but after tossing this way and
that, exchanging the squeeze of this pillow for that, it became clear that I
wasn’t going back to sleep either.
Downstairs I got into my meditation routine there in the
dark with all the pre morning sounds calling out in the wet. In the silence there is quite a bit of
noise to discern. Water, of
course, pouring, splashing, running off of roofs and off of leaves and
splattering onto wood and earth, and coursing into drains that all have their own acoustics. Living in an arid climate the rain is
all the more dramatic when it comes.
The thunder wasn’t through
with us either, though by now the sound of Zeus’ bolts took longer and longer
to arrive.
Somewhere out there was a bird with a four-note call. “doot doot, doot doot.” I tried to listen for a while to
discern if the note descended or repeated, but it wasn’t easy to make it
out. I don’t usually have it up in
this room but my old electric guitar was right there beside me so I picked it
up for second. I’m pretty sure
that little birdie was playing C, B. B, A-flat, over and over and over again
around 4:38 or so. This is
certainly a call we have in North America as well. And in my mind I wanted to say this bird was a
whippoorwill. That name is
probably stuck there because of the old Hank Williams song where he asks “Have
you ever heard the lonesome whippoorwill?”
I’ve gone on line and there is actually a Youtube clip, of
the old whippoorwill singing and alas, I have to confirm: that’s not my
bird. Was it a dove? Youtube check again? Nope. Not to be defeated, I took things up a notch in
seriousness and went to the Cornell Ornithological Lab, which my step dad used
to run and cycled through about a dozen calls. My “Doot, doot.
Doot, doot” bird could not be found. It has to be said that no one, not even another bird
species, only the frogs, returned the gesture. Later, like the thunder, he moved further off and then
disappeared entirely. I say “he”
and surely it may have been a lady but something about that repetitive yearning
persistence, sounded awfully familiar.
I think the rain got him thinking about a lady bird, 巴山夜雨[1] with no one calling back.
It wasn’t till well after the sun was up and most of the
dripping had stopped that other birds began to arrive and neighbors began
putting about in their kitchens and smells of wet earth began to arrive on the
wind. A fitting sound track to
this extra early morning deluge and aftermath is the 1938 recording of “Morning
Air” by the one William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith, otherwise
known as Willie “The Lion” Smith.
Yet another in the tradition of great Harlem Stride piano stylists, it's
a boisterous, playful rendition of the genre. It isn’t hard to hear Duke Ellington in these compositions
and indeed, Willie was apparently considered a “musician’s musician” by the likes
of Duke, George Gershwin and Artie Shaw.
Born upstate in Goshen New York, not too far from where I have a summer
home, I wonder what birds The Lion was hearing on his 1938 morning?
[1] Bāshānyèyǔ: rain on Mt Ba (idiom); lonely in a strange land / Evening
Rain, 1980 movie about the Cultural revolution
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