My Duty to Listen
Ever since I was old enough to understand what the word “deaf” meant, hearing has been the most important sense for me. I remember truly understanding for the first time that without the assistance of a special device, my father couldn’t hear anything. Having grown up with a deaf parent my entire life, the sense of hearing has had a particularly meaningful importance to me. Although my dad can hear with the assistance of a cochlear implant, when he removes the device to go to sleep or get in the shower, he renders himself completely deaf. I always felt as though it was my duty to actively listen to everything around me, because my father could hardly keep up with conversations across the dinner table. It wasn’t until my mother pointed it out to me when I was in the first grade that I realized, but my father is an absolutely horrendous singer. Because he can’t hear himself, most notes that are produced by his vocal cords end up being completely off-key. However, even upon coming to this realization, I still looked forward to when he would sing me to sleep every night. Something about the soul in his voice when I would listen to him sing, even through all the wrong notes and awkward timing, would always comfort me.
As I grew older, hearing became more and more important to me. Whether listening to the conversations around me or the birds outside, I made a conscious effort to always be attentive to my surroundings. Living on a mountain for my entire life exposed me to a great variety of sounds that I could hear from my backyard. To name a few: the cry of a hawk going in for a kill, the sound of a breeze weaving its way through thousands of redwoods, and the sound of coyotes howling far too near for comfort. Just a few feet out of my front door and I could hear them all. This active way of hearing sparked my intense love for nature that I still have to this day.
Before leaving my comfortable home on the mountain with the hundreds of noises I had grown accustomed to, I was sure to spend at least an hour every day out in nature just listening. My goal, in doing this, was to create a sort of sound-bank in my brain in which I could recollect the noises of my mountain while living in my new and extremely urban home. Although I never could identify the creatures from which they came, I must have memorized dozens of calls from birds that resided in the canopy above me in Muir Woods National Forest. The hundreds of ways the wind can sound depending on the foliage around me, the sounds of a creek trickling just out of view, and the sound of the rattlesnake grass hitting one another on a hillside just beneath my house all were stored in my sound-bank.
Although I had previously been to New York nearly over two dozen times, my arrival at JFK airport felt much different this past trip than those hitherto. I walked off the plane doing my best to hold onto the sounds I had spent so long trying to tuck away into each and every corner of my brain. My sounds from Mount Tamalpais, however, were immediately replaced with those of New York City. Bird calls and sounds of wind rustling through the redwoods turned into irate shouts and the honks of taxi cabs passing by in the street. The noises that I had been holding onto suddenly seemed impossible to grasp. I struggled to sleep that first night, as I knew it would be almost four months before the sounds of the mountain could lull me to sleep once more.
I found it incredibly difficult to find any way to teleport myself back to the mountain with the sounds of the city at first. However, setting foot in Washington Square Park for the first time on my walking tour, I began to reminisce. After being told to sit quietly and observe our surroundings, I closed my eyes and listened. After a minute of loud music produced by a jazz band adjacent to me and the hundreds of conversations circumscribing me to my single square foot of dirt, I made out the chirp of a lone bird in the tree above me. Listening harder, I heard another and another until it seemed as though the park was completely inhabited by the birds of my mountain. Instantaneously, my sound-bank came back to me. The countless animal calls, the sounds of the breeze, and the trickle of water all flooded back into my ears at that instant in Washington Square.
Walking back from the park, I couldn’t stop smiling. All my memories of California and Mount Tamalpais had rushed back to me, all from the chirp of a single bird. Upon returning to my dorm, I no longer struggled to hang on to the sounds of my home on the mountain. Instead of being just out of reach, they were now in my grasp, for me to hear once again in my mind. For the first time that night, I let the sounds of my mountain lull me to sleep instead of the sounds of the city.
