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Today we have a bit of a departure. This 31 minute soundwalk was recorded at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge on January 28th, 2024. It is the flipside—both figuratively and literally—to the upcoming Oaks to Wetland Trail Soundwalk. I’m calling it Four Trains Soundwalk.
Both soundscapes were intertwined in my lived experience, but as always, manufacturing a pre-industrial soundscape requires substantial editing in the way of splices and EQ. Rather than let these appealing train recordings become so much digital ash, I’ve compiled them here. Visually speaking, this is what that looks like. The spectrograms below are basically just heat maps for sound. The first image is the natural soundscape—the birds, the creek, and the rain. The second is the four trains. (Not preserved is any aircraft noise.)
Think of this as a trainspotting album. Trainlistening? It’s really quite a treat to have just trains, wildlife and rain sounds. The low frequency hums, the clank-clank, the doppler effects, and the periodic pneumatic “psst” sounds are quite relaxing. The wildlife, creek, and rain sounds soften the industrial edges. It’s a top 3 insomnia / get-to-sleep album for me over the past several months. I’m happy to share it with you finally.
For my instrumental score, I leaned heavily into textural synth drones mirroring the energy of the passing trains.
I hope you enjoy it!
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I love oak trees. Here in the Pacific Northwest, our western forests are dominated by conifers, so oaks have something of an exotic look to my eye. It wasn’t always this way.
Here in the Willamette Valley, oaks thrived in the rain shadow of the Coast Range. The entire 1.5 million hectare valley was not long ago dominated by native prairies and oak savannas.
This is one of the most strongly human-modified ecoregions on the continent, with an estimated 99.5% decline of native prairies and oak savannas. Despite this devastating loss, the vegetation of this region and its history are fascinating, and the remaining remnants are often packed with rare and endemic species. (oneearth.org)
In the last 175 years we have lost 98% of the oak savanna habitat here.
(From: Rivers to Ridges Oak Habitat Flyer)
It’s not lost on me that, just a 30 minute trip from my home, a 100 acre oak savanna on Sauvie Island is a pretty special place. Not just because it’s scarce habitat, but also because it’s very tranquil, buffered from road and city noise by placid lakes and distance. So we’re back, visiting Oak Island, the “island” within an island:
This time I pointed my most sensitive mics (a Rode NT-1 stereo pair in ORTF placement) toward the long axis of the woodland, recording a detailed, spacious soundscape. One can walk around the margins of this woodland on the Oak Island Nature Trail, but there are actually no trails through it. It really preserves a sense of mystery about it, I have to say. You are an outsider looking in, here.
Oak Savanna Suite is the second in a new series of more calm, more atmospheric, more classically ambient releases collected under the pseudonym artist name Listening Spot.
As with the first release, Crane Lake Suite, Oak Savanna Suite is a group of self-contained instrumental movements of varying character in the same key. The instrumentation sounds vaguely orchestral, like a pastorale with flowing legato phrasing, but it’s less melodically rigid, and not built up with traditional orchestral instrument sounds.
In fact, in the beginning it’s difficult to discern basic musical patterns: Meter is elastic, melodic phrases are indistinct and unrepeated, and the music barely rises above the soundscape. All this changes by degrees as the suite progresses. I hope you get to spend some quality time with it.
If you enjoy it, please follow Listening Spot wherever you get your music, and consider sharing it with one other person. I’m heartened by the initial response, but also aware of the challenge of building momentum for a new thing, so I’m grateful for any support you can offer.
Oak Savanna Suite is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow, Friday, November 8th.
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Manglende episoder?
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Rentenaar Road is just a flood-prone, gravel road through blackberry briars on the east side the Sauvie Island Wildlife Area. It does not look particularly special or inviting. But it is. It’s a portal to the kingdom of birds that have come to this island every winter for time immemorial. And, unless you’re there to hunt, it’s as close as you can get to the large flocks of Snow Geese, Canada Geese, Tundra Swans, Sandhill Cranes and various ducks and coots.
The sound of these large flocks is visceral.
A tradeoff of coming here though, for the uninitiated, is the manifold shotgun rifle reports that distract from the enjoyment of the natural soundscape. (I’m sure for the hunter it’s an exciting sound, like the chime of a slot machine for a gambler. Tomato, tomawto.) The island is also under a commercial flight corridor; the noise of which is inescapable.
Here’s a tip: Check the hunting season calendar to visit on an off day, or come in February, when there’s still lots of birds and the duck hunting season is concluded. Any reports you hear should be distant and less frequent. And, maybe bring some galoshes.
I came on a gray February day and walked down the lane, until I came to the flooded area, and I just stood there with water all around me, soaking up the wildlife sound until a rain shower came.
You know, I often feel like my soundwalks are kind of like Tootsie Pops; the sweetest part encased inside. You have to spend some time to get to it. That’s the way I feel about the end of Rentenaar Road Soundwalk. I just love the sound of the gentle rain starting, falling on the pond-like puddle; the way the rain seems to calm the thousands of birds nearby. I quietly take off my recording hat, and hold it close to the puddle surface. It’s an entrancing sizzle that concludes the piece. I hope you can spend some time with it.
Rentenaar Road Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow, Friday, October 18th.
Two more things:
* Yesterday I offered an amuse-bouche alternate of this walk with galoshes on. Check out Rentenaar Wade Soundwalk here:
* Also this Friday, Nov. 1st, Cultural Norms (20th Anniversary Edition) by my old indie pop band Blanket Music will be released. It features several bonus tracks, with parallels and through-lines to the state of the nation today. Hear it on all streaming platforms. (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, and YouTube…)
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We’re back on Sauvie Island for a special bonus soundwalk. Or maybe it’s a soundwade. Feel free to play the audio as you read on.
A satellite view of Sauvie Island reveals a squiggly teardrop-shape island about the size of Manhattan. The upper half of that teardrop has an assemblage of lakes that resembles a heart with chambers and valves and arteries. Now look closer; there is a thin straight line running perpendicular on the right side of our view, surrounded by fields, just about where the aorta would emerge. That is Rentenaar Road. If you’re not there to hunt, it’s as close as you can get to see and hear the spectacle.
In a wet year, the road can resemble a canal:
So before I reveal Rentenaar Road Soundwalk tomorrow, let’s throw on some galoshes and wade in! I’m happy to present Rentenaar Wade Soundwalk as an amuse-bouche:
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Wapato Park is pretty great, partially because it’s easily overlooked and therefore never crowded. Its full name is Wapato Access Greenway State Park. It’s a sleeper park, the kind you stumble on if you like studying maps. The small gravel parking lot trailhead is on a dead end road, and easy to miss. Interestingly, it’s the only trailhead on Sauvie Island that you don’t have to pay $10 ($30/yr) to park at. In the winter the trail can be quite muddy, in the late spring and summer it can get buggy, and if you’re really unlucky, your car can get busted into. Still, it’s worth a visit.
On a mild February day earlier this year I strolled around its shores, and down to the dock on the river. This soundscape records the wildlife and ambience of winter. You’ll hear Common Raven, spirited and unusual vocalizations from Stellar’s Jays, a Pileated Woodpecker, Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Kinglets, and all kinds of water birds. Sometimes you even see Tundra Swans in small numbers here.
Reminiscences of Louis Labonte (1900) recalls life on Scappoose Creek near Sauvie's Island, as a teenage boy, from about 1833 to 1836. Labonte [Jr.] was the son of Astor expedition member Louis Labonte [Sr.] and his native wife, daughter of Clatsop Chief Coboway.
Game on the ponds of the island was very abundant, consisting of deer, bear, and panthers and wildcats; and beaver were still plentiful; but the waterfowl of the most magnificent kind, at their season of passage, and, indeed much of the year, almost forbade the hunter to sleep.
Indeed, the lake was so covered by the flock as almost to conceal the water.
So we can forgive Capt. William Clark for his 1805 journal remark referring to the swans, geese and cranes: “they were emensely numerous and their noise horrid.” Here we have another recollection of wildlife din riotous enough to make sleeping difficult.
And, here I am thinking about this place prior to Euro-American settlement again, prior to industrialization and the inescapable anthropogenic noise coming from the commercial aircraft corridor above, the highway to the west, and the motorboats in the channel.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself, boy Chad sure brings up indigenous people a lot, for being a field recording and music guy. It’s true. I think it’s because I get so tuned into natural soundscape, that I’m curious to imagine all the details of what life was like two hundred-plus years ago. When I’m editing my field recordings with splices and EQ filters and cut & paste techniques to approximate a pre-industrial quietude, I can’t help but think people used to be much more in tune with wildlife and weather.
In the vicinity of Wapato Park, human history goes deeper than is often discussed. According to amateur archeologist Emory Strong, there are three archeological points of interest nearby:
MU 6. Cath-la-nah-qui-ah. six houses and 400 inhabitants. Nathaniel Wyeth built Fort William near this town but the residents had all died in the pestilence by then. Dr. Mclaughlin had all the houses burned. Excavations reveal everything covered with a film of cedar charcoal.
MU 7. The site of Wyeth’s Fort William
MU 8. One of the prehistoric sites that appears to be very old. There are no game or fish bones, and the midden has a different character from the more recent sites. (Stone Age on the Columbia River, 1958)
[“MU” here is just an archeological prefix indicating Multnomah County. The modern trinomial standard now includes a code for Oregon as a prefix: 35 MU 6 and so on.]
Each is an interesting story. Let’s discuss.
(35 MU 6) Cath-la-nah-qui-ah (or Gat-la-na-koa-iq), was a Multnomah tribe village on Multnomah Channel. The size estimate of 400 inhabitants belongs to Lewis and Clark. This would have been about half the size of the main Multnomah village on the other side of the island, in that time period.
This is what that milieu looked like on the day I visited.
This is what the plank houses looked like 200 years ago. They varied in size from 15’ x 30’ all the way up to 30’ x 400’:
This is what the inside of a plankhouse looked like:
Today, if not obliterated by erosion, or dike building, one would only expect to see slight depression in the soil on the site where one of these plankhouses stood. In the early 1800’s there were hundreds of them on the lower Columbia.
The pestilence of the 1830’s is now widely regarded to have been a malaria epidemic. Sauvie Island tribes—perhaps owing to the marshy landscape— were particularly devastated.
The Indians believed it had been introduced by an American ship involved in the salmon trade, the Owyhee, commanded by John Dominis. They may have been right, as the ship had visited malarial ports before sailing to the Columbia.
The impact of fever and ague on Native people in Oregon was earthshaking. In the 1820s, they had been by far the majority population in the region; by the early 1840s, they were in the minority. (Disease Epidemics among Indians, 1770s-1850s)
Dr. McLoughlin was the Chief Factor of Fort Vancouver, upriver about 10 miles. This was the center of operations and trade for the entire Pacific Northwest, on behalf of French-Canadian Hudson’s Bay Co (HBC). In addition to the to the Cath-la-nah-qui-ah village, HBC men also burned the larger Multnomah village (35 MU 2, 800 inhabitants, originally much larger) on the east side of the island, presumably in an effort to curb the epidemic.
In an 1895 article for The Oregonian, pioneer John Minto reminisced about the “old Multnomah nation” and its appearance fifty years before, in 1845.
We landed and camped for the night at the site of the last Multnomah village, but at which that time there were no Indians nor sign of recent Indian life. There was however an extensive city of the dead, a cemetery laid out in streets as wide as the plat of Riverview Cemetery at Portland. The dead were deposited on structures of wide split cedar boards three or more inches thick, set upright; sometimes three tiers of horizontal boards one above the other, mortised into and secured by twisted inner bark of cedar. On these the dead were laid wrapped in cedar bark.
He included this remark about what he heard:
It was rare that a traveller should pass a village at night without hearing at the same time the women wailing for the dead and the monotonous beat of a tom-tom.
Now, I know that maybe this all seems like a tangent. But, these are testimonials both to the look and sound of that time that I think is not just interesting, but worth sharing, particularly on public lands where these events happened. And for my part, why not include them with narratives about my soundscape recordings also bearing witness to the land?
Just 8 years after Minto’s observations of the Multnomah village site, in 1853, Simon Morgan Reeder settled the donation land claim (originally belonging to one N. D. Miller) on which once stood the largest village of the island. Today the main road on the east side of the island, Reeder Road, bears his name.
Now let us turn to (35 MU 7) Fort William, the abandoned effort to set up a trading post on Sauvie Island by Nathaniel J. Wyeth, rivaling HBC, on behalf of American investors in 1834. Two roadside monuments have been erected nearby.
Let’s be clear: these are monuments to a failed business venture. Upon arrival, Wyeth saw opportunity in the Natives’ misfortune, writing in his journals "providence has made room for me and with doing them [Natives] more injury than I should if I had made room for myself viz Killing them off."[3]
Wyeth had many setbacks in his attempt to establish Fort William. In 1835 one of his men was killed at the hands of another. Reading a correspondence from his investors, one might surmise Wyatt was a poor communicator, if not lacking the temperament of a leader.
Finally there is (35 MU 8) “a prehistoric site that appears to be very old. There are no game or fish bones…” Here we are to understand the bones decomposed in the intervening time span. These weren’t the original vegans of the Portland basin. My best attempts to research this further yielded nothing. Were these the ancestors of the Multnomahs, the Chinookan peoples?
The landscape holds a lot of mysteries. I think about them when I listen to it.
Thank you for reading and listening. I hope you enjoy Wapato Park Soundwalk.
Wapato Park Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow, Friday, October 18th.
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In early 2022, before I adopted the soundwalk form for a my own musical inquiry, I released a recording called Rain Suite. It featured one long field recording—not captured while walking—with a group of self-contained instrumental movements of varying character in the same key. This is the definition of “suite” in music. It was very much a R&D precursor to my soundwalks. Indeed, it inspired my take on the concept of musical soundwalks.
I followed that up with Island Rain Suite a couple years later, which attempted to cultivate a more atmospheric aesthetic; closer to what people probably think of when you say the word ambient. Smoother, peaceful, more ambiguous. I quite liked the former, and found the latter challenging.
Recently I thought I’d take another step in that direction, and I think I’ve finally found my stride. To make the delineation a little stronger I’m going to attempt a “spin off”. Today, I’m introducing a new recording project pseudonym, designed to be a repository for this particular character of recordings: Listening Spot.
I selected this name because, like “soundwalk”, it is a term in the lexicon of folks who think about, and make a practice of, listening. Also, it wasn't already taken. It’s informative, but not prescriptive. The listener can bring many things to it, and make use of it however occurs to them.
Crane Lake Suite is the first in a half dozen on deck, coming to you over the next five months. Here is the similar, but refreshed new look.
Now then, about Crane Lake Suite… I chose this one for the inaugural release for two reasons: first because it’s recorded at Crane Lake on Sauvie Island, the nexus of Wapato Valley (the subject of the current soundwalk series) in one of the least disturbed, least visited corners of the island. Second, because its name nods to perhaps the most recognizable contribution to the suite form in classical music: Swan Lake.
Crane Lake is positively alive in May. The shallow lake itself breathes slowly with the tide. Carp splash, songbirds sing, woodpeckers drum, heron croak, dragonflies buzz. My composition is minimal, ambiguous and orchestral in feel, without having any traditional orchestral instruments as starting points. From a mixing perspective, I’m marinating my contributions much more deeply in reverb than in the past and taking pains to smooth transitions.
If you enjoy it please follow Listening Spot wherever you get your music, and consider sharing it with one other person. It’s really challenging to build momentum for a new thing, so I’m grateful for any support you can offer in this way.
Crane Lake Suite is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow, Friday, October 11th.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadcrouch.substack.com/subscribe -
It’s Oct 2nd as I write. The Oak Island area on Sauvie Island, near Portland, Or., closed to recreational use for the season yesterday. For the coming fall and winter, it will serve as a haven for the birds, save for the occasional hunters.
Last winter, when I brought my Soundwalk podcast to Substack, I embarked on a series touching down at certain points in the greater area I referred to as the Columbia Lowlands. I’m pleased to say I’m taking us back there, covering some spots that I didn’t get to last time through. Lewis and Clark called this area the Wappato Valley, after the edible tuber, Wapato, that the Native Americans harvested here on Sauvie Island. The island was also named Wappato Island, the geographical center of Wappato Valley. (Both the double P spelling and the geographic names didn’t really take.) Today, this area is also referred to as the Portland Basin.
Oak Island in the early 1800s would have looked pretty similar to what it looks like now—only without pastures—and the name would have made more sense than it does today, because the land mass used to be surrounded by shallow lakes. Today it more resembles a peninsula.
Like the lakes of the Columbia Bayou (slough) on north side of Portland, many lakes on Sauvie Island were drained in the early 1900’s, and dikes were built, hardening the river bank.
Now, as far as I know, the only marker honoring the stewardship of this land by Native Americans is found a few steps into the Oak Island Nature Trail. There you will see wood post with a line drawing of a two people in a canoe with a QR code underneath.
Focusing on that QR code with a smartphone will pull up a page, offering the following:
Two hundred years ago, Native Americans walked on this very spot. Each year, just before winter, tribes from up and down the Columbia and Willamette rivers gathered on Oak Island for a trading fair which included dancing and festivities.
I want to know more about that. I want to imagine what that looked like, what that sounded like.
Of the environmental sound, Capt. William Clark leaves only this description on November 5th, 1805, from the vicinity of Sauvie Island:
I could not sleep for the noise kept by the Swans, Geese, white & black brant, Ducks etc. on a opposit base, & Sand hill Crane, they were emensely numerous and their noise horrid.
Immensely numerous and horrid. Ha! We will hear numerous birds soon enough in our extended soundwalk survey. For now, on our Oak Island Road Soundwalk, we hear just a handful of bugling Sandhill Cranes, small flocks of geese, wintering songbirds, Pacific tree frogs and light rain showers. Anything but horrid to my ears.
Dig a little deeper and you’ll discover 200 years ago is just the tip of the iceberg. Native Americans lived in various village sites on the island dating back 2500 years; one thousand generations! (Archeological sites upriver near The Dalles increase that time horizon to human occupation of the area going back well over 10,000 years ago).
And all they got was a QR code.
How do we know Native Americans lived on Sauvie Island so long? Well, less than a mile south of Oak Island is Merrybelle Farm. Several archeological digs occurred here, beginning in 1958. Analyzing the projectile points and found here with others found on the island and throughout the region, Richard Pettigrew points to an estimated timeline of village occupation at the Merrybelle site from 600 BCE to 200 CE.
There were 16 known village sites on Sauvie Island. Several have been the subject of formal archeological excavation. Many were picked over by amateur artifact collectors. Some were buried or partially buried under tons of dike soil. One was “sunken”, preserving woven baskets in the mud for up to 700 years. Today there’s no physical reminder of the civilization that existed here before Euro-American settlers; no formal mention or marker, save for a recently renamed bridge. Wapato Bridge. It’s a start. Scholars believe the Wapato Valley once sustained the highest population density north of Mexico in aboriginal times. Isn’t this a story that should be told?
In fourth grade we had a “Pioneer Day”. We came to school in costume: bonnets for the girls. Cowboy hats for boys. Did some boys bring toy guns? Did anyone dress up as an Indian? Seems plausible. We rolled out pasta from scratch, cutting broad noodles for chicken noodle soup “like the pioneers did”. We pledged allegiance to the flag every morning. We did not learn we were inhabiting what was once the cradle of the largest Native American population center, in the Portland Basin, in the United States.
When I walk around on Sauvie Island, I try to picture the long house villages, and the multitude of dugout canoes. When I went paddleboarding on Sturgeon Lake a month ago my feet sank up to my calves in mud as I clumsily launched my craft. I imagined Wapato growing there, plentifully. I imagined Native Americans loosening the root bulbs with their toes, harvesting them in floating baskets. The land of plenty. People of the river.
This soundwalk was recorded on mild December evening last year, on Oak Island Road, adjacent the Wildlife Area. There are half a dozen farm houses on this quiet spur road. It was very relaxing, and nourishing. I totally recommend this to anyone in the area.
Like last time, the composition is almost entirely solo performances strung together. Four voices: piano, a clean Wurlitzer electric piano, a modified Wurlitzer electric piano, and a piano with heavy tape effects. All taking turns. It won’t always be like this, though. In fact, next week I have a whole new direction I’m excited to unveil! Til then, thanks for reading, for listening, for joining me here.
Oak Island Road Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) today, Friday, October 4th.
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And now we return to our soundwalk series on quiet spots in the city. This is part two of two. But before we get to that, I’d just like to take a minute to reflect on my journey to get here.
On April 29, 2022 I released Chapman Beach Soundwalk. It was both extremely simple and, to me, experimental. It was in a nutshell a natural soundscape with musical soundtrack. I had no basis to believe that the idea would commercially viable, and to be honest, while it has shown promise, it hasn’t really caught on in a big way either. Still, I persuaded myself to keep doing it, as a practice. And so, here we are, two and a half years on, and we’ve come to soundwalk #50. Let me tell you, it is possible to be both proud and embarrassed at the same time. Proud because, well, fifty! Embarrassed because, well, you know—fifty. A string of 50 non-hits, if you will. At a good clip, too!
So, for #50, we are rediscovering Reed Canyon, another “hidden” natural area near downtown Portland, Oregon. Type it into a mapping app, and it won’t know where to go. This is because is not a nature park and is not public land. It’s on the Reed College campus, and thankfully, the campus welcomes neighbors, near and far, who enjoy walking the trails that wind around the canyon’s lake shore and through a wetland environment on its east end. The canyon was formed by Crystal Springs, which erupts from the broad plane of inner SE Portland next to huddle of buildings forming the Reed College Campus. According to a historical overview, surveys indicate Reed Lake is the oldest naturally occurring lake in Portland. That’s not saying an awful lot, as Portland topography isn’t especially dotted with lakes. It also depends on where you draw the city limits, of course. If anything, the city has filled in most of the lakes it once had, alongside the Willamette and Columbia Rivers.
Let’s go ahead and name those lakes, and when they were filled in, for posterity. I’d estimate Portland lost more than 75% of its total lake surface area in the last century.
Historical Lakes of Portland, Oregon
* Guild’s Lake c. 1913-1926
* Kittridge & Doane Lakes c. 1930
* Mud Lake c. 1930
* Switzler’s Lake & Columbia Slough unnamed lakes c.1930
* Ramsey Lake c. 1964
* Mock’s Bottom c. 1980
So, being able to walk around a natural lake in Portland anymore is a rare thing! And just to be clear, while the basin is natural, the Reed Lake water level has been maintained by a small dam built in 1929.
This walk takes place on a drizzly leap year day—February 29th—of this past year. Winter and Spring are perhaps my favorite seasons here. Waterfowl motor around. Mallards, Buffleheads, Hooded Mergansers, Wigeon, Gadwall, and Canada Geese are all common visitors. Huge flocks of geese sometimes wheel overhead, attracted to the all-you-can-eat lawn buffet the campus provides just over the canyon rim. Songbirds sound so sweet here in this intimate and reverberant canyon; you can easily forget that there’s a city all around you.
My composition features almost all solo performances of piano, unplugged Wurlitzer electric piano, a “soft clarinet” synth pad, and a “bottle” synth sound that I think sounds like droplets. Oh, and zither. All performed unrehearsed, warts and all. Why? Well, because, for now, it conveys what I want to convey; some alchemical expression forged in the naïveté—the grasping.
Part of me thinks I’ll eventually work myself out of a job here. Meaning, my music will become by degrees more spare and quiet and adrift that eventually all the will be left is the natural soundscape.
It reminds me of a trope of architecture writers that goes something like, “The design sought to blend seamlessly with the landscape.” It seems like four out off five articles in Dwell magazine used parade that one out. Meanwhile, walls of glass and rectilinear volumes were de rigueur. There’s a limit to the blending that can occur with that design language, and it’s far from “seamless”.
When you boil it down, I think it’s pretty common to try and convince other people you are doing something thoughtfully, when really we’re all just kind of clunky. Nothing is seamless. So why try and convince? Embrace Your Clunkiness! I say.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope you can spend some quiet time with Reed Canyon Soundwalk. Or better, head on over there in real life, if you can. It’s nice. You’ll like it.
Reed Canyon Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, September 20th.
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Welcome back. It’s a new season of Soundwalk, the album series / podcast / newsletter that transports you to sound-rich natural places via roving binaural audio field recordings paired to a melodic, ambient score. In this short two-part season we are discovering serene soundscapes within the city of Portland, Oregon. Thank you for tuning in!
See that dark green canyon in the foreground? That’s where we’re going to escape the sound of the city, within the city.
Every Portlander knows about Forest Park, the forested hillside roughly eight miles long and one mile wide, northwest of the city. Most Portlanders have visited it. In contrast, my guess is less than one in ten would be able to point to Marquam Nature Park on a map, and even less have visited.
Marquam is the “secret” nature park mere minutes from downtown. I’ve posted field recordings from here before, but this is the first soundwalk I’ve shared. What’s most noteworthy about this place to me is how quickly the canyon spirits you away from the hum of the city as you venture in. It’s really quite amazing. The city throbs at full volume just over the hill, and here—provided leaf blowers aren’t in use on residential properties along the bluff— you’ll find serene quiet; the twitter of birds, the murmur of streams.
At the park’s main gateway the visitor is greeted by a tile mosaic that forms an amphitheater. Inscribed in its depiction of park flora and fauna is this message:
Tranquility reminds us that we are a small part of nature in a place where listening and looking inspire us.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve become a bit extreme about sound. That is, I wonder if I’m peculiarly bothered by city noise or unusually thirsty for quiet refuges. This message hints to me that I’m not alone. “Tranquility” and “listening” strike me as potent and deliberate word choices. Unlike the new Forest Park entrance north of town, this one embraces the visitor and conveys them quickly to a natural, tranquil setting.
Thus, on our soundwalk from Mar 8th of this year, we encounter the sounds of Dark-eyed Junco, Chestnut-backed Chickadee, Pacific Wren, American Robin, Golden-crowned Kinglet and others all rising above the many creeks, streams and seeps we pass by on foot. At the 25 minute mark we come to a trail culvert spitting out water in a rhythm. It’s an unusual and entrancing sound, worth lingering on. A Pacific Wren sings in the distance. Junco trills percolate through the canyon. Synthesizers pulse and sweep in response. It’s a recipe for a reverie, if you’re open to it.
The instrumentation is comprised of piano, zither, and electric piano—all played solo—with occasional woodwind (clarinet & bass clarinet) and synth pad accompaniment. As always, it errs on the side of minimalism.
Marquam Nature Park Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, September 6th.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadcrouch.substack.com/subscribe -
Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
When I turned twenty-one in 1994, I embarked on a 500 mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail across the state of Washington. The Tread of My Soul is a memoir-meets-travelogue written from the trail. Originally self published and shared with only a handful of family and friends, I recently dusted off the manuscript with the intention of sharing it with a new generation, on the 30th anniversary of its completion. Among black bears, ravens and Indian paintbrush, I grappled with the meaning of life while traversing the spine of the Cascade range with a handful of pocket edition classics in tow. Quotes from sacred texts, poets, and naturalists punctuate a coming of age tale contemplated in the wilderness.
What follows is Part 1 of the book, squared off into four long Substack posts.
For this first post, I’m also exclusively including Pacific Crest Trail Soundwalk, featuring a binaural field recording captured while hiking the first few miles on the Pacific Crest Trail up out of the Columbia Gorge in Washington. (If you haven’t already, feel free to tap that play button at the top of the post.) The 26-minute composition cycles a triad of parts inspired by the letters PCT: part one in Phrygian mode (in E), part two in the key of C, and part three with Tritone substitutions. The instrumentation is outlined with Pianet electric piano, and colored in with synthesizer and intriguing pads built with a vaguely Appalachian mood in mind. It’s on the quieter side, in terms of wildlife, but all in all, I think it compliments the reading. It concludes with a pretty frog chorus so, like the book, I’m making it unrestricted, in the hope of enticing some readers to stick with it to the end.
If you prefer, you can find The Tread of My Soul in ebook format available for free right now on Apple Books or Amazon Kindle Store (free with Kindle Unlimited, points, or $2.99). If you read it and like it, please feel free to leave a review to help others find it. Thank you.
So, without further ado, here we go:
The Tread of My Soul
Coming of Age on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Chad Crouch
ACT 1
(AT RISE we see TEACHER and STUDENTS in an art studio. It is fall term; the sun is just beginning to set when class begins. Warm light washes the profiles of eight classmates. The wood floors are splashed with technicolor constellations of paint.)
TEACHER
Hello. Welcome to class. I find role taking a tiresome practice so we'll skip over that and get to the assignment. Here I have a two-inch square of paper for you. I would like you to put your soul on it. The assignment is due in five minutes. No further explanations will be given.
STUDENT #1
(makes eye contact with a STUDENT #4, a young woman. She wears a perplexed smile on her face.)
TEACHER
Here you go.
(hands out squares of paper.)
(People begin to work. Restlessness gives way to an almost reverence, except STUDENT #5 is scribbling to no end. The Students’ awareness of others fades imperceptibly inward. Five minutes pass quickly.)
TEACHER
Teacher: Are you ready? I'm interested to see what you've come up with.
(scuffle of some stools; the sound of a classroom reclaiming itself.)
TEACHER
What have you got there?
STUDENT #1
Well, I used half of the time just thinking. I was looking at my pencil and I thought…
(taps pencil on his knee, you see it is a mechanical model)
this will never do the trick. The idea of soul seemed too intense to be grasped with only graphite. So 1 poked a pin sized hole in the paper and wrote:
(reading voice)
“Hold paper up to sun, look into hole for soul.” That's all the further I got.
TEACHER
(looking at student #2)
And you?
STUDENT #2
(smiles)
Um, I didn't know what to do so all I have is a few specks where I was tapping my pen while I was thinking. This one…
(she points to a dot)
is all, um, all fuzzy because I was ready to draw something and I hesitated so the ink just ran…
(Students nod sympathetically. Attention goes to STUDENT #3)
STUDENT #3
I couldn’t deal with just one little blank square.
(holds paper up and flaps it around, listlessly)
So I started dividing.
(steadies and turns paper to reveal a graph.)
Now, I have lots of squares in which to put my soul in. I think of a soul as being multifaceted.
TEACHER
Okay. Thank you. Next…
(looking at student #4)
STUDENT #4
(without hesitation)
I just stepped on it.
(holds paper up to reveal the tread of a shoe sole in a multicolor print.)
The tread of my soul.
• • •
The writing that follows seems to have many of the same attributes as the students' responses to the problem posed in the preceding scene. While I have a lot more paper to work with, the problem remains the same: how do I express myself? How do I express the intangible and essential part of me that people call a soul? What is it wrapped up in? What doctrines, ideologies and memories help give it a shape?
I guess I identify mostly with Student #4. Her shoe-print “Tread of My Soul” alludes to my own process: walking over 500 miles on The Pacific Crest Trail from Oregon To Canada in the Cascade Mountain Range in Washington. In trying to describe my soul I found that useful to be literal. Where my narrative dips into memoir or philosophy I tried not to hesitate or overthink things. I tried to lay it all out.
Student #1's solution was evident in my own problem solving in how I constantly had to look elsewhere; into nature, into literature, and into symbology to even begin to bring out the depth of what I was thinking and feeling. Often the words of spiritual classics and of poetry are seen through my writing as if looking through a hole. I can only claim originality in where I poke the holes.
As for Student #2, I am afraid that my own problem solving doesn't evoke enough of her charm. For as much as I wanted to be thoughtful, I wanted also to be open and unstudied, tapping my pen. What I see has emerged, however, is at times argumentative. In retrospect I see that I had no recourse, really. My thoughts on God and Jesus were molded in a throng of letters, dialogues, experiences, and personal studies prior to writing this.
Finally, in the winter of my twenty-first year, as I set down to transcribe this book, I realize how necessary it was to hike. Student #3 had the same problem. The soul is complex and cannot fit into a box. Hiking gave me a cadence to begin to answer the question what is my soul? The trail made me mindful. There was the unceasing metaphor of the journey: I could only reach my goal incrementally. This tamed my writing sometimes. It wandered sometimes and I was at ease to let it. I had more than five minutes and a scrap of paper. I had each step.
• • •
The Bridge of the Gods looks like a behemoth Erector set project over the Columbia River spanning the natural border of Washington and Oregon. My question: what sort of Gods use Erector sets? Its name derives from an event in space and time; a landslide. The regional natives likely witnessed, in the last millennium, a landslide that temporarily dammed the Columbia effectually creating a bridge—The Bridge of the Gods. I just finished reading about why geologists think landslides are frequent in the gorge. Didn't say anything about Gods. How we name things, as humankind, has something to do with space and time doesn't it? Where once we call something The Bridge of the Gods it has been contemporarily reduced to landslide. We have new Gods now, and they compel us to do the work with erector sets. Or perhaps I mistook the name: It doesn't necessarily mean Gods made it. Perhaps Gods dwell there or frequent it. Or maybe it is a passageway that goes where the Gods go. It seems to me that if the Gods wanted to migrate from, say, Mt. Rainier in Washington to Mt. Hood in Oregon, they would probably follow the Cascade Ridge down to the Bridge of the Gods and cross there.
If so, I think I should like to see one, or maybe a whole herd of them like the caribou I saw in Alaska earlier this summer, strewn across the snow field like mahogany tables. Gods, I tend to think are more likely to be seen in the high places or thereabouts, after all,
The patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament behold the Lord face to face in the high places. For Moses it was Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo; in the New Testament it is the Mount of Olives and Golgotha. I went so far as to discover this ancient symbol of the mountain in the pyramid constructions of Egypt and Chaldea. Turning to the Aryans, I recalled those obscure legends of the Vedas in which the Soma—the 'nectar' that is in the 'seed of immortality' is said to reside in its luminous and subtle form 'within the mountain.' In India the Himalayas are the dwelling place of the Siva, of his spouse 'the Daughter of the Mountain,' and the 'Mothers' of all worlds, just as in Greece the king of the gods held court on Mt Olympus.
- Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue
These days Gods don't go around making landslides every time they want to cross a river, much less perform a Jesus walking on the water miracle. That would be far too suspicious. Gods like to conceal themselves. A popular saying is "God helps those who help themselves." I think if Moses were alive today, Jehovah would have him build a bridge rather than part the waters.
Someone said, "Miracles take a lot of hard work." This is true.
• • •
Day 1.
Bridge of the Gods.
Exhausted, I pitch my tent on the side of the trail in the hot afternoon and crawl into to take a nap to avoid the annoying bugs.
My sweat leaves a dead person stamp on the taffeta floor.
Heavy pack. A vertical climb of 3200 ft.
Twelve miles. I heaved dry tears and wanted to vomit.
Dinner and camp on a saddle.
Food hard to stomach.
View of Adams and gorge.
Perhaps I am a naive pilgrim as I cross over this bridge, embarking on what I suppose will be a forty day and night journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, with the terminus in Canada. My mother gave me a box of animal crackers before my departure so I could leave “a trail of crumbs to return by.” The familiar classic Barnum’s red, yellow and blue box dangles from a carabineer of my expedition backpack
As I cross over the bridge I feel small, the pack bearing down on my hips, legs, knees, feet. I look past my feet, beyond the steel grid decking of the bridge, at the water below. Its green surface swirls. I wonder how many gallons are framed in each metal square and how many flow by in the instant I look?
How does the sea become the king of all streams?
Because it is lower than they!
Hence it is the king of all streams.
-Lao-tzu, Tao Teh Ching
On the Bridge of the Gods I begin my quest, gazing at my feet superimposed on the Columbia’s waters flowing toward the ocean. Our paths are divergent. Why is it that the water knows without a doubt where to go; to its humble Ocean King that embraces our planet in blue? I know no such path of least resistance to and feel at one with humankind. To the contrary, when we follow our paths of least resistance—following our family trees of religion, learning cultural norms—we end up worshipping different Gods. It is much easier for an Indian to revere Brahman than it is for I. It is much easier for me to worship Christ than it is for an Indian. These paths are determined geographically and socially.
It’s not without trepidation that I begin my journey. I want to turn from society and turn to what I believe to be impartial: the sweeping landscape.
With me I bring a small collection of pocket books representing different ideas of the soul. (Dhammapada, Duino Elegies, Tao Teh Ching, Song of Myself, Walden, Mount Analogue, and the Bible.) It isn’t that I want to renounce my faith. I turn to the wilderness, to see if I can’t make sense of it all.
I hike north. This is a fitting metaphor. The sun rises in the east and arcs over the south to the west. To the north is darkness. To the north my shadow is cast. Instinctively I want to probe this.
• • •
Day 2.
Hiked fourteen miles.
Three miles on a ridge and five descending brought me to Rock Creek.
I bathed in the pool. Shelves of fern on a wet rock wall.
Swaths of sunlight penetrating the leafy canopy.
Met one person.
Read and wrote and slept on a bed of moss.
Little appetite.
Began another ascent.
Fatigued, I cried and cursed out at the forest.
I saw a black bear descending through the brush
Before reaching a dark campsite.
I am setting records of fatigue for myself. I am a novice at hiking. Here is the situation: I have 150 miles to walk. Simple arithmetic agrees that if I average 15 miles a day it will take me 10 days to get to the post office in White Pass where I have mailed myself more food. I think I am carrying a sufficient amount of food to sustain my journey, although I’m uncertain because I have never backpacked for more than three consecutive days. The greatest contingency, it seems, is my strength: can I actually walk 15 miles a day with 60 pounds on my back in the mountains? Moreover, can I continue to rise and fall as much as I have? I have climbed a vertical distance of over 6000 feet in the first two days.
I begin to quantify my movement in terms of Sears Towers. I reason that if the Sears Tower is 1000 feet, I walked the stairs of it, up and down, six times. I am developing a language of abstract symbols to articulate my pain.
I dwell on my condition. I ask myself, are these thoughts intensified by my weakness or am I feeding my weakness with my thoughts?
I begin to think about God. Many saints believed by impoverishing their physical self, often by fasting, their spiritual self would increase as a result. Will my spirit awake as my body suffers?
I feet the lactic acid burning my muscle tissue. I begin to moan aloud. I do this for some time until, like a thunderclap, I unleash voice in the forest.
I say, "I CAN'T do this,” and "I CAN do this," in turn. I curse and call out "Where are you God? I've come to find you." Then I see the futility of my words. Scanning the forest: all is lush, verdant, solemn, still. My complaint is not registered here.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
I unstrap my pack and collapse into heap on the trail floor, curled up. I want to be still like the forest.
The forest makes a noise: Crack, crack, crack.
I think a deer must be traversing through the brush. I turn slowly to look in the direction of the sound. It’s close. Not twenty yards off judging from the noise.
I pick myself up to view the creature, and look breathlessly. It’s just below me in the ravine. Its shadowy black body dilates subtly as it breathes. What light falls on it seems to be soaked up, like a hole cut in the forest in the shape of an animal. It turns and looks at me with glassy eyes. It claims all my senses—I see, hear, feel, smell, taste nothing else--as I focus on the bear.
And so I hold myself back to swallow the call note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans and already the knowing animals are aware that we are really not at home in our interpreted world.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
Remembering what I read to do when encountering a bear, I raise my arms, making myself bigger. "Hello bear," I say, "Go away!"
With the rhythm of cracking branches, it does.
• • •
Day 3.
Hiked thirteen miles.
Descended to Trout Creek, thirsty.
Met a couple en route to Lake Tahoe.
Bathed in Panther Creek.
Saw the wind brushing the lower canopy of leaves on a hillside.
A fly landed on the hairs of my forearm and I,
Complacent,
Dreamt.
I awake in an unusual bed: a stream bed. A trickle of clear water ran over stones beneath me, down my center, as if to bisect me. And yet I was not wet. What, I wonder, is the significance of this dream?
The August sun had been relentless thus far on my journey. The heat combined with the effort involved in getting from one source of water to the next makes an arrival quite thrilling. If the water is deep enough for my body, even more so:
I undress... hurry me out of sight of land, cushion me soft... rock me in billowy drowse Dash me with amorous wet...
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
There is something electrifying and intensely renewing about swimming naked in a cold creek pool or mountain lake.
I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect; "renew thyself completely each day; do it again and again and forever again."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Is bathing, then, a spiritual exercise?
When I was baptized on June 15, 1985 in the tiled pool of our chapel in the Portland suburbs, I thought surely as I was submerged something extraordinary would happen, such as the face of Jesus would appear to me in the water. And I did do it—I opened my eyes under water— but saw only the blur of my pastor's white torso and the hanging ferns that framed the pool. I wondered: shouldn't a ceremony as significant as this feel more than just wet? I’m guessing that most children with exposure to religion often keep their eyes open for some sort of spectacular encounter with God, be it to punish or affirm them. (As a child, I remember sitting in front of the television thinking God could put a commercial on for heaven if he wanted to.)
Now, only ten years after I was baptized, I still keep my eyes open for God, though not contextually the same, not within a religion, not literally.
And when I swim in a clear creek pool, I feel communion, pure and alive. The small rounded stones are reminders of the ceaseless touch of water. Their blurry shapes embrace me in a way that the symbols and rites of the church fail to.
I hear and behold God in every object
Yet I understand God not in the least.
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
And unlike the doctrines and precepts of organized religion, I have never doubted my intrinsic bond to water.
And more-
For greater than all the joys
Of heaven and earth
Greater still than dominion
Over all worlds,
Is the joy of reaching the stream.
- Dhammapada, Sayings of the Buddha
• • •
Day 4.
Hiked fourteen miles. Climbed to a beautiful ridge.
Signs, yellow and black posted every 50 feet: "Experimental Forest"
Wound down to a campground where I met three people
As I stopped for lunch.
"Where does this trail go to?" he says. "Mexico," I say.
"Ha Ha," says he.
Camped at small Green Lake.
My body continues to evolve. My hair and fingernails grow and grow, and right now I've got four new teeth trying to find a seat in my mouth.
I turned twenty-one on August sixth. On August sixth, 1945 a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The world lost more people than it made that day. When I was born, I suspect we gained a few.
I'm an adult now, and I’m not sure where it happened or why. I wonder if someone had to stamp something somewhere because of it? A big red stamp that says "ADULT". It was a blind passage for me—just like those persons who evaporated at ground zero on August sixth, 49 years ago.
I do feel like I just evaporated into adulthood. I am aware of the traditional ceremony of turning twenty-one. Drinking. Contemporary society commemorates becoming an adult with this token privilege. Do you have any idea how fast alcohol evaporates? I am suggesting this: One’s response to this rite rarely affords any resolution or insight into growth. Our society commemorates the passage from child to adult with a fermented beverage.
I wanted to more deliberate about becoming an adult. Hence the second reason (behind a spiritual search) for this sojourn into the wilderness. I took my lead from the scriptures:
And he was in the desert forty days... He was with the wild animals and the angels attended him.
- Mark 1:13
Something about those forty days prepared Jesus for what we know of his adult life.
I also took my lead from Native Americans. Their rite of passage is called a vision quest, wherein the youth goes alone into the depth of nature for a few days to receive some sort of insight into being.
I look around me. I am alone here in the woods a few days after my birthday. Why? To discover those parts of me that want to be liberated. To draw the fragrant air into my lungs. To feel my place in nature.
…beneath each footfall with resolution.
I want to own every atom of myself in the present and be able to say:
Look I am living. On what? Neither
Childhood nor future grows any smaller....
Superabundant being wells up in my heart.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
• • •
Day 5.
Hiked to Bear Lake and swam.
Saw over a dozen people. Eighteen miles.
Watched raven fly from tree and listened.
Found frogs as little as my thumbnail.
Left Indian Heaven.
Surprise. My body is becoming acclimated to long distance hiking. I know because when I rest it is a luxury rather than a necessity.
The light is warmer and comes through the forest canopy at an acute angle from the west, illuminating the trunks of this relatively sparse old growth stand. I am laying on my back watching a raven at his common perch aloft in a dead Douglas fir.
It leaps into its court and flap its wings slowly, effortlessly navigating through the old wood pillars. The most spectacular sense of this, however, is the sound: a loud, slow, hollow thrum: Whoosh whoosh, whoosh.... It’s as if the interstices between each pulse are too long, too vacant to keep the creature airborne. Unlike its kind, this raven does not speak: there are no loud guttural croaks to be heard.
Northwest coastal tribes such as the Kwakiutl thought the croaks of a raven were prophetic and whoever could interpret them was a seer. Indeed, the mythic perception of ravens to be invested with knowledge and power is somewhat universal.
My raven is silent. And this is apt, for I tend to think the most authentic prophecies are silent, or near to it.
Great sound is silent.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
The contour of that sound and silence leaves a sublime impression on me.
• • •
Day 6.
Hiked twelve miles.
Many uphill, but not most.
Met several people.
One group looked like they were enjoying themselves—two families.
I spent the afternoon reading my natural history book on a bridge.
Voles (forest mice) relentlessly made efforts to infiltrate my food bag during the night.
I am reading about how to call a tree a “Pacific Silver Fir” or an “Engelmann Spruce” or “Western Larch” and so on. If something arouses my curiosity on my walk, I look in my natural history book to see if it has anything to say.
Jung said, "Sometimes a tree can teach you more than a book can."
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha was enlightened beneath a fig tree.
I read that a 316-year-old Ponderosa Pine east of Mt. Jefferson bears scars from 18 forest fires. Surely that tree taught us one thing a book couldn't. All things are clues. Everything is part of a complex tapestry of causality.
The grand design behind these mountains has something to do with plate tectonics. Beneath me the oceanic plate is diving beneath the continental at twenty to sixty degrees putting it well under the coastline to where it partially melts and forms magma. This has been happening for millions of years. Every once and a while this magma channels its way up to the surface, cools and turns into igneous rock. Again and again, this happens. Again and again, and yet again until a mountain is made; a stratovolcano.
Meanwhile, on top, water, glaciers, wind, and sun are trying to carry the mountains away grain by grain. Geologic time is as incomprehensible as it would be to imagine someone's life by looking at his or her gravestone. These mountains are gravestones.
Plants fight to keep the hillsides together. Plants and trees do. But every summer some of those trees, somewhere, are going to burn. Nature will not tolerate too much fuel. New trees will grow to replace those lost. Again and again. Eighteen times over and there we find our tree, a scarred Ponderosa Pine in the tapestry.
And every summer the flowers will bloom. The bees will come to pollinate them and cross-pollinate them: next year a new color will emerge.
And every summer the mammals named homo-sapiens-sapiens will come to the mountains to cut down trees, hike trails, and to put up yellow and black signs that read Boundary Experimental Forest U.S.F.S. placed evenly 100 yards apart so hikers are kept excessively informed about boundaries.
Here I am in the midst of this slow-motion interplay of nature. I walk by thousands of trees daily. Sometimes I see just one, sometimes the blur of thousands. It is not so much that a tree teaches me more than a book; rather it conjures up in me the copious leagues of books unwritten. And, I know somewhere inside that I participate. What more hope could a tree offer? What more hope could you find in a gravestone?
• • •
Day 7.
Hiked twenty miles in Alpine country near Mt Adams.
More flowers—fields of them. Saw owl. Saw elk.
Wrote near cascading creek.
Enjoyed walking. Appetite is robust.
Camped at Lave Spring.
Saw six to ten folks.
Didn't talk too much.
Before I was baptized, during the announcements, there was a tremendous screech culminating in a loud cumbf! This is a sound which can be translated here as metal and glass crumpling and shattering in an instant to absorb the forces of automobiles colliding.
In the subsequent prayer, the pastor made mention of the crash, which happened on the very same corner of the chapel, and prayed to God that He might spare those people of injury.
As it turns the peculiarly memorable sound was that of our family automobile folding into itself, and it was either through prayer or her seat belt that no harm came to my sister who was driving it.
Poor thing. She just was going to get some donuts. Do you know why? Because I missed my appointment with baptism. There is time in most church services when people go to the front to (1.) confess their sin, (2.) confess their faith in Christ as their only personal savior, and (3.) to receive Him. This is what is known as the “Altar Call”. To the embarrassment of my parents (for I recall the plan was for one of them to escort me to the front) the Alter Call cue—a specific prayer and hymn—was missed and I sat expectant till the service end. The solution was to attend the subsequent service and try harder.
I don't recall my entire understanding of God and Jesus then, at age eleven, but I do remember arriving at a version of Pascal’s reductive decision tree that there are four possibilities regarding my death and salvation:
1. Jesus is truly the savior of mankind and I claim him and I go to heaven, or
2. Jesus is truly the savior of mankind and I don’t claim him and I end up in hell, or
3. Jesus isn't the savior of mankind and I die having lived a somewhat virtuous life in trying to model myself after him, or
4. Jesus isn't the savior of mankind and I didn't believe it anyhow.
My sister, fresh with an Oregon drivers license, thought one dose of church was enough for her and, being hungry, went out for donuts and failed to yield.
Cumbf!
Someone came into the chapel to inform us. We all went out to the accident. The cars were smashed and askew, and my sister was a bawling, rocking little lump on the side of the street. We attended to her, calmed her, and realized there was yet time for me to get baptized. We went into the church and waited patiently for the hymn we had mentally earmarked and then I was baptized.
I look back on the calamities of that day affectionately.
Prize calamities as your own body.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
Those events that surrounded the ritual decry a ceremony so commonplace one often misses the extraordinariness of it; of humanity; the embarrassment of my parents; the frustration and impetuous flight of my sister; and the sympathy and furrowed brow of our pastor. These events unwind in my head like a black and white silent film of Keystone Cops with a church organ revival hymn for the soundtrack. There was something almost slapstick about how that morning unfolded, and once the dust had settled and the family was relating the story to my grandmother later that day, we began to find the humor in it.
Hitting things and missing things and this is sacred. All of it.
Because our body is the very source of our calamities,
If we have no body, what calamities can we have?
- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
Most religions see the body as temporal and the soul as eternal. Hence, 13th century monks cloistered themselves up denying their bodies space and interaction that their souls might be enhanced.
I see it this way: No one denies their bodily existence, do they? Look, your own hand holds this book. Why do you exist? You exist right now, inherently, to hold a book, and to feel the manifold sensations of the moment.
If this isn't enough of a reason, adjust.
I've heard it said, "Stop living in the way of the world, live in the way of God."
My reply: "Before I was baptized, I heard a cumbf, and it was in the world and I couldn’t ignore it. I’m not convinced we would have a world if we weren't supposed to live in the way of it."
Thanks for reading Soundwalk! This is Part One of my 1994 travelogue-meets-memoir The Tread of My Soul. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Or find the eBook at Apple Books or Amazon Kindle Store.
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For our last soundwalk we are returning to the banks of Onion Creek, taking in McKinney Falls and its environs. It’s been a whirlwind four stop soundwalk tour of greater Austin, TX. Spring mornings in this part of the country are hard to beat!
McKinney Falls lies within a 641 acre state park where Onion Creek plunges over amphitheater-like limestone ledges. Our soundwalk route connects the upper and lower falls by way of a trail that leads through an overhanging rock shelter, and across a broad limestone plane.
Artifacts found in McKinney Falls State Park in Austin show Indigenous people inhabited the area starting 9,000 years ago. The names of the early groups are unknown, but it is believed the Tonkawa, among others, descended from them. (texashighways.com)
My instrumental arrangement for woodwinds, synthesizer, harp, zither, and celeste floats lazily along with the songs of Northern Cardinal, White-eyed Vireo, Red-breasted Woodpecker, and Black-crested Titmouse in the scenic canyon.
Thank you for listening and joining me on this chapter of Soundwalk in central Texas. For our next season, we return to Portland, Oregon in search of the quietest natural places in my home city.
McKinney Falls Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, August 16th.
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We have decamped from the inner rings of Austin to the suburb of Round Rock, TX. It’s April 7th, 2023.
When I’m scouting a map for a good place to record a soundwalk, I look for trails through natural areas that have some sort of buffer in the way topography or distance from highways and arterial roads. In Round Rock, one of those places is the Brushy Creek Regional Trail, and the buffer, as it turns out, is the enormous property on which was built the Kalahari Resort, presently America’s largest indoor water park.
How big? The resort compound boasts a total of 1.5 million square feet of indoor space. The water park is 223,000 sf with 30 water slides and 20 pools. The hotel has 975 rooms and suites. The site also boasts an 80,000 sf adventure park, a 200,000 sf convention center, a 10,000 sf shopping area, 20 dining outlets, and a spa & salon. It is a small encapsulated city.
Now, I’m not here to judge Kalahari Resort. Well, maybe a little. I mean it strikes me as kind of a landlocked cruise ship, recalling in some respects the Axiom Space Cruiser from the movie Wall-E, with its always-72˚ razzle-dazzle cocooned-ness, but I haven’t been there, and I happen to have fond memories of water parks.
When I was in the 6th grade I travelled with my dad to Orlando, Florida. It was the only flight I was took as a child. Disneyworld and EPCOT were fun, but Wet’n’Wild, one of the country’s first modern water parks, really excited me and captured my imagination.
Back to the soundwalk. I was strolling along the paved path, and I glanced over in the direction of the creek canyon. Under a flimsy wire fence, a stormwater spillway led down to smooth rocky basin that Brushy Creek meandered through. I skittered carefully down the slide and was transported to a magical place. The light glittered on the riffling water. A Snowy Egret stood sentinel. Cardinal song ricocheted off the stone walls. I couldn’t help but feel like I walked into a superior water park, admission-free. I mean it wasn’t a thrill ride, obviously, but it engaged my senses, and offered its own kind of thrills.
Now if I told you that clip was from a national park, would you question it? I mean c’mon. It’s glorious! It’s priceless! And it its hidden between the nation’s largest water park and a suburban development.
I love finding these overlooked spaces: undeveloped, sometimes difficult to access, tucked into the fabric of our civilizations. I encourage you to look at maps of your own region for quirky public spaces that might offer a sense of refuge and discovery in the midst of so much sprawl.
Lastly, a word about the music. The backbone of the arrangement is a wobbly, stylized Wurlitzer electric piano. Plucky (mandolin, zither, “Panjo”) and fuzzy (synthesizer) sounds are latched to this scaffolding in turns. Some parts are sparser than others. Generally speaking it’s all melodic, sometimes concretely, sometimes vaguely.
This was a very memorable walk and I’m happy to share it with you! Thanks for listening.
Brushy Creek Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, August 2nd.
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We are in Austin, TX again, at Onion Creek Metropolitan Park on a mild spring morning. It’s April 5, 2024.
Onion Creek Greenway Trail follows a large “S” curve along Onion Creek on the semi-suburban south side of Austin, Texas. Located about two miles from the closest strand of Austin’s web of highways, it is one of the more serene riparian destinations within the city limits.
It’s a popular place to walk dogs or go for a jog. The trailhead I arrived at even had a barista / food cart. Getting off the main trail will afford the visitor a quiet, intimate experience with the creek and wildlife. There’s a fair amount of human history here too if you know where to look, dating back thousands of years to the El Camino Real period and presence of Coahuiltecan Native Americans.
Onion Creek Metropolitan Park owes its existence to a more recent history of ill-fated development and flood events culminating in The Halloween Flood of 2013:
Austin received over 10 inches of rain during a single 24-hour period. Onion Creek rose by 11 feet in a mere 15 minutes and eventually hit an all-time high of 41 feet (topping a 1921 record by three feet). Water coursed through it at twice the velocity of Niagara Falls—enough to easily topple houses and trees, and move multi-ton objects like boulders and automobiles. The Halloween flood killed five people and damaged over 1,200 houses.
The houses that once stood in the area were demolished but a patchwork of “ghost streets” that once served them remain, offering visitors a view of the slow process of residential re-wilding (and/or recreational redevelopment).
Unlike the ghost towns of the previous century, which were built to extract one local resource, these ghost streets may offer a window into the future, where residential areas are abandoned after flood events owing to more frequent and intense storms, or erosion from sea level rise, or conversely, water scarcity making some places simply too impractical to inhabit.
It’s a reminder to live in the moment, to cultivate non-attatchment to things, and consider the adaptive strategies of wildlife.
Despite its origin near the site of a
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I couldn’t really do what I set out to do yesterday. It was too hot in the city, so I went for an afternoon walk in Forest Park. I was interested to hear what it sounded like when the thermometer hit triple digits; something it rarely used to do around here.
It was quiet. Did I say it was hot? Instinctively I wanted to be near water. I figured the wildlife did too. Many hillside streams were dry as a bone, but I eventually reached one with a trickling flow. I soaked in the ambience before heading back to civilization.
Summer might have been my favorite season as a child. Not any more. Heatwaves and forest fire smoke makes me anxious these days. Thankfully we’ve been spared the latter so far this season. Doing something with my hands offers some solace. Finding my way through a composition gave me something to focus on. Voila; a very hushed 20 minute soundwalk and a minimal keyboard mediation for hot days in a warming world.
My go-to (virtual instrument) keys have been the Hohner Pianet T lately, the least famous of the 60’s and 70’s electric pianos. I just Googled “songs with Pianet” and interestingly “Louie, Louie” by The Kingsmen topped the list; probably the most famous act to hail from Portland in the 60’s. I have to say the instrument doesn’t really stand out in that song though. It appears on several Beatles songs as well. I just like its mellow tones.
But I digress. To break it up, I sprinkled in some celeste and Korg Prototype 8 keys during the streamside passage. A solo performance throughout. Enjoy!
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I had scheduled this for the U.S. July 4th holiday tomorrow, but I’m second-guessing that now and pressing send with unrestricted access. Perhaps this can offer some counter-programming to the sometimes overbearing or militant sounds of fireworks, or be a balm to those who are traveling and might feel unsettled right now.
Why not make it a two-fer? I also just shared a spacious dawn chorus soundscape field recording I made recently at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
For the next four installments of Soundwalk we are traveling to Texas in the springtime. After several soundwalks with sparse birdsong, I’m ready for migration sounds. How about you?
Texas hill country in springtime is pretty great. The morning air is mild and sweet. The birdsong is exotic to my western North American ears. Flowers are in bloom. I get the draw. I wasn’t missing cold, rainy Oregon that morning.
Barton Creek Greenbelt is in the inner rings of southeast Austin, TX, but it feels like a world apart from the city. Sure there’s the hum of the highway that’s not far off, but it’s pretty easy to tune out, and in some reaches of the canyon, altogether missing.
I visited April 4th. There was no water in the creek bed due to ongoing drought conditions, but the shrubs and grasses were spring green amongst the canopy dominated by live Oak. The lack of water in the soundscape gave the bird and insect sounds more presence.
For a lot of songbirds in North America there are western and eastern analogues. Eastern Wood-Pewee: Western Wood Pewee, Carolina Chickadee: Black-capped Chickadee, Carolina Wren: Bewick’s Wren. What the west does not have is its own version of the Northern Cardinal. (We also don’t get Grackles and lots of other widespread eastern birds.) The Northern Cardinal is just such a superstar of the bird world. It’s a noteworthy absence. The closest thing we have to the Cardinal might be the Lazuli Bunting, a distant cousin in the cardinalae family. Like the Northern Cardinal, the male is painted vibrantly. Instead of crimson, it has a sky-blue hood that dazzles the eye. But it’s not really a backyard bird, so it’s observed less frequently. Furthermore, its repertoire of songs and calls is limited in comparison, and a bit busy-sounding.
There’s a lot going on in this soundscape, but the Northern Cardinal, I would say, is really the star of the show with its sweet cheer, cheer, cheer and birdie, birdie, birdie layering on from many coordinates.
My instrumental score is dominated by a Wurlitzer electric piano, leaving room for the avian frequencies throughout. Gauzy strings and synth layers sweep in and out with watercolor broad-strokes. Occasional glockenspiel and zither offer some filigree.
It’s a good introduction for what’s to come, and brings me joy to share it with you! Thanks for reading and listening!
Barton Creek Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, July 5th.
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If a spark bird is a gateway to an interest in birding, then a spark place, I’d posit, is a gateway to a connection with nature. These places sometimes inspire writers. Think Thoreau and Walden, Annie Dillard and Tinker Creek, Aldo Leopold and Sauk County. My spark place in the last decade was Oaks Bottom, and for me it inspired music.
It was an affair of convenience, to start. Conveniently located in central SE Portland, the 163-acre wildlife refuge and nature park was on the route to my child’s school. I’ve taken thousands of photos there. I’ve made hundreds of field recordings. I’ve observed and contemplated its changes through the seasons and years, for most of a decade.
So it was with a mix of complex emotions that I visited on the last day of school on the last year that my child will attend school nearby. I will continue to visit it of course, but it will be much less convenient to do so. Much less routine.
In the section of the field recording that I chose to use for this piece you hear me walking on the trail, then stopping by an area I call “the coves” alongside the large pond, to sit on a rock for about 15 minutes and soak it all in. This rock is right beside the trail, at the base of a bluff. A concrete eight-story Mausoleum looms above, standing next to a primary schoolyard. The 50’ tall, windowless wall of the mausoleum acts as sounding board reflecting the children’s voices down the embankment. In the foreground of the soundscape are the morning sounds of creatures who find what they need here. Song Sparrows, House Finches, Black-capped Chickadees, Spotted Towhees, Crows, Red-breasted Nuthatches, Cedar Waxwings, Great Blue Herons, and Mallards with softly twittering ducklings.
In a stylistic break, I chose not to interrupt the soundscape recording with musical accompaniment for the first five minutes. I guess I’m thinking of this interval as a deliberate acclimation phase for the musical accompaniment section. When the music does enter, I meander my way through a solo performance for Pianet electric piano consisting of 9 parts; one for each year I made the cross-town pilgrimage. The reverberant children’s voices struck me more deeply than they usually do, and I tried to convey that in the piano performance. What can I say about it? It’s performed in my way; which is to say it’s tender and naive, and just my fingers communicating something words can’t quite get at.
Thanks for listening, reading, and allowing me to share my story and music. I hope it brings you some enjoyment and reflection.
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Well friends, we’ve come to the end of another chapter in our Soundwalk journeys. For our final installment in the series on Mount Hood—Oregon’s tallest stratovolcano (at 11,249’)—we are taking in Larch Mountain.
While technically just outside the confines of the Mount Hood National Forest, Larch Mountain offers a gorgeous view of Wy’east, the Native American name for Mount Hood.
Right? Oh man, what a beauty!
It was an interesting confluence of events that drew me out to Larch Mountain on Oct 31, 2023. It was the last day to drive the road up there before it closed for the season. Also, I was peripherally aware that Grey-crowned Rosy Finches were spotted in the area; a rarity for the county. Mind you, I never heard of Grey-crowned Rosy Finches until a couple days prior, and I’m not usually a rare bird chaser, but the time and space opened up so I drove up there.
It was a beautiful partly-cloudy day. There were patches of snow on the ground; a crunch crunch under foot. So quiet!
Chestnut-backed Chickadees, Golden-crowned Kinglets and a Red-breasted Nuthatches meandered through the canopy. Chipmunks chattered. Red Crossbills called out in flight. I did see the Grey-crowned Rosy Finches far below me from Sherrard Point (where I took that photo of Mount Hood) but they never got close enough for a decent photo.
Larch Mountain was developed as a tourist attraction / forest service lookout in 1915 when the first tower and hiking trail were constructed. It was a hard-earned view. The 13.3 mile trail (out and back) climbed 4000 feet up from the iconic Multnomah Falls to the summit of Larch Mountain. At that time most visitors would have arrived by train to Multnomah Falls. The Historic Columbia River Highway opened to automobiles in the early 1920’s. Today, while the one mile trail up to the top Multnomah Falls is bustling, the rest of the hike up, following Multnomah Creek for the most part, is serene in contrast.
It was on the upper rim of this trail that I made this soundwalk. Like Timothy Lake Soundwalk, this is a very quiet soundscape. The same recommendation applies: For best results, listen with headphones, or in a quiet environment. Thanks for reading and listening. It brings me joy to share it with you!
Larch Mountain Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow, June 14th.
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Earlier this year I shared a soundscape field recording of an American Dipper singing on the Salmon River near Mount Hood at Wildwood Recreation Site. Wildwood Soundwalk is another recording that was made on that same day, Feb 20 of this year. It captures the sounds of walking over bridges and wetland boardwalks, languorously moving past springs, creeks and seeps trickling down rock walls, and strolling alongside the Salmon River.
If you like gentle water sounds, you’re in for a treat. There’s more water than wildlife sounds in this one.
These days when I edit my Soundwalk audio, I remove airplanes, automobiles and humans. I generally do this by digitally splicing the recording. Snip, snip. I also use selective EQ filters and a cut and paste technique to remove low frequency highway or aircraft noise. Overall though, I rarely crossfade clips or deviate from the linear timeline.
My hike that day took me up Boulder Ridge into the Salmon Huckleberry Wilderness. Though a couple signs warned of black bears in the area, and the scenery was lovely, this section of audio proved less interesting, so I swapped it out for the American Dipper song by the river. Here is a clip of it batting its white eyelids and doing its dip motion. Charmer!
I take my time at the base of the incline, lingering next to rivulets dripping over mossy rocks, crouching down to observe with my eyes and ears the little details of these watery vignettes.
Compositionally I’m delighting in the water, selecting bouncy synthesizer patches to play off the water sounds. Stitched throughout the instrumental score is, essentially, a duet for electric piano and clarinet. It’s all performed with an unrehearsed looseness, which I hope lends an unfussy, “wild” vibe. Woodwind arrangements, hushed celeste, and a variety of animated synth passages also add to the bouquet of sound. I hope you enjoy it!
Wildwood Soundwalk will be available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow May 31.
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Company Lake is a scrappy bit of woods and water on the banks of the Columbia River near Troutdale Oregon. Birds flock to it.
I was going through some old files yesterday and rediscovered this 10 minute piece. I don’t have any memories associated with the composition—a minimal suite for piano, bells and electric piano I found surprisingly well paced and strong in the coda—but I recall my visit to the place I recorded the soundscape just a year ago.
The soundscape is from the roughly 70 acre cottonwood grove near Company Lake, a small body of water near the former site of an Alcoa aluminum plant known for the last half of the previous century as Reynolds Metals. The area was named a superfund site by the EPA in 1994. In 2004 the aluminum plant that once used more electricity than the entire city of Portland (back in 1981) was demolished. After being cleaned up, the site was redeveloped as a FedEx distribution center.
The FedEx employee parking lot used to welcome birders to the Company Lake environs. Last year, however, I arrived to find a gated lot, fenced off with barbed wire. I’m going to hazard a guess that this has something to do with car prowls and houseless camping, but there’s no official word on that. To get to the wooded area today you have to walk a half mile on a bike path from the closest public road. All the more privacy for the birds, I suppose, but a change that left me feeling a little deflated at the time. In retrospect, not really a big deal.
I mean, let’s be honest, what can we expect from a place called “Company Lake”? It’s almost a cartoonish appellation; something you would expect in an episode of the Simpsons. Three-eyed fish and barrels of industrial waste, anyone?
Who named it Company Lake and why did it stick? Google couldn’t tell me, and Chat GPT (4.0) hallucinated with gusto: “The name "Company Lake,"originates from its historical association with the Union Pacific Railroad Company. The lake, along with several other lakes and ponds in the area, was created as a result of gravel extraction operations conducted by the railroad company.” Bla-bla-blah… No such thing occurred! The lake was likely created as a flood channel before becoming choked off. The name? Well it likely comes from the era of land ownership cited in newspapers as “Sundial Ranch Company” between 1910 and 1924, referring to the 2400 acre tract near Troutdale held by the Union Meat Company. In those days it was still a wild landscape, according to a 1941 reminiscence by Ben Hur Lampman in The Oregonian:
Yon was a great country before it was diked, in the times when the river refreshed it with regularity. With the wood ducks winging over the shining expanse of it, and a static excitement in the soft air, and the willows smelling like spiced varnish.
So in truth, “Company Lake” is a misnomer. The lake is on the “wild” side of the dike amongst the low-lying cottonwoods. It’s not a titan of industry cesspool. Company Lake today is like a moat to a no man’s land, cordoned off by industry and forgotten by most, re-wilding in obscurity.
I’ve decided not to restrict access to this recording. Thanks goes to my subscribers for supporting my work and making this possible. Thank you for your interest, and for being here.
Before I leave you, let’s just take a moment to contemplate the Lovers Oak, which once stood near Company Lake, another testament to the resilience of life.
The original tree was shaped by an 1876 Columbia River flood. The slender oak was forced over one log and under another, maturing into the shape of the letter "S" lying on its side. The lowest curve of the S-shaped tree formed a perfect bench where friends and lovers met on pleasant Sunday afternoons. Local residents began to call it the Lovers Oak.
During World War II when the government built the aluminum plant nearby, it was agreed to fence and protect the tree. The publicity resulting from that decision brought the tree to the attention of Ripley's "Believe it or Not," a nationally syndicated cartoon featuring unusual items throughout the world.
After the war, the tree was forgotten by most. It fell in the Columbus Day windstorm of 1962, but the image remained in memory as the logo of the Troutdale Historical Society. -troutdaleoregon.gov
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Castle Canyon is in The Mount Hood National Forest, a stone’s throw from the little hamlet of Rhododendron. It isn’t a what I’d call a canyon. It’s a wooded ridge with some striking volcanic rock formations rising out of it. Two steep creek canyons do cut troughs in the landscape on either side of this ridge, so it’s not devoid of canyons, but the “castle” bits don’t mix with the canyon bits in an obvious way. The short trail that leads up to these rock pinnacles is quite steep, utilizing just a few switchbacks to climb 800 feet in less than 3/4 of a mile.
The soundscape here is unique. I’d call it airy, reverberant and fuzzy. The sound of the distant tumbling creeks bounces up through the Douglas-fir and hemlock woods, mixing with the breeze playing off the leaves of alders and big-leaf maples, forming a bio-acoustic hum. Its frequency changes subtly as I climb the trail.
This is not a soundwalk I would recommend listening to in the car. Its features are nuanced and easily lost in a din. I mixed the soundscape more in the foreground than in the past, embracing all that fuzzy creek sound. It’s probably best experienced in headphones or a quiet environment.
I’ve also been utilizing more of the stereo sound stage lately: placing instruments in the mix solidly in the left or right channels. After all, this is how the birdsong registers. When you listen with headphones and close your eyes you can often picture the birds in imagined space.
Pacific Wrens can be heard singing and calling at different points, along with Golden-crowned Kinglets and Dark-eyed Junco. A distant Pilieated Woodpecker’s laugh is heard and in the opening minutes, and midway through a raven honks and vocalizes in “subsong” (birdsong that is softer and less well defined than the usual territorial song, sometimes heard only at close quarters).
My score is melodic, as always, but always rising through the scale, playing off the rising pitch and evolving timbre of the creek sounds on the climb. For the instrumentation I challenged myself to leave piano out this time. With small songbirds so prominent in the soundscape, I tend to gravitate to “smaller” sounding instrument voices: glockenspiel, circle bells, flute, wispy synths. A clarinet plays out a theme at several points. One interesting addition to the instrumentation is Joshua Meltzer’s “Panjo”, a clever virtual instrument hybrid playing either baritone banjo or pan drum sounds for each note from the phrases I play on the keys. Never the same twice. It sounds like a dreamy, twangy music box.
Just over a week ago I finished submitting the next dozen soundwalks to come after this one, cementing the biweekly release schedule up to December! So, I know well what is in the future for Soundwalk and I don’t think it spoils any surprises to say they more or less follow the trajectory set by Castle Canyon Soundwalk. What I don’t quite know is what I will create over the summer and fall, having freed up my schedule, but I’m hoping to experiment, take some risks, and branch out!
In that spirit, I’ll leave you with this short video of the trail to the pinnacles viewpoint at Castle Canyon. Thanks for being here. I hope you enjoy Castle Canyon Soundwalk. It will be available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow May 17.
- Vis mere
