We had dinner recently in a new restaurant owned by a good friend of mine. It was so loud that I had to get up and sit on the other side of the table next to my wife so we could hear each other talk. Later. the owner he explained that restaurants today are designed with acoustics that are always loud.
On the way home, we talked about how night sounds have changed with each passing year. As we drove through the harvest-moon night, it brought back memories of some of the unique night sounds that I remembered for the rest of my life.
In 1943, I first heard a night sound that later became familiar on clear, moonlight nights. I had driven my date up to Malibu to show her what the ocean looks like under a full moon. (My wife says, yeah, right.)
I had my redwood surfboard sticking out of the back of my car and when I pulled off of the highway onto the shoulder, high waves were breaking crisply along the beach. After sharing the evening with my date and a half an hour of mentally riding each and every wave, I paddled out to try to ride a wave at midnight. I had never surfed at night before, but when I finally managed to catch one, the sound of the waves breaking behind me along with a splash of the wake of my surfboard made me feel as though my overseas Navy assignment was a long way away.
Two years later, I heard almost that same sound, but so but much louder. I was surrounded by 60-foot high waves that were crashing all around me. This scene was mixed with the stinging spray of the typhoon force winds while I was aboard a ship that was sinking in the South Pacific near the end of World War II. The shouts of the officers and the enlisted men, the plunk of the munitions that we threw over the side as rapidly as possible to lighten the ship, all came together in a symphony for survival. We somehow managed to stay afloat until dawn when we were picked up by another ship in the convoy.
In 1968, on a freezing cold, clear evening, I heard the flup, flup, flup of helicopter blades as a pilot tried to lift our terrified bodies off the summit of the Tasman glacier in New Zealand aboard a three-place helicopter. Somehow it lifted five of us plus an extra 100 lbs. of camera equipment. There was only room inside for three of us, so two skiers were tied on the outside like a couple of dead deer. The whine of the turbine engine was way above the red danger mark on the instrument panel when the pilot finally got us high enough into the air so that we could fall off the nearby cliff and get enough airspeed for the rest of the trip. The sigh of the pilot as he finally quit holding his breath in his extra effort to help the engine get airborne was lower than the whine of the jet engine.
It was quiet as my wife, Laurie, and I drove into our driveway and the harvest moon was shining brightly on the water in front of our house. We startled three deer nibbling on the bushes alongside of our fence and their cloven hoofs sounded alien. It was a cool night so we stayed in the hot tub long enough to want to fall asleep, climbed in a hot shower and we were both finally in bed and falling asleep when we were startled by strange sounds coming from the salt-chuck in front of the house.
Neither of us could figure out what was causing it so we put on our bathrobes and walked down toward our dock. The sound were as if it was a combination of waves breaking at Malibu, the howling wind in the typhoon in the South Pacific, with helicopter noises for counterpoint and all mixed together with the volume turned down.
Swimming just off the end of our dock was a large pod of orcas or killer whales that even under the harvest moon were impossible to count. They spouted many times as they chased of school of salmon down the path of the moonlight on the water. They seemed to be having a great party. Their spouting sounds became quieter as they all swam on west through the pass between the islands. Finally, they were through the narrow pass as silence once again settled around us. We walked slowly back to the house when the cooing of a loon disturbed by the noise of the passing orcas caught our attention. Then there was darkness without a sound.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
