This afternoon, shortly before four o’clock, the sun, which had been low and sickly most of the day, began to seriously consider setting, her flames licking the clouds and igniting them all along the horizon above the Olympic mountains, and tracing the waves of Puget Sound with gold and scarlet, as I stood at the brink of the waters, blinking in the cold wind from the sea. The sound stretched out vast in front of me, confusing distances, so that the postcard-perfect snowy mountains looked both as far as the edge of the world and close enough to touch. Behind me was Seattle, with its rumbling buses and rushing cars and chattering humanity. With me here, at the line where sea, sky, and city met, was a seagull — at least, I think it was a seagull, though I’ve never seen a seagull that was so large, mottled gray, and ill-tempered. I considered trying to snap its picture, but it just scowled at me and flew off.
In English sound has four basic meanings, each of them historically unrelated to the others — an unusual situation. The “narrow channel of water” goes back to Germanic swem, “move, be in motion”, which is also the root of swim. The “fathom, probe” meaning is possibly related to swem as well, but can’t be traced back further than Old French sonde. The “noise” meaning has the most regal pedigree — it goes back through Latin sonus to Proto Indo European swonus, which is also the root of swan (“the sounding bird”) and sing. And the “healthy, unhurt” meaning comes from Proto Indo European swen-to, “strong, healthy”.
It’s my sense that the fact that all these meanings have merged into a single simple word — sound — shows an unconscious acknowledgement among English speakers of the underlying affinity between these concepts. Phonosemantically sound indicates energy that arises with great vigor but also with resonance, depth, and earthiness. You can feel the same energy in south and ground and round — volume, profundity, but also vibration and motion. For each of these concepts — the narrow waters, the far fathoms, the shaking air, the healthy body — sound calls to mind a mass, often in movement: a channel of ocean, an echo in the depths, a billow in the atmosphere, an unsullied solid.
And these thoughts bring me round again to where I’m standing. I am here because of a confluence of ripples set in motion quite suddenly this fall. So much was different a year ago — on a cold January day — when I stood with my fiancee on the opposite edge of the continent, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, our faces to the ocean’s wind, planning our wedding. I had a solid job with good prospects, our little home in Pittsburgh was established and orderly, my children (who visited on weekends) were doing well across town with their mother. Everything seemed reasonably sound and predictable. Then, two weeks before our wedding in September, there was an earthquake under my little life: my company was bought by a much larger one in Seattle. Like a hammer tapped against a weak spot in a support beam, or a shout in silence, or a boulder falling into a deep pool, those corporate executives brought a sharp shock to my life. Even as Alison and I launched our new lives as husband and wife, we were shifted, shunted, and everything began to settle into a new shape.
It’s still settling. Our orderly little home in Pittsburgh has been sorted, boxed, and readied for transport three thousand miles. Just today, I put down the deposit to reserve a new apartment — a newer, smaller place, cozier, with more light and less carpet, and strange west-coast trees in the yard. I hope they will be our friends. My new job is even more solid, with even better prospects, but will require more time in an office. The schedule of visitation with the kids — three months in the summer? Two months with extra weeks in the fall and winter? Something else entirely? — has become a source of contention, and I can only hope that it’s resolved quickly. The only thing that has remained rock-steady has been my wife, who has been beside me without a doubt or a flinch every step. When the ground shook under us, we leaned on each other. When the hardest shocks came, we were knocked to our knees, but we landed together, and rose again together.
We were married on the edge of land, sea, and sky, but also on a knife’s edge in our lives — between jobs, between homes, between cities, between landscapes. In September we knew that the edge was coming, but we couldn’t see beyond it. Today I stand on another shore, under another sky, with a new home and new work before me. Even this northern sun seems new. But it is good. And she still stands with me.
There is a sound — a song — when I hear it these days, I often cry.
Harbor
We’re here where the daylight begins
The fog on the streetlight slowly thins
Water on water’s the way
The safety of shoreline fading away
Sail your sea
Meet your storm
All I want is to be your harbor
The light in me
Will guide you home
All I want is to be your harbor
Fear is the brightest of signs
The shape of the boundary you leave behind
So sing all your questions to sleep
The answers are out there in the drowning deep
You’ve got a journey to make
There’s your horizon to chase
So go far beyond where we stand
No matter the distance
I’m holding your hand
Oddments
- It’s been almost four months since I’ve posted here; the new marriage, new job, new home, and new child custody situation have put this blog on the back burner. But finally things are settling into their new shape, and I can breathe a bit. My posting will still be very sporadic over the next couple of weeks, but I hope to have everything on an even keel by early February.
- In the meantime, I’ve collected some past writings and put them on a new blog, Skein of Words. I want to use it for bits and snatches of fiction I’m working on. I tend to have a number of projects going at once, many of them interconnected and interrelated, and it’s only every once in a while that once of them is knocked into a shape finished enough to be ‘published’ (though, these days, the very definition of ‘finished’ and ‘public’ are changing month to month!). I have been trying to discipline myself to work very hard on just one project until it is finished, but I visited a psychic during my honeymoon who suggested I take a more relaxed, playful attitude. So I made this blog where I can simply work on whatever I want to work on, and whenever one of my projects is ‘ready’, I’ll put it on Amazon and ‘publish’ it. Good times! Check it out!
- If you follow me on facebook (either my personal account or my Druid Journal page), you might have noticed that I haven’t posted anything in months. I’ve gotten pretty fed up with facebook, and plan on confining myself to Twitter (@druidjournal) and G+ from now on. Look me up there!
- “In Seattle you haven’t had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it’s running.” ~Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
- There is a famous, oft-quoted speech attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854, at the time when his people agreed to move to a reservation. It is eloquent and moving, but it was made up in the mid 70′s by a screenwriter. Nevertheless a version exists which probably actually reflects what Seattle really said, and is definitely worth reading: “When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone… At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.” – Chief Seattle (probably)
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Mere America
