Have We Lost Touch with Mother Nature?

This has been a strange summer, weather-wise. June was swamp-like with torrential rain practically every day, followed by an instant immersion into heat that felt suffocating and thick with humidity. I trudged from air-conditioned home to air-conditioned library to air-conditioned gym. In other words, I didn’t open a window until last Wednesday night, when the temperature dropped into the low 80s and I discovered summer was spinning onward, whether I was listening to it or not.

The early Sixties was not a time of central air conditioning, so the indoors and the outdoors were one, the noises spilling into each other. Mothers called out, children rang their bicycle bells or scraped along uneven sidewalks on metal skates. The Good Humor Man—or his distant relative, Mister Softee—jangled through the streets every evening, amid whoops and hollers from kids playing tag. The ever-present cicadas chirred in the trees above a father mowing the lawn in the cool hours of dusk. By 9 o'clock, we had all been summoned home and a quiet settled on the neighborhood that would last until dawn. 

AM radio was all we heard back then, and what started me on my sounds of summer kick was a chance hearing last week of “What’s New Pussycat?” by Tom Jones while I drove to work. I was immediately transported to the back seat of my mother’s turquoise Impala, a barge of a car, as we drove to Ocean City on a sultry summer Saturday. All the windows were open. My mother was wearing a chiffon scarf, tied in the style of those times, criss-crossed under her chin and tied at the nape of her neck. My hair was flying every which way. Tom was singing “whoa-ah-whoa-ah-whoa-whoa-whoa” on every station and my mother kept fiddling with the radio knobs after hearing it for the third or fourth time.

But there was no escaping Tom Jones that day, because when we finally made it to the beach, there were so many transistor radios squawking that, by the end of the day as we rode home—crisped by the sun, smelling of Coppertone—that refrain kept repeating in my head, unbidden, well into the night.

The transistor radio was a must-have when I was growing up, a status symbol in much the same way the iPhone is today. Kids used to bebop down the street with a turquoise rectangle clamped to their ear, the antenna waggling in the air. On the beach, it was a symphony of AM radio, as you were forced to listen to whatever your neighbor was listening to. There weren't many choices back then, so chances are it was the same station, seasoned with a sprinkle of static.

The transistor begat the boom box, which was much louder and more intrusive, the bass thumping obnoxiously. Nobody enjoyed that particular phase of portable music, so we welcomed the Walkman eagerly—which, in my opinion, began our descent into inward living.

Here in the overheated summer of 2013, Tom Jones is still singing lustily, but we can’t hear him. We don’t experience summer the way we used to, windows thrown open, eager to get outside and chase the milk truck. Instead, we live our lives in a closed-off/closed-up sort of way. The sounds of summer this year? The hum of central air, the constant drumbeat of the rain.  

We've lost our connection to the outdoor world in our daily life. Summer used to be the season of open windows and an endless soundtrack of leisure. Now it's just another season of indoor living. And although I'd never want to give up my central air, it saddens me and makes me yearn for simpler times and temperatures that didn't seem as stifling. 

No matter where you look these days, someone or everyone is tapping on a cellphone. As a matter of fact, it's not unusual to come upon a group of people thumbing at their phones, almost prayer-like, not talking to each other. It's become much easier to talk with our fingers than with our mouths, and I don't know why I'm more apt to text someone now rather than phone them for a nice long gabfest. I'm no different than any other closed-off, finger-tapping Mo'towner.

Is climate change to blame? Are smartphones the culprit? Is it really hotter than it used to be, or have we become less tolerant of anything that disturbs our personal space, be it soaring heat or a persistent bass line?  

When I walk the long driveway to retrieve the morning newspaper, I am acutely aware of my insular, 21st century life. The persistent tap of the woodpecker no longer wakes me in the morning, my smartphone does. When the birds announce their presence at 5 a.m., chatting and chirping at each other, I'm sealed inside, unaware of their symphony.

Last Thursday morning was blessedly cool. I heard a loud, percussive buzzing and walked outside to see a cicada spinning upside down in the street, a robin poking with its beak. When the cicada finally gave up, the robin carried it away for an aerial feast. I was happy to have heard and seen that little drama.

I miss my connection with the sounds of summer. I must be getting old.

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