The sound of silence

The lake is pretty quiet but human noise sneaks in. You can still hear the sound of trucks rolling on Route 1, two miles away.  Then there is the hammering of shingles, chain saws, and boat traffic during the day.  You have to filter out human noise to hear the wildlife.  It takes concerted effort.

Silence — true silence — is hard to find.  Growing up, I remember hearing nothing but birds and the farm rooster in the morning.  (In Switzerland, you were prohibited from mowing your lawn on a Sunday.)  These days, there is always human noise in the background.  We keep the lights on to stay up later, people are always getting up earlier to get to where they need to be, and there is no day of rest.  In search of silence, I sometimes get up at 3am, to live on the edge of sleep and life.  It is a strange silence, coffin-like and there are no bird songs.

While 3am has its magic, there are other times to hear nature’s cycle.  My time of choice this week is that hour while the sun is almost done casting its afternoon shadows, but hot and warm enough for the very best of photos.

To bring you into temporal perspective, these fields are covered with lupine in the late spring, a gorgeous wildflower growing on the coast of Maine that really only thrives in neglect.  You can’t grow lupine deliberately, it grows where it wants.  See wild lupine on Round Pond (a few miles from me) as taken by Keith Webber here:

This time of year, the lupine are dried out husks sticking up through meadow grasses and other wildflowers and thistle, attracting Goldfinches who nest in the long grass.  We can’t mow the hay because the goldfinches haven’t left their nests, and the lupine haven’t set their seeds.  If you mow too soon, the lupine won’t grow next year.

Tonight, when I took my picture, there was a brief moment in time when there was no distant traffic and I heard the small crackling sound as thousands of Lupine seed heads burst open to release their seeds.

Nature is not silent.  But I need to stand still to hear it.