Nighttime Symphony

When I was about 17, I went with my dad to Kansas in order to help him build a Renaissance booth.

It was a miserable three weeks- sticky heat, hard work twelve to sixteen hours a day, and only my schizo dad for company. I learned how rice smells when you accidentally leave it, closed, out in the summer heat for three days (really, really bad). I learned how to put up a roof truss, and how it feels when one swings down and whacks you in the back all of a sudden (knocks the wind outta you for half an hour!) and I learned how concerts sound from the back of an amphitheater (pretty awful, especially Hootie & the Blowfish)

Construction work, while never my strong point, is incredibly satisfying. Watching a structure of our own design take shape and go up was incredible, and even though my dad and I fought a lot, we also bonded.

One night our wrists were in particularly bad shape after a day of stapling and air nailing. The heat prevented sleep, the tendons in our arms were tingling and buzzing all the way up to our shoulders, and a Pantera concert was raging away next door. I lay awake just trying to massage the pins and needles out of my right arm. My dad had outfitted the van (our 'camper' for the interim) with an ingenious velcro & screen system that enabled us the keep the creepy-crawlies out while letting air pass through. The bugs that night were particularly energetic, flinging themselves bodily at the fiberglass van with enough force to make actual clunks.

They were probably trying to escape Pantera as much as we were...

Nearly as suddenly as it began, the din from over the fence ceased. When abruptly left with an absence of noise, your ears sharpen for the tinier sounds around you. I heard cicadas in the distance start their song, then a pair nearer me answered back. A few trees over, a similar but different song rang out, with staccato answers from the trees near the shower house. Then the frogs in the creek started up...

Within ten minutes, the entire fairgrounds was enveloped in sound. Not just sound, but a cacophony of insect, bird, and animal noise. It soothed me, and I lay back on my sweaty little pillow, forgetting about my tingling arm for a moment. Then I realized something- it wasn't just a random pattern of chirps and croaks- it was a melody. I mean this in the most literal sense.
I know very little about music, but I know a rhythym when I hear one. This was a rhthym: click, chirp, bzz, click, echo. Repeat. The bugs in that area of the U.S. are massive- we found cicadas over two inches in length and a luna moth with a five-inch wingspan- and apparently talented!

The sound got to be nearly deafening when the roadies next door packed up and left. As human activity ceased, the creatures around us became bolder with their music. Tree answered tree, frogs called for and found their mates, and the forest resounded with a symphony. It was, by far, the most beautiful thing that I have ever heard. I slept well that night, despite the heat and extreme fatigue.

God had set His very own creatures in motion to sing for me a lullaby, and they were so joyous at the prospect that I received, instead, a concert.