At 9:37 pm I hopped in my car and made the drive out to Wall’s Pond for a nighttime visit. It was cold, about 30 degrees, and utterly windless. The sky was clear; I knew there was a sliver of moon up there somewhere but could never find it. The stars were magnificent.
I got out of my car and approached the pond slowly. There was some sodium glare from the parking lot streetlights to guide the way and lights still burned in the conservation building. Fort Hoosac, the huge brick house where the first-year art history graduate students live, was ablaze with electric light and it cast long shadows from the eastern side. I switched on my headlamp as I walked through the gates, heading at once under the big sugar maple to investigate the tilting white pine I had noticed on my last visit.
It was hard to tell in the dark, but there appeared to be no change. I poked around the southern edge of the pond, careful not to tread too close to the edge which I have learned is not always a clear boundary between turf and water. The stillness was crushing. The only sounds around the pond were my own footfalls and I quickly leapt out of the thicket at the southern end to take a turn around the outside of the pond.
I walked back to the entrance and turned north, walking up the western side of the pond and switching my headlamp into wide-angle mode. I had gotten about halfway up that western edge, when I heard a rustling in the strip of ash and beech behind the western cow fence. I whipped my head in the direction of the disturbance and pulled out my backup flashlight, flooding the tree line with sharp white light. Nothing. I waded into the bushes a bit, but still saw nothing. I switched off both my lights and stood for a moment, softening my auditory focus and tuning in for any sound at all. Nothing. Not a cricket to be heard, not a rustling of leaf or shrub. A faint mechanical hum from the conservation building. But from nature herself, nothing. The sense of intense stillness and solitude hit me again, though where it had unnerved me first, under the maple, now became a comfort. There was a certain measure of safety in the tranquility now and I continued my rounds.
As I rounded the northwest corner I swung my light out, scanning the pond’s whole surface from the highest elevation I could get. The lily pads were sitting on the surface, I saw no blossoms at all, and the water itself was absolutely placid. Again I strained for any sound at all. Something dropped from the top boughs of a white pine at the south end of the pond. No other noise at all. Just then, the college bells pealed out 10 o’clock. The man-made sound roused me and I continued my walk.
My light fell on the grasses at the edge of the water. In the still, thick air they were completely immobile, every single leaf was frozen in place. The harshness of my headlamp’s light cast a strange, clinical feeling over the motionless shrubs, heightening their stillness. It was as though the pond itself was an elaborate sculpture, a glass masterpiece, part of the museum, a work of art in which all the choices had been made and were now frozen in perpetuity. I probed the darkness around me for some contradiction to the freakish, empty silence. I walked quickly down the eastern edge, I even ventured off into the hemlock grove off the southeastern corner looking for something, anything to report. It was empty.
I walked back around the southern end of the pond to the entrance, moving quickly through the thick, dense air. I paused under the big maple again to listen and jot some notes. I looked up through the branches and noticed (finally!) the leaves nodding ever so slightly in the meager breath of breeze that had just sprung up. I watched them for as long as the puff held out, until they returned to stillness. Soupy, still nights like this are common in a New England fall, as are wild, windy ones. I’ll come back soon for an audio recording to capture the silence, because, in all truth, it’s well worth hearing.