River Landscape with Sheep; John William Casilear

STEVE KOGAN writes:

My wife and I have a three-acre rural property along a country road in Columbia County, New York. The sleepy Rip Van Winkle mood of the surrounding landscape is underscored by our nearby access to the other side of the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains just beyond, which is aptly named the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. According to Washington Irving’s tale, Rip is almost sleep-walking himself as he scrambles “unconsciously” up one of the highest peaks in the region, where he sees the river shimmering far below, with “lagging” ships in the windless air “sleeping on its glassy bosom.” He soon  enters a kind of mythical dreamland, where he encounters silent little shades of Henry Hudson’s crew, drinks their magical liquor, is knocked insensible for twenty years, and sleeps through the transformation of his domestic life and his colonial village and through the American Revolution itself.

The Rip Van Winkle effect pervades our little corner of the Taconic Hills. Except for the sounds of birds, frogs, thunderstorms, an occasional airplane, or the rare car, truck, or tractor along our road, the silence is unbroken. At least it was until I shattered it for over an hour on a recent day. Music can have powerful effects on our image-making faculties. But so can the sounds we encounter in our everyday existence.

My wife had just bought a large metal watering trough for farm animals, about 6 x 4 x 4, in order to make a small, raised garden bed for tomato plants. Near the bottom of one side was a small cap that could be unscrewed for drainage, but she wanted additional holes all along the bottom, for which I had the necessary electric drill and a bit for drilling into metal. I had the place to myself for the day and began by turning the trough upside down and hammering a large nail into a few spots near each other, just enough to allow the bit to take hold and not slide all over the surface. It was a hot day, and I figured to make no more than two or three holes and call it quits until the day cooled off. I pressed down firmly on the drill and began to hear a whirring sound that grew louder with every increase of the hole’s diameter.

And then it happened. The entire trough became an echo chamber that magnified the sound until it momentarily obliterated my other senses and then fell away when the three-quarter inch hole was complete. I hadn’t expected anything like it, but the real thrill came on the second drilling, when I suddenly heard the sound of distant B-17s revving up in my imagination, the scene an airfield in England in 1943 from Command Decision, starring Clark Gable as the commander of a bombing group of the 8th Air Force, with Gable and others standing on an observation deck above the runway watching wave after wave of those four-engine bombers taking off for their perilous flight deep into the industrial heart of Nazi Germany, with no fighter escort in those days that could guard them all the way there and back. I couldn’t believe my ears. As I stood there drilling hole after hole, sweat pouring off me, the idea of stopping long forgotten, I was consumed by the sound of my imaginary bombers drawing nearer and nearer and then being up and away.

The noise had triggered that precise film sequence in my mind, but as I write this it occurs to me that I witnessed something of the real thing at an air show of World War II fighters and bombers, in the Catskills, no less, many years before, where recorded wartime broadcasts and band music of the time played over loudspeakers strung along the field. Later in the day, there was an announcement telling us to listen carefully to the sound of the four 1,200 hp piston engines on a B-24 Liberator as they began to rev up. “You don’t much get to hear a sound like that these days,” the announcer said, and he added that we should pay special attention to the vibrations coursing from the beating motors through the air and even the runway into our bodies as the engines went full throttle and the heavy bomber took off. A white-haired old veteran was at the controls. From the oohs and aahs of the spectators as he made one long pass over our heads and in a trice was a speck in the sky, it seemed as if he had turned us all into children once more, rapt in fascination, not unlike my own boyish exuberance at the thought of commanding waves of simulated B-17s as I drilled into the trough, or as Thomas F. Bertonneau remarks on the explosive sounds toward the end of Charles Ives’s The Fourth of July, “Finally, the boys get hold of matches and manage to set off the fireworks display prematurely, but to good effect nevertheless.”

— Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I enjoyed Steve Kogan’s beautifully composed reminiscence of sounds lost to memory – the harmonious roar of multiple piston-fired aircraft motors and the physical impression made by their activity.

It occurs to me that some of your readers, particularly the younger ones, might not know precisely what a B-17 Flying Fortress or a B-24 Liberator was.  Both were four-engine heavy bombers used in WWII.  Boeing introduced the Flying Fortress in the mid-1930s, but the Army Air Force was not much interested in it.  Only a few were on hand when the attack came at Pearl Harbor, but American industry “geared up” to build more than five thousand of them before the war ended.  The B-24 was a later design.  Before putting it into mass production, Consolidated, the manufacturer, had been known for supplying the Navy with flying boats.  (Call this “male knowledge.”)

Here is an excellent view of a B-17 in flight.  And here is a similarly excellent view of the prototype of the B-24 in flight, as seen from above.

There are half a dozen flying B-17s remaining, at least two of which tour the country in summer.  It is still possible to be physically close to the actual artifact.

A Reader writes:

I live full time in those Catskill Mountains that Mr. Kogan sees from his side of the Hudson. Perhaps if I stand on my roof and wave he will be able to see me! A native New Yorker, I moved up to the Catskills from Manhattan twelve years ago and have never looked back. The sights, sounds, smells and cycles of the natural world are something I could never again do without. The very thought of living in a large city again sends shivers up my spine. The noise pollution in Manhattan from the traffic and never ending construction is simply awful. You don’t have conversations with your friends while walking the street, you have shouting matches. I don’t know how I used to tolerate it. In the winter here in the mountains it is so quiet I can here the sound water makes as it flows and bubbles under the ice. Or there is the sound of the trees creaking and groaning as they rub against one another during a windy day. Just last night I fell asleep to the sound of two owls hooting in the distance. Better that than the 1st avenue bus, or a couple of drunks screaming in the night.

Yet the sounds of modern man do manage to bleed into my world now and then. Summertime brings the inevitable armies of obnoxiously loud Harley Davidson riders flexing their childish middle age machismo for all the world to see. Some of the modern sounds I do enjoy. As is the case of the C-130 night training missions that just happen to pass right over my humble little cottage during the summer. You can barely hear them approach until they are right above you, and then the whole house shakes. I suppose that has something to do with the terrain. They seem to fly three at a time, in close formation with no lights on.  The only way you can make them out is if the moon is bright or you have a night spotting scope such as I have. I assume they have taken off from nearby Stewart Airbase in Newburgh, NY.

Mr. Kogan writes:

I thank Thomas Bertonneau. I spent a good deal of my free time in my public school years making and flying model planes powered by small model diesel engines. My first toys were a pair of welder’s goggles, a box of airplane rivets, and a three-dimensional silhouette copy of the beautifully designed RAF Spitfire, which my father cut out from a small sheet of aluminum and assembled on a break from his work on aircraft assembly during World War II. As the photo that Bertonneau provided amply demonstrates, the B-17 had handsome features of its own, but my taste in bomber design gravitated to the B-24 Liberator, which fascinated me because it seemed like a kind of flying locomotive and to my adult eyes remains a vivid expression of American industry in the era that is still sometimes referred to as Smokestack America.

As for Karl D.’s comment,  the sentiments about Manhattan in the first paragraph correspond to my own. I loved my old New York in the 1950s – everything about it – the art galleries and jazz clubs, the low-slung factories one took in at a glance from the Brooklyn Bridge, the multitudes in and around Klein’s department store at Union Square, who looked as though they had just stepped out of a Reginald Marsh drawing from the 1930s – and on and on. For me, the beginning of the end took place in the mid ‘60s when I saw the first high-rise corporate buildings go up on 6th Avenue in midtown, with a corresponding loss of the pool hall, French bistro, large cut-rate record store, and other such delights of mine around 52nd Street. The later ‘60s saw the advent of Thomas Hoving’s commercialization of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where masses of people, sounds of cash registers, and huge and hugely expensive floral displays on the ground floor began to displace what was once a sanctuary for art lovers, with the smell of oil paint, turpentine, and linseed oil rising up from the studio easels of art students who were on assignment to make a copy of their favorite work. When this melancholy mood comes on, it helps me to remember that F. Scott Fitzgerald gave voice to similar feelings about an earlier Manhattan in his most elegant essay, “My Lost City,” which he wrote in 1932.

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