Author: Gary Ferrington

There are sounds from my childhood that remain with me as aural memories. The wind of summer and winter both carried messages that I still hear in my mind's ear.

Often, on summer mornings, I would lay in bed and listen to the East wind blowing far above our house. It was like a ghost wind, high and faint, but audible. Unlike yesterday when there was no wind, I knew that today would be hot and dry as experience had taught be that the sound of a morning wind would bring a quick warming by early afternoon.

What I would hear on those days was the beginning flow of warm air from East of the Cascade mountains down through the Columbia River gorge, where I lived, and onward to the cool shores of the Pacific ocean a hundred miles away.

By mid-day the wind would have reached ground level and what had been a gentle warm breeze was now a fully heated blanket blowing anywhere from 40 to 50 miles per hour. The wind would continue until evening when it would quietly fade at sun set perhaps to only begin again tomorrow morning.

The East wind also blew in winter - so often in fact that it's force had caused all the trees on our farm to grow with branches pointing west. With winter came a new sound that of sleet clicking against my bedroom window as falling rain moving in from the west met the cold freezing air flowing down that same Gorge that had brought the warmth of summer.

The sleet would swirl in the gusts of wind and strike the window in patterns of rising and falling intensity. I knew instantly upon hearing that sound that I need not get out of bed. School would be canceled as water pipes would freeze, and roads slick with coated ice would close.

When I think about it, the sound of the wind was always a part of my childhood.

I would often climb the rolling hills that surround the village in which I lived. Up there, high above the valley below. I would lay in tall grass on sparkling warm days, close my eyes, and listen to the wind moving through the grass in gentle waves.

At other times I would watch the wind and enjoy it's racing toward me and crashing about my ears as it passed.

There are also memories of when the sound of wind was not as friendly or comforting.

On Columbus day, 1962, the wind blew not from the East, but from the south. Southern winds always brought strong storms. But this particular storm was the remnant of a typhoon that had made an usual northern movement inland and up and over the Pacific Northwest.

What had been an a period of eerie silence around 4 PM in the afternoon was quickly filled by the roaring sound of a 106 mile per hour wind storm bending the trees around our home in patterns they had never made before. Their gyrations generated cracking sounds as branches fractured, split from the tree trunks and crash to the ground around the house.

At the height of the storm a sturdy old Douglas fir came roaring down toward the house, it's very tip scratch across our dining room window like a piece of chalk on a slate board. The window resonated filling the house with a frightening scream. We were lucky the window did not break. But the family decided, for safety sake, to seek shelter in a window less hallway.

There was one other stormy night that I recall in my aural memory. It was a night not too soon after my father had passed on. It was winter and the wind from the East had been blowing constantly for over a week. But this night the wind seem to intensify.

My mother was asleep at one end of the house and I at the other. I imagine we were both wide awake as the house shook more violently with each gust. We both seemed to realized that a wind break of tall fir trees outside the house were just feet from our bedrooms. Thoughts of falling trees filled our minds with concern.

About midnight I decided to move to the living room and sleep by the fire place. It would be further from the trees who's every movement I now could hear and feel vibrating through the walls and floor of my bedroom.

It wasn't long before my mother appeared in the living room and asked what I was doing. I told her that the storm was frightening me and that I felt safer in another part of the house. She said she had felt the same way and had brought her blanket and pillow and too laid on the floor by the fire.

It was one of the first times that we both had been scared since my father's passing. It was also the first time that we really talked about how much we missed his not being with us.

I now live in another part of Oregon far from the Columbia River Gorge. But the sound of the wind remains a part of my life even though I no longer hear it. I spent eighteen years with the wind and I had learned to listen to its voice. It had its own acoustic language which, depending upon the time of year, communicated information far beyond that of any weather forecaster.

It was an ancient voice I had learned to listen to. It told me the same stories it had told generations of Indian children who lived in the valley that had become my home. I imagine those first people understood the wind even better than I for it told them not only of the seasons but of legends that can only be heard when one listens to the wind.

Gary Ferrington is a Senior Instructor in media literacy and technology at the University of Oregon's College of Education. He is currently a member of the WFAE restructuring committee and serves as the webmaster for the World Forum for Acsoutic Ecology.