Son Trouve

Thinking of my three favorite environmental sounds of Berkeley, the ones that summon a strong sense of place...

In earlier entries to this journal I gave voice to my resentment of several noise sources in my immediate vicinity. To refresh, they were the loud disco boom-boxes employed by the Asiatic dance gangs that collect around lower Sproul plaza, the trucks and tour buses on Bancroft way that idle their engines far beyond the legal time limit, and, the most intolerable but least frequent annoyance, the Taiko drummers who bang out their identity politics in the same general area.
But really, despite any impression I may have yet made, I actually celebrate more than I find fault. In that vein, let me praise my three favorite sounds of this locality. These would be sounds I dig in particular, as opposed to the more universal salvation of sounds as widely defined as let's say bird song.
And they are: the sound of morning doves calling especially in the early twilight of a summer's eve when the fog is vigorously rolling in; the train whistles along the tracks through far West Berkeley as they echo off the hills; and the life-enhancing music that peals off the carillon bells in the Campanile on the UC campus.

I lived for fifteen years in a much quieter residence on Woolsey street, the last street in South Berkeley. The place was locked in the center of block, flocked by rich trees, and it was reached by a long driveway separating it from street noise. It was there that I grew so accustomed to the plaintive but somehow encouraging sound of the doves calling back and forth in the cool of an evening. The fragrant smoke from an outdoor mesquite grill frequently accompanied what is now a vivid sense memory. I see less of the once ubiquitous morning doves and hear them still less of them these days in my more urban part of town--I hope it is not because they have become more scarce in this habitat.
The trains, the trains-- they won me over to Berkeley in a strange way. I relocated here but intended to settle in San Francisco. Berkeley can often seem somewhat dull and insular in comparison. But over time the things we see everyday become sacred and that goes for the sounds we here. I have long had a love affair with trains and many of my heroes were train-riding, or at least train-identified, from Alfred Hitchcock to Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan etc. To me there is nothing more evocative than the sound of trains as they pass in the night, suggesting unknown realms of possibility. And the sound of trains are profuse in the great night that envelopes the populous eastern shore of San Francisco Bay.
There once was a sense of solidarity among most residents of this chilly and saintly shangri-la. Like-minded people had gravitated here with a strong shared sensibility that included an appreciation for what was right with the place. This was followed by the coming of the nimby-
the not-in-my-backyard type, often a property speculator. Several such bought homes along the railroad tracks in Berkeley, knowing full well what that entailed. Then they proceeded to complain to the powers that be that they were egregiously disturbed by the train whistles. Just as with the lobby against legal medical marijuana dispensaries, long-running street fairs, and San Francisco's traditional night life, the East Bay nimbys tried to get restrictions on the train whistles. These are the house-flipper types who were a big engine of the latest economic crisis in the "Highway 61 Revisited" brand of late capitalism that characterizes the current US scene. Well since this latest bubble burst perhaps we can relegate them back to the democratic margins where they belong. Thus far they have failed in their attempts to stifle the trains.
The romantic siren call of all my years living in earshot of those ever-traveling trains, the summons on the precipice of sleep so many nights, eventually inspired my own far-reaching adventure by rail. In 2005, my North America travel pass in me pocket I crossed North America, including Canada the wide part, twice in 28 days. As I left this part of the world on the 11 o'clock Starlighter to Seattle, I thought of how I was at that moment boarded on one of those poetic, oneiric trains. Moving past the Marina, sounding off the hills, and drifting through nocturnal chambers of the town, I had joined the sound that had stirred my soul for decades.

And the bells, the bells, the bells that toll from a glorious towering perch atop the campanile. They are essential and intrinsic to my perception of where I live. They were recently the raison-d'etre for a carillon festival held on campus. Players from far-flung places came to offer their grooves. The sound of these fabulous bells underscores all that is pleasant about the controversial campus. I came to a liminal point sitting on a wooden bench on the Campanile plateau, and listening to a carillon-playing adept perform one of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedies." I reached the conclusion that classical pieces and other old chestnuts played on these great bells was my purest and best loved form of music. It is just waves of sound emanating from percussion on a tuned metal bell-- no opportunity for distortion, no amplification, and no pro-tool sweetening of wrong notes.
Just the ringing of the hours alone is important to me. But again this has been constrained in cranky over-wrought Berkeley--another fuss-budget crabbed about the "disturbance" caused by bells tolling the time. So they only toll to nine in the evening or some such. While for myself, having grown up in a city of Catholics, where the bells tolled the hours, called us to church, and gave us an agreeable and sustaining sense of community--I say, like Bob Dyan sang,
"Ring them bells.'