When I began this journey I brought all kinds of entertainment with me; audio books, music of every type, movies to watch on the computer. The only thing I find I’m using is the audio books when I’m driving. Whenever I’m at camp I find I’m always listening.
Every place has it’s own symphony. Morning music, day music, the special sounds of dusk and the secret sounds of the night. At Acadia during the tropical storm our senses were bombarded with the rain drumming on the roof. The first night at Lake Superior the waves crashing against the shore was the only sound we heard.
Other times it is a mixture, wind rustling through the cotton woods, mourning doves chime in, chitter of different types of songbirds and occasionally geese overhead. Listening to brooks and waterfalls at Chutes campground as the lodgepole pines groan in the wind. Seabirds, wind and gentle waves in Nova Scotia. In Minnesota we listened to wolves and loons sing their haunting tune under the stars.
I heard a new sound today of cicadas in the trees, now I know it’s August for sure and the summer is halfway over.
I don’t know whether I have become more aware of sounds because I’m traveling alone and more alert and wary or if is just because I’m outside most of the time. I noticed Maya has learned the sound of the crank that raises the camper. Someone else was cranking up their camper and she ran to see if it was ours. She knows that sound means a move for us.
We are camped next to a river now and most of the time it makes very subtle sounds; the plop of a fisherman’s lure, the swish of a fish,
Shhh, I’m listening…
Paddling a kayak at dusk is a good time to listen.
Away! 
Pam’s rolling home’s
Where the buffalo roams
Where Crazy Horse tranced in a tree
Where General George Custer
Called his men to pass muster
Land of the brave and the free, Tra la,
Land of the Brave in the Tree
[Crazy Horse, between battles, would go up into the tree tops while fasting, seeking a vision of how to defeat the U. S. Army in upcoming engagements.]
ADD: Just to be clear, C.H. would sit in a tree for a long time at night while seeking a vision.
William Heyen’s modernist poetry sequence, the book-length poem, “Crazy Horse In Stillness,” BOA Editions, is wonderful reading on the subject of Mr. C. Horse and Mr. G.Custer. (Custer, I just read was a Lt. Colonel. I had just assumed he must’ve been a general. Now I have to go check it.) Heyen is the author from whom I learned the thing about C. H. trancing.
Looked up Custer’s rank: He was generally a general: He had risen to that rank in the Civil War, for example. But in the Indian Wars, he had come out of retirement and was serving as a Lt. Colonel. He was a West Point grad (just barely.) Managed to be last in his class. Someone had to. He brought his much-beloved wife with him to the Dakotas and she lived at the fort. Libby, I believe.
You are so right. Nature has a symphony if we only listen. It plays a different tune at different times of the day.
very good posting
i’m sensing much “return to nature” sentiment — which i really like in many ways — in the tradition of h. d. thoreau and many others since.
return to nature, in many ways, is a return to reality.
certainly the buddhists would say so
a return to reality unmediated by television. and by mass media generally, reality off the grid of mass media
(a getaway from tv and all of television’s many-armed manifestations: internet videos, dvds, downloads, camera phone videos, cable movie channels, facebook vids, netflix subscriptions)
reality is, in this case, pammy unplugged, pammy unmediated, in direct contact with the natural world