If it's a sign of eccentricity to walk around with your head in the clouds — at least the stock-character sort of eccentric popularized in the Technicolor Hollywood movies of midcentury, with Einstein hair, bumping into walls — I am one. Certainly my hair is a bird's nest, and I do habitually walk around with my chin tilted up to gaze at the sky, at the clouds never the same twice, the branches waving and dipping, the birds plotting their tricks.
The sky was scrubbed clean Monday night, absolutely empty, not a cloud up there as Sweetpea and I made our evening perambulations. Sweetpea was at the end of her leash and I had put on my giant sleeping-bag winter coat for the first time this season as we stopped in our paces, repeatedly, to marvel at the clarity and stillness of the night. The Moon shone unusually bright, casting shadows, even though it was as far from us as the Moon gets, high at the apex of the dome that covered us in night like one of those glass domes the Victorians used to display taxidermy. But once, twice, and then three times the strange stillness was broken by an equally strange, surprisingly sudden and violent, burst of wind that came first out of the south and then out of the north with no warning, shaking the trees. The branches bent and banged on the windows of the houses of Main Street. We hurried along, still looking up and up to admire the strange behavior of the sky. The wind turned on and off in fits and bursts. The golden eagle weathervane that perches at the top of the flag on the village green screeched as it turned on its axis to point into the wind, and the ropes and tackle that the Public Works men use to raise and lower the flag clanged against the pole, making a sound exactly like the sound of a ship's rigging clanging against a mast, brass on oak.
Autumn is the most magnificent time for upward-gazing. The trees on Main are in their glory — orange and green, rust, yellow, and brown, making a papery rustle — and the sky is brilliantly blue. Whoever designed this color scheme had a strange color sense; maple-orange with dish-liquid blue? But it's very bracing.
On Wednesday, last week, Nisse and Sebastian and I had dinner in the basement tavern at the 1770 House and, as we enjoyed our oysters and a Tom Collins, the conversation turned to the sky and to the sky sounds. We agreed we approve of the noon whistle.
The noon whistle — the siren at 12 from the firehouse in Amagansett that blares out, always unexpectedly, making the shoppers at Amber Waves jump and cover their ears reminds us of the past, when working people were pleased to know it was time for a ham and Swiss wrapped in white paper with a dill pickle spear (as they did at Bucket's Deli) and a lukewarm coffee with lots of whole milk. Also, the noon siren reminds us that the fire alarm system is working. It's un-American to disapprove of the noon whistle.
The sirens and bells that broadcast into the air, for all ears to hear, may be anachronistic but they are, at least, reminders of a former communal way of life. (Writing this, I realize I don't know if there is still a noon siren on Oakview Highway or Toilsome Lane. I think not? I do remember when a siren was removed from Herrick Park to protect the hearing of the students at John M. Marshall Elementary School.) I ordered a prosecco to follow the Tom Collins and we agreed we approve, too, of the church bells that ring out at 5 each evening, and peels from all the different steeples on Sunday.
I was already an adult before I realized that the dull roar coming in a general and very dispersed way from the south was, indeed, the ocean. Isn't that ridiculous? I grew up within the sound of the Atlantic breakers and was so accustomed to their roar that I wasn't even aware of it. Like the heartbeat you hear rushing in your ear canal.
My favorite sky noise, however, is the rushing sound made by the gigantic tulip poplar that grows on the property line between my house and the library. This tree is so big it would take four adults, arms outstretched, to join their hands around its trunk. The wind plays that tree like a harp. Or a cello. Or a four-story pipe organ. It makes all sorts of sounds, and I love to hear it.
Among the mental inventory of brilliant projects I have thought up but never put into action (filed neatly away in this metaphorical cabinet in a mental folder alongside one containing my long-term plans to found a fashion brand of more flattering sleepwear that you don't look a fool in; and one containing details of my ingenious scheme to make millions with expensive, bourgeois iced-slushy drinks) is a scheme for creating a sound garden, or wind garden, by the strategic planting of different species in different combinations on the knolls, hills, and dells of an imaginary vast-acreage of property I don't own: The visitor would linger among a stand of white birch on the hill and the wind would play the trees, and they would make a particular tinselly sound; and then the visitor would make their way into a small nearby hollow where the wind barely brushed the treetops, and, there, the cherry trees would have something else to say (or to sing).
Have you heard of the Gerard K. O'Neill Space Settlement Contest for ambitious teenage scientists? It's an annual competition for middle and high school students, who are challenged to design free-orbiting habitats for humans in space. Not habitats on Mars, but self-contained moving cities to float up there in the nothing between the stars, where the humans of tomorrow will live after we have burnt out our planet Earth. I was reading about it in bed last week, after I got home from the 1770 House, slightly tipsy from an unaccustomed two drinks, and I would like to recommend to any little Einstein out there with messy hair and a skyward gaze that he or she incorporate some mechanism for the transmission of earthlike sounds in the communal air. Sound doesn't travel in space, but I think we humans will get very depressed, and very lonely, if deprived of the sounds of the bells, sirens, waves, and leaves.