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In
one of his essays Scott Russell Sanders writes that in centuries past Japanese
villagers were cautioned never to wander so far from their homes that they could
not hear the village drummer. In ancient times Asians considered drums to be the
most important of all musical instruments. The drum beat may have represented
security to the villagers by suggesting to them the mother’s heartbeat heard in
the fetal stage.
Since I grew up on a farm in North Texas, thousands
of miles from Japan and centuries after the era to which Sanders refers, there
was no village drummer to give me a sense of security. Unlike the larger schools
to the west and east of our rural school, we had no marching band with bass drums.
Except for the sticks, tambourines, clogs and woodblocks of the rhythm band in
the primary school, the only musical instruments at the our school were a piano
in the auditorium and a piano in the room in the gymnasium where a teacher came
from a nearby town to give private lessons.
In our community, there was,
however, a sound comparable to a drum beat that, on occasion, proved comforting
by reminding me that I was not far away from my home. Approximately three miles
from our farm there was the Saltillo Station, operated by the Gulf Pipe Line Company,
a subsidiary of Gulf Oil. When we stepped outside our houses, except for times
when there was high wind or heavy rain, those of us who lived in a three- or four-mile
radius of the area could hear the sounds made by six generators in the pump room
of that station. The metronomic sound from the generators was comparable to the
throbbing of a giant’s pulse.
No more than two generators were ever shut
down at the same time and then only when they needed to be cleaned or repaired.
The sound of the generators was a constant we could depend on, yet one that we
were hardly conscious of hearing. We became accustomed to the sound of the generators
as one who lives near a busy railroad track becomes accustomed to the sound of
trains on the rails. |
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There
are two experiences from my boyhood that are linked to the sound of the generators.
They were both ordinary experiences, like those the poet William Wordsworth describes
as “spots of time.” There were certain incidents that occurred in Wordsworth’s
boyhood during times when he was alone that lingered in his mind for years afterward.
He described the particular sights he saw and the sounds he heard. In later years,
in his solitude, he recalled the emotions he experienced during one of these “spots
of time.” Some of his finest poetry was inspired by these experiences. |
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One evening when I
was fourteen I attended a party for members of my ninth-grade class. Since I lived
five miles from the home of the classmate whose mother gave the party, I arranged
to spend the night with my sister and her husband, who lived nearby. After the
party ended that evening, I walked along the highway past quiet houses and the
darkened windows of the frame building where the post office, the drug store,
and the barber shop were located. During the three or four minutes that it took
me to walk to my sister’s house, no cars or trucks traveled on the highway. The
clouds were heavy that spring evening, so there was no light from the moon. As
I walked on the shoulder of the highway, I could hear little else but the pulsing
sound of the generators at the pump station almost a mile away. The sound was
comforting to me in my solitude. I had heard the sound hundreds of times before,
but that evening the sound was somehow more noticeable.
Another time,
two or three years later, a high school classmate gave me a ride home one summer
evening after we had attended a movie in a town nearby. I stepped out of the pickup
truck the friend was driving, and, after he drove away, I stood for a few moments
at the crossroads near our farm house. The light from a full moon was reflected
against the white sand of the roadway. It was a clear, windless evening. The only
sounds were the sounds of the grasshoppers in the field just north of our house
and the sound of the generators at the pump station. Though the sound from the
generators was mechanical, it sounded as natural as and more comforting than the
sounds the grasshoppers made. I stood for several moments as if transfixed.
The Gulf Pipe Line Company abandoned the Saltillo Station in 1958. I had
left Saltillo a few years before in order to accept a teaching position in South
Texas. I wonder whether, if I had still been living there when the generators
shut down, how long it would have been before I noticed that the sound of the
generators had stopped.
I prefer to believe that I would have immediately
begun to miss hearing the sound.
© Robert
G. Cowser
"They
shoe horses, don't they?"
June 30 , 2007
Guest Column
More
Columns by Robert G. Cowser
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