Sounds Like Kansas

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

SOUNDS LIKE KANSAS

As we make our homes here on the range, we stop to enjoy the honking of geese overhead.

We cheer at the brassiness of the school fight song, hear the grunts and the clashing of helmets at football games, and during the winter we listen to a herd of basketball shoes pounding their way down the court.

Kansas will celebrate her 149th year of statehood on Friday. And while we’re all pretty good at describing the Kansas we see and know – the landscape, weather, the politics, the people – how often do we pay attention to the sounds that Kansas offers?

It’s easy to get caught up in vision, in sight. Our eyes catch the curve of hills, the blur of wildflowers in the ditches, and the farmer drinking coffee in the hometown café.

Hearing seems secondary to sight, but sound is story – it is conversations, rhythms and melodies, it is movement, it is life itself.

Sound is the applause of cottonwood leaves in the breeze, it’s the trash truck slamming one down on Monday mornings, the ding-ding-ding as the red and white bars block the railroad crossing.

During the day, the rumble of a freight train blends into the background, but at night, we hear the train charge into town and listen to the rhythm of the rails, the whistle cutting through the clean, black air.

Deep in snow, the city moves in a hush as traffic sounds are absorbed by the powder. Then you hear the scrape of shovel against sidewalk.

On summer days in a small town, you may track down what seems to be the whine of a vacuum cleaner, and find that the noise comes from the grain dryer at the elevator.

In some communities the fire whistle blows every day at noon, and converts itself to a tornado siren as the need arises. The siren sends a circle of screams, telling us the skies have turned violent, that trouble is on its way.

Thunder is a sound Kansans will be hearing again soon. Purple storms will march in from the west with all the splash and hoopla they can manage, including a couple of elephants rolling across the sky.

So on a night in March you might be sleeping, your face soft against the pillow when an airplane-crash of lightning lands outside your bedroom window. The panes rattle, the house quivers, your eyes fly open and your feet hit the floor just out of instinct.

Wind is a constant in our lives. That breeze may be a nuisance, but it also makes music as it blows through the tall grasses in the Flint Hills.

Farm sounds are familiar to many – chickens clucking and cattle lowing in the corral. There’s the flutter of wings in the barn as a pigeon swoops by, the squeaking of hinges on the washhouse door, and the twitter of a meadowlark sitting on a barbed-wire fence.

You might drive past a school during recess and hear the shouts of kids as they kick a ball or chase each other in a game of tag. Their shouting might stir us to remember our own recesses, the school bell that called us in, our mornings in fourth grade when we each put hand to heart, “I pledge allegiance to the flag… .”

Our childhoods were full of sound – the snapping of playing cards on bicycle spokes, a splash into the swimming pool, the radio playing over the speakers, wet feet running on concrete, the lifeguard’s whistle.

And we might remember lying in a patch of cool clover in our own front yard, listening as a single-engine airplane tries out the big blue sky above us. We likely jumped when we heard an unexpected sonic boom, a jet breaking the sound barrier.

Maybe we tune in to sound only when the dog barks at the edge of the yard light’s circle, or when the coyotes have a hill-to-hill conversation, or when a guitar, banjo, and fiddle start weaving their tunes on a brick street on a Friday night.

Kansas is a beautiful state to look upon with its endless land and spacious sky. But some of its beauty is beyond vision – and to see the whole picture, it may help to close our eyes.

Copyright 2010 ~ Cheryl Unruh