Evening Chorus

A week ago on Nantucket at twilight I wandered down past the MSPCA’s driveway, which is also a road, of sorts. It’s unpaved, and runs through a bit of piney woods past someone’s great-tracks-of-land spread, complete with big red barn and, um, llamas. At one point, you come across an emphatic stone marker noting that it’s a Public Way. Damn straight! I’ve walked through all the way, and it comes out in someone’s driveway. Whatever. (With so many mostly-vacant houses on the island — summer homes, second homes, third homes, etc. –, I take a laissez faire approach to trespassing there in the off-season.)

With all the water on the island, this time the roadlet was flooded. On both sides were impenetrable thickets, also flooded. It was a sort of temperate swamp. This is where I’d seen a garter snake earlier that week, and a drake mallard bustle out of the thicket to paddle in front of me before flying off for a short return to what I gathered was more open water just a few feet away from me.

But that evening it was all about the ears. The spring peepers were roaring. They can be heard in far-flung parts of Brooklyn, but this isn’t an urban sound. (The wikipage has some audio clips). Yet, even to my city- assaulted ears, the chorus was of such loudness, such intensity, that I could not take much of it. I was in the center of the chorus, which I felt as much as I heard. Indeed, I felt in danger of being no more, of being consumed by the sound. My kind of enlightenment not being about obliteration, I beat a retreat to a safer distance, marveling at the effect of all those little frogs.