Lately I’ve been enjoying the natural soundscapes available online from the US National Park Service, in particular those from the Rocky Mountain National Park, in particular the thunderstorms.
I’ve been reading The Outermost House by Henry Beston (which influenced Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), and I came across a passage that wonderfully evokes, in text, the soundscape of a thunderstorm on the Cape Cod peninsula shore in June.
A roll of thunder wakes Beston in his house on a dune at one o’clock in the morning. He sees lightning in the distance; a storm heading his way.
“Then came a time of waiting in the darkness, long minutes broken by more thunder, and intervals of quiet in which I heard a faintest sound of light surf upon the beach. Suddenly the heavens cracked open in an immense instant of pinkish-violet lightning. My seven windows filled with the violent, inhuman light, and I had a glimpse of the great, solitary dunes staringly empty of familiar shadows; a tremendous crash then mingled with the withdrawal of the light, and echoes of thunder rumbled away and grew faint in a returning rush of darkness. A moment after, rain began to fall gently as if someone had just released its flow, a blessed sound on a roof of wooden shingles, and one I have loved ever since I was a child. From a gentle patter the sound of the rain grew swiftly to a drumming roar, and with the rain came the chuckling of water from the eaves. … Now came flash after stabbing flash amid a roaring of rain, and heavy thunder that rolled on till its last echoes were swallowed up in vast detonations which jarred the walls. … [T]hat night there came over me, for the first and last time of all my solitary year, a sense of isolation and remoteness from my kind.”