Zero Decibels by George Michelsen Foy

Author:George Michelsen Foy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

chapter nine

the silence of the sea: how hearing evolved

I have written before that it is a good sign when your research yields data that you did not expect and, to be honest, did not want. It indicates that you are not molding the research to fit your lissome theories. But the implications of Buran’s research seem ridiculous. Is it possible that humans can never find silence because their brains and/or their nervous systems, conditioned by a long history of hearing, expect some kind of sound and therefore, when sounds are absent, make up their own?

What, then, to make of the much longer history we have of not-hearing, by which I mean the billions of years during which our oldest, most rudimentary ancestors floated; crude protozoa, largely senseless, in warm primeval seas? Do we, at some level, carry within us a subset of expectations to the effect that true peace stems from a state wherein perception does not exist—when all that counts is the blind, soundless engulfing of nutrients, and the mute division of cells?

I hope to find answers in Woods Hole, not far from my family’s turf. Woods Hole is a village on the southwest shoulder of Cape Cod, at the intersection of Buzzards Bay, the Elizabeth Islands, and Martha’s Vineyard. In late summer it is usually a sunny place where tidal currents funnel and twist viscously in all directions; where the floods of tourists drowning the Cape meet the hordes boarding ferries to the Vineyard; and where scientists from around the world mix, exchanging theories the way tidal currents swap nutrients, under the auspices of two venerable research outfits, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Marine Biological Laboratory.

In the basement of an MBL lab I visualize two experiments that concern me. In one, confined by a small tank, a species of loligo, the Atlantic squid, uses jet propulsion to escape its walls; to escape, also, the thin needles planted in its Frankensquid brain. The other experiment conjures an even more hideous image: a warty, black, foul marine monster, pinned to a dissecting board. The creature is not big, only five or six inches long, but two-thirds of it is mouth. This is not just any mouth, it’s a mouth from an aquatic nightmare; it holds ranks of huge, sharp teeth, all oozing slime. The dark dead eyes stare evil from the slab. I, my brother Louis, and my friend Caleb used to live in fear of these fish, which are properly called toadfish but are known locally as Cape Cod ministers. They live in sinkholes in the mud of our bays and are capable of biting off a toe if you step on this creature while clamming the shallows. We hunted them, for the good of all waders, with dive masks and frog spears. When you stabbed a Cape Cod minister it gave off a low, slow, and sinister underwater croak that was very satisfying to ten-year-old boys full of the unthinking savagery of that age.

Richard Fay has

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