Despite my artificial knee, the best way for me to lose weight is to walk, which I do in more pleasant or cooler days on a small part of Omaha's extensive trail system along the Big Papio. I try mantras to focus and lose my hyperactive brain in coasting as I did once as a runner, achieving a kind of automatic happy blankness, but the biggest obstacles are my senses. I notice the patches of brilliantly deep yellow birdsfoot trefoil are almost gone, turning a pastel salmon orange before dying, as the moonwhite bindweed trumpets its territorial triumph across the burnt grass. (Strange that we valued the larger, fragile morning glories on our porch and at the end of our clothesline in those innocent Fifties before knowing about their hallucinogenic seeds.) On breezy days the accursed brome seedheads stir like Van Gogh's wheatfields and landscapes alive with restless energy like colored sonic booms exploding out of the frames, the grasses invisibly stirred in our usual winds. I smell the peculiar sunburnt pine scent reminiscent of mountain hikes on hot afternoons, this time merely a row of pines by the nearby ballfields, or the oily dampness of the Interstate underpass.
Mostly, though, I am sunk in sounds. I hear always the whines, thumps, hums of tires on I-80 or under F and L Streets, the clanging mustard-with-red-accents (technically called Armour yellow) Union Pacific trains crossing the trestle, metal-screeching stops, the pronounced Doppler effect telling us what sounds are approaching, which moving away. I hear the children splashing and yelling in the Westside pool, a secretary on a loudspeaker calling men working in the industrial areas the trail curves through, their tools banging and hissing and sawing on auto wrecks and trucks. Jets roar across the sky as small planes buzz like giant insects below them. Other trail users greet me--well, when it's in the morning when people seem cheerier. The afternoon sorts seem more sullenly silent.
I also hear the tlonk and rasping chirr, like the rolled Hispanic r I cannot master, of the red-winged blackbird nesting along the creek banks, the dropped pingpong ball of the field sparrow, the song sparrow's staggered notes with a different kind of buzzing chirring, the high ti-ti-ti-zeer slurred downward of the kingbird, the increasingly rare state songbird, the melodious western meadowlark, and, of course, the familiar robin. (When is a robin not a robin? When it's the American robin.)
I suspect the question first came up in college, for collegians are prone to worry over such futile questions like dogs worry over meaty bones: If you had to lose one, which would it be, eyesight or hearing? As a music major, I had a readymade bias then and figured I could always learn Braille or listen to book tapes. Now I would find it more difficult to give up my art, both my drawing and painting and seeing art in books or museums, also to give up my reading anything I choose, most material not recorded. Actually, at my age, one worries legitimately over the question of losing both, whether presbyopia is going to progress to macular degeneration, whether hearing will gradually worsen to alienated silence. (I already have a problem with a nephew's low register and low voice, just as Dad had with mine.)
What fascinates me walking is simply one of our taken-for-granted human amazements. That atmosphere of sound layers I walk into is all separated into known components, pitch, volume, timbre, identified, sorted, and stored through our magic ears funneling nothing but invisible vibrations into the quivering eardrum on to the tiny vividly descriptive middle-ear parts--hammer, anvil, stirrup--to the snaillike cochlea and semicircular canals to the inner ear secured within our hardest bone, where soundwaves converted to physical mechanics are finally altered to nerve impulses fired into our brains. Instantly. It is all this world of sounds bathing me in the humid air that disrupts my attention, my mantra efforts. A cause for wonder and gratitude. True focus for meditation.
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