In the SEGO diary this evening OkieByAccident brought up the tragic Ray Bradbury story called "The Fog Horn." You can read it here. It isn't long -- I will wait for you.
It is a story of loss, of great loneliness, and of the beauty of nature. And a story you can read many different ways.
Tonight I am reading it to mourn the passing of the great sounds. I know that things are much safer now that there is radar to indicate to ships they are nearing the shoals. But in making this advance we have been able to replace the great fog horns. I don't remember when I heard them myself -- I am 48 years old as of two weeks ago, and I am feeling suddenly older than I should by rights feel. Perhaps it is this sudden realization that things are not getting better.
I don't yearn for the 1950s or 1960s, the picket fence world and libertarian universe that never really existed but which Beck and McCain seem to think would be just peachy keen to get back to. But there are some things that I miss. The magic of the fog horn is one of them.
Ironically, I can't remember where I have heard it. I know I must have, but it could conceivably be only in a film and in my imagination, combined to have that vague sense that I must have experienced it. I grew up a long way away from the ocean or the great lakes. But I traveled with my parents when I was little and went to Boston and New York, crossed the English channel on ferries, and took ships to/from the UK and Rotterdam. We stayed for a week on the Dutch coast, and spent time in Ireland and Scotland. Where would I have heard the fog horn? I don't know. But I know I have heard it once when I was little. I feel it in my bones, in that memory that is so deeply buried that it is inaccessible to me in my conscious memory. In that depth my memory of the fog horn echoes that ur-memory of the creature who comes to court the fog horn. And in the human urge to see what would happen if it were taken away (the polar ice, the great old-growth rain forests), it leads to destruction, mourning, and great irretrievable unsurvivable loss.
The town north of me across the Iowa border is now debating a decision to forbid the use of train whistles as the train go through the town. My town in Missouri has no train tracks -- they were taken up some fifteen years ago as they were no longer being used. But many towns in Iowa and Missouri still have the trains for grain and coal transport largely. Amtrak also goes through the area too, but there is little other passenger rail west of the Mississippi. The town I grew up in still has the train coming through at night, with the lonesome whistle (as the song goes) marking the hours of darkness. That is magical. I enjoy the sound when I am home -- I lie awake at night waiting for it. I lived much closer to a train line when I was in college, just a couple of blocks, and I loved the whistle then as well even though it was much louder. But in this Iowa town it is too distracting, too loud I guess. And they are getting rid of it. I can't help but think they are losing something else. Some connection to the past. And not just the past of the prairies and the move westward, but the past that is much deeper in us, the wildness that is the wind and movement. We are losing the sense of simultaneous disquiet and peace that was the sound of the fog horn blowing in the mists.