OutdoorNebraska

58 Nebraskaland • December 2019 MIXED BAG It happened only once during the winter of 2017-2018. As I write these words in December 2018, it has yet to happen this winter. But it probably will, and when it does, I will once again be goofy-happy about living at the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, in the middle of nowhere, the middle of everywhere. Deep into a night, probably soon, I'll wake up and sense that something is ... strange. Not exactly wrong. Just not quite right. Instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, I'll lie there listening, trying to fi gure out what exactly this "disturbance in the Force" is. I'm used to how noisy it can be out here. I sleep on a back porch, windows and doors wide open summer and winter. When we sleep, we can close our eyes, bury our senses in blankets, but we can't shut off our ears. And believe me, I have lived long enough and covered enough miles that I know night sounds. I no longer get to Berlin, Oslo, or Milan, not even New York or Chicago. In fact, it is rare that I overnight in Omaha or Lincoln. But I know what to expect in cities: there is a constant, muffl ed but ever-present ... what? Not exactly a roar, but more like a rumble or mumble. I imagine it's the blended sounds of thousands of automobile engines, air conditioners and ventilator fans, maybe tires on pavement, punctuated now and then with the beep of a car horn or siren. The distinguishing factor is that it is constant. It never lets up. Maybe it's not as loud at 2 or 3 in the morning as at 7 in the evening or 9 in the morning, but it is always there. The noise out here on the north bank of the Middle Loup River is more intermittent: All at once there may be the calls of geese or cranes so loud you can't hear yourself think. There is always the squawk of robins, the ever-imaginative calls of brown thrashers, crows and turkeys, the rattle of cottonwood leaves, the scream of a red-tail hawk, and rarely the peculiar hoot of a whippoorwill. Last night just before I dropped off to sleep the coyotes cut loose a hundred yards or so west of the house where my sleeping porch windows and door open. Once in these 42 years out here, as we lay in bed reading, it was the never-to-be-forgotten scream of a mountain lion just below our backyard fence. Those are sounds that wake us but don't disturb us. In fact, I rather like being awakened by them; I lie a moment listening, and then drop off again to sleep, a bit happier for the disturbance. No, what I am leading up to here is a completely diff erent auditory experience, not as rare as a lion but not nearly as common as cranes, owls, or even coyote cacophony. I wake up and sense something. I listen and slowly it dawns on me. I rouse enough to look around and see if maybe there is enough moonlight that I can see if what I suspect is true. If so, the light doesn't just pour in from one direction but is diff used and seems to come from everywhere. If the shades are not already open, I roll them up or more likely, get out of that warm bed and go to the door to look out into the yard and trees to the west. And if my suspicions are confi rmed, there it is ... a gentle snow, arriving not like so many Nebraska snows, driven by a gale and slamming into everything in its path, shaking the house and plastering the screen door. No, this is that rare and gentle blanket of snow that falls silently and then muffl es every other sound just as surely as if we were in a 50-acre dead-sound booth in a recording studio. What I am "hearing" is that rarest of 21st-century commodities – dead silence. A quiet so deep that even with my failing hearing (too many unmuffl ed tractor engines and rock 'n' roll concerts!) I think I can hear the individual snowfl akes hit those already on the ground. Dead quiet. I go back to bed but try to stay awake to take as much of this in as possible because it won't be long before I hear the scrape and scratch of the snowplows on the highway, and I can start worrying about the tractor starting and pushing around some of that snow so we can get out of our lane to that highway. As Linda says, however, the best three hours of sleep start an hour before you have to get up, so I know that the wonder of hearing nothing will soon fade away. But here it is now, this rare phenomenon of dead quiet, so I might as well take advantage of it while I can. Soon enough I'll be downstairs being bombarded by the noise of the morning's news, so in this moment deep in the night I'll try to stay awake and take in these rare moments when they really are "beautiful Nebraska, peaceful prairie land ...." Roger Welsch is an author, humorist, folklorist and a former essayist for CBS News Sunday Morning. He has been contributing to Nebraskaland Magazine since 1977. DEAD SILENCE By Roger Welsch

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