The other day, my closest friend and I were walking near a particularly scenic and spectacular section of the Pacific Ocean near Big Sur. When we got back, he asked, “What did you hear during our walk?” For a moment, I was befuddled. Then, I answered, “I have no idea.”
He responded, “That's what most people say. Can you remember what you heard in any of the places you've visited?” I had to admit I didn't. Then he replied, “You know, you can get an entirely different feel for a place if you listen rather than just look.”
The more I thought about what he said, the more it made sense, particularly for a writer, who has to recapture “images” from all five senses: sight, of course, but also sound, smell, taste, and touch, and to somehow translate those sounds onto a printed — or electronic digital — page. That's harder to do than it sounds, because while we're used to describing something we see, it can be quite difficult to capture in words — which we also see on a page — the sounds we hear.
Next time you're on vacation, on a business trip, or even a walk in your own neighborhood, try to capture and recall sounds you might otherwise ignore. Better yet, imagine a time, a place, and sounds which, had you been paying attention to them, would have made your story more three-dimensional, or, as writers like to say, “Show me, don't tell me.”
Here's a sample of an exercise I tried while I was writing my latest novel. The scene takes place in 1940, during the Battle of Britain, in a small port town on the Netherlands' Atlantic Coast, just north of the Belgian border.
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August 5, 1940 – Haamstede, The Netherlands, 20 miles north of the Belgian frontier
Varga could hear his own footsteps as he slogged up the wet, hard-packed sandy beach toward the town, shhh-sss, shhh-sss, shhh-sss. Behind him, the crashing of waves, the sound receding as he moved farther inland, and the sucking sound as the surf rolled back toward the open sea. Once in the center of the small town, twenty miles north of the Belgian-Dutch frontier, where he'd been sent overnight, his attention became focused on a sharp crackling, popping sound. The docks were burning, the harbor smelled of dead fish and rotting seaweed. Varga could identify the lone attendant, an old man, from the metallic click-click as he fastened the snaps of his 'Norwester.
“Damn!” the man grunted. The sloshing of water inside his soaked galoshes seemed louder than the splintering sound of cracking, old wood. The plop-plop of a heavy rain pelted the rubber sleeves of the man's raingear.
Suddenly, a growling roar drowned out everything else. Varga's eyes widened as he recognized the only surviving Polish bomber to have escaped capture by the Romanian government, a PZL.37 . The twin-engine medium bomber, “Moose,” came tearing over the coast at fifty feet. It's high-pitched whine combined with a loud whoosh as a herring boat caught fire, and a splash as a sailor jumped into water abutting the harbor, to create a cacophony of disparate sound.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Ten rounds from the 's guns raked the side of the harbor's gasoline tank, following by an explosive ka-BOOOOM! The seaman shouted that he couldn't swim. A taxi driver ran to the edge of the pier to try to rescue the flailing body, whose desperate arms were churning the water, but when the screamed around the town, he threw himself on his belly. When he arose seconds later, the sailor had disappeared below the mild chop of seething waves.
German antiaircraft guns fired, pfft-WHAM, pfft-WHAM, pfft-WHAM from their position on a small hill atop the town and sent red fireballs over the port in a fruitless attempt to hit the . The Polish bomber screamed as it tore out over the sea and came skimming back into the town, its three machine guns raining further havoc on the German-occupied port town.
After he'd made it back to the top floor of the only lodgings available that night, the dingy, pretentiously named Hotel Amsterdam, where the seaport's whores regularly plied their trade, Varga watched the bomber through one of two windows in his shabby room, just as he heard the sharp cll-r-aaack as the adjacent window burst and the silvery tinkle of glass showered the pavement three stories below. As he recognized the insignia on the tail and the familiar aircraft type, Varga involuntarily burst into a round of applause and shouted, “Yes!” for the whole city to hear.
Moments after Varga heard the loud flush of a toilet down the hall, a half-drunk Greek sailor wearing only his underpants burst into Varga's room, belched loudly, and passed wind with a flatulent bbrrrppp. The seaman, who'd gone to the communal bathroom to relieve himself after his time with a woman in a different room, didn't realize his mistake and seemed surprised to find another man there. He mumbled his apologies and left the room just as a blast shook the window glass, a high explosive bomb going off on the other side of town. Varga looked out the window and heard, rather than saw, a tall building collapse onto the street.
His attention momentarily diverted, the Polish colonel looked back toward the waterfront, where a man ran up to the herring boat, now fully ablaze, threw a completely useless bucket of water on the roof of the wheelhouse, then ran away as the loud sizzle and crack added its momentary solo to the symphony of destruction.
As Varga turned back to the window, the PZL.37 flashed by, its wingtip less than thirty feet from where he stood, its engines howling, rattling the window in its frame. The pilot circled low over the town and headed out to sea, toward his home base. The engines' noise sank to a lower pitch as the ' pilot put his plane into a steep climb, then a sharp bank at the top of the climb, and vanished into the cloud.
Suddenly, Varga heard the anachronistic high tinkle of a tin bell as the town's sole fire truck, an ancient Volvo 71-S, slithered and skidded around the harbor to where the burning herring boat had set the pier on fire. A late-model Citroën Traction-Avant commandeered by the occupying force, its six-cylinder engine purring smoothly, pulled up behind the truck, its brakes protesting with a loud squeal, its tires skidding noisily on the wet cobblestones. Its driver, a Wehrmacht soldier, leaped from the car, his heavy boots pounding clack, clack, clack as he approached the truck driver's window. Banging on the hood of the truck with a glove-enclosed fist, the soldier shouted in guttural German through the pouring rain, and pointed back the other way. The fire truck, its gears clashing, its engine growling, and the chuff-chuff-chuff of greasy smoke pouring out of its exhaust pipe, its little tin bell still incongruously tinkling, slowly backed up, trying not to drop a wheel over the edge of the pier.
Good! Varga thought. Something's really gone wrong and the Germans are pissed off about it. Even so, it didn't seem to slow them down. They patched and fixed and improvised and did without. Somehow, they find a way to get things done and move on to the next objective.
Another plane came roaring past the hotel. No, the same PZL.37. Take that for destroying our country, you fucking bastards!
This time, the huge gasoline storage tank erupted in a great ball of orange flame and black smoke. Once again, the aircraft circled the town, its pilot waggling its wings, and sped out over the sea toward the English coast. “Yes!” Varga shouted for a second time, raising his right arm and shaking his fist in victory as the bomber disappeared from sight.
Afterward, the sounds of the mini-war abated until the only noise Varga could hear was the pitter-patter of a light rain as it moistened the town, falling with varying degrees of noise on the wharfside streets, cooling them. The water sizzled as it touched the still-hot metal and dying embers that abutted the alleyways. In the distance, the bell of the fire truck never stopped pealing as the small rescue vehicle fought to be heard against the deafening silence which now enveloped the town. Haamstede smelled similar to the way he remembered Warsaw in September of 1939: charred plaster, burning oil, and cordite.
“The hell with everyone and everything,” he muttered. By now, Varga had gotten tired of the four-walled cage in which he had observed everything. He decided to go for a walk.
Once outside, he luxuriated in the quiet, punctuated by the rain still hissing on a few small fires here and there. Some of the town's citizens poked through a burnt-out café, lifted a blackened timber, then dropped it quickly when they saw what was under it. Soot drifted down on him as he walked — carefully, because the sea fog hung over the town. Quiet water that night, lapping gently at the foot of the quay as the tide went out. Walking away from the center of Haamstede, he was stopped by a pair of Wehrmacht sentries. They desultorily waved him along. Varga moved off the beach and into the dunes, where he sat quietly, listening as peace descended on the town.
As it turned out, the ' attack was only the opening act.
The main British assault came half an hour later. Bristol Blenheims, at least a dozen of them, maybe more. Although these planes were individually smaller and lighter than the PZL-37, their combined number sounded like a hundred timpani — kettledrums — pounding the town from above. The beach shuddered as the bombs hit. Once or twice, they came close, showering sand down on him. The antiaircraft defenders finally chalked up a small success; they hit a Blenheim with a full bomb load a little way out to sea from the harbor. Varga swore he could see the night cloud for ten miles from the light and corrosive BLAMMM! of the explosion. But most of the rest of the English armada got through, hitting the town and the sea and God knew what else. Pretty soon, most of Haamstede was ablaze. As he turned back from whence he'd come, Varga was not surprised to see that the Hotel Amsterdam was nothing more than a pile of smoking brick.
As the sun rose over the still-smoldering remains of the town, it was clear that the Germans had put on a dress rehearsal for Operation Sea Lion, their proposed landing on the beaches of Britain.
And it was equally clear that the British had put on a dress rehearsal of their own.
Carmel, February, 2022
LISTEN!
