I strain to hear the waking birds, but sound is out of the west: cars, trucks, winter tires—the fossil-fueled Fat Tuesday that never ends.
trucks
The still, gray morning is interrupted by the stuttering roar of a pickup full of hunters hauling an enormous homemade wooden tree stand.
Wind out of the east, and with it the noise of cars and trucks and trains funneled up the hollow’s half a horn. A smudge of sun.
Another overcast morning, with wind and the sound of trucks out of the east. Two thrushes and a gnatcatcher move silently through the lilac.
Long before daylight you can hear it coming, this first Monday after New Year’s, loud with the whine of truck tires on the interstate.
Clear, cold, the kind of morning where you can hear for miles, noisy with cars, trucks, trains, jets, and chipmunks standing their ground.
Shrill chirps of a truck going in reverse. Under a lowering sky, daylight seeps from the jagged blaze of forsythia at the edge of the woods.
A heavy inversion layer—I have quarry trucks for company this morning. Over the roar, from the corner of the field, the first singing robin.
A second day of warmth and a strong inversion layer. This morning the air is loud with trucks; by afternoon it will be teeming with insects.
A lull in the storm, and it’s quiet—no sound of trucks or trains, no Sunday drivers. Squirrel scold-calls echo off the ice.
Quiet except for the distant moan of a truck’s brakes and the staticky sound of sleet, giving way to a heavier ordnance of freezing rain.
“Crepuscular”: such a weird word, conjuring up ancient forests, twisted mossy forms. Not this dawn, filled with the noise of trucks.