It’s something of a cliché to talk about how quiet it is in Ashcroft. Since, as a writer, I like to avoid clichés wherever possible, I will instead remark on how noisy Ashcroft is, particularly out by the river along Evans Road (or the Slough Road, as many still refer to it as).
I’ve been walking out there a lot since the start of the year, when I resolved to resume my daily walks. This resolution — which I have so far managed to maintain, touch wood — was due to several factors, one of them being that while I am walking I am not doom-scrolling my way through news sites and social media, ever more appalled and outraged by the fact that a vengeful, petty, and deeply stupid narcissist — egged on by a ketamine-addicted, unelected opportunist — is wreaking havoc on a global scale like a three-year-old with anger management issues on a sugar high.
(When Orson Welles, then a 24-year-old wunderkind of stage and radio, was given carte blanche by RKO Pictures to make his first film, he called the movie studio “the greatest electric train set a boy ever had,” surrounded himself with the best on- and off-screen talent he could find, and proceeded to make Citizen Kane, one of the greatest films of all time. Were Trump and Musk to be given the same opportunity, they would fire most of the people with experience in the name of cost-cutting and/or retaliation, surround themselves with people who knew nothing of (or despised) the film-making process, fail to make any kind of film, sell off the equipment, and put the studio on the market.)
I feel my blood pressure rising, so back to the river. I can see how people — particularly those from a city of any size — would think it almost preternaturally quiet in Ashcroft, and on first listen it is. Listen more closely, however, and you begin to hear things that would ordinarily be lost, obscured by the aggressive noise of a larger place.
There is the river, of course, eternal and enduring, flowing along as it has for millennia. At this time of year, when it is low, it slaps against rocks rising out of the river, rocks that will be well underwater once freshet starts. Where the Bonaparte enters the Thompson there is a continual rushing noise, but nowhere is the river completely quiet.
Then there are the birds, particularly the Canada geese which crowd the banks and edges of the river. Their cries are distinctive (and loud), but there is also the ghostly whoosh of their wings overhead when a group of them take it into their heads to go elsewhere. The cawing of crows can also be heard, and occasionally there is a scuttling sound as some smaller bird scuttles through the brush, startled by my incursion into its domain.
Always there is the wind, rustling its way through grass and sagebrush and making the branches on the sparse trees dance. Occasionally it dislodges a tumbleweed, which cartwheels lazily along until it gets caught in something and comes to rest. The words of poet Christina Rossetti come to mind: “Who has seen the wind? / Neither I nor you / But when the leaves hang trembling / The wind is passing through.”
There are man-made noises too, of course: traffic along the road or sometimes across the river, the thrum of trains as they approach and pass and recede, occasionally a plane passing far overhead, sunlight glinting off it. Once I heard distant voices, and traced them to people far above me on the other side of the Thompson, but these noises are only temporary, soon subsumed by the river and wind and birds.
So, is it noisy in Ashcroft? Yes, but not necessarily in the ways you would think. It’s a reminder not just to stop and look around you, but to stop and listen, really listen, to the world. You’ll be surprised at everything there is to hear, by those who care to take the time.
