Appreciation (33) … Frogal fugue

Appreciation (33) … Frogal fugue
Torrey Orton
Feb.9, 2010

What four different frog families and three different crickets (?) sound like in celebration of the refilling of their water hole.

We've just had 100-150 mm of rain in the last three days in Melbourne…remnants of cyclone Anthony which dumped a small ocean on Queensland three weeks ago (that flood). Under the right conditions these things peter out over central Australia. Their warm, damp leftovers may get sucked down south by a weather system gliding out of the Indian Ocean 3000 ks. away from here. It's clearly visible on national weather maps, the one system sliding along the edge of the other. What doesn't show immediately is what the slider picks up – water!


And this was our first real walk in four weeks due to my recovery from a week incarcerated for acute pancreatitis*. As we started out a small rain shower kicked off and we stepped under some path bordering trees to get out the wet weathers. In the midst of covering up I felt a pinch on my ankle, looked down and spotted a bull ant having a nibble through my walking sock and a small troop of its colleagues wandering up my shoes to get in on the fun. Turned out we had setup the changeover to wets on an ant mound hidden under track gravel. Bitey, indeed!! No harm but the withdrawal took some doing. They stick as well as bite.


Towards the end of our ramble (slight incline over 1500 meters or so) we began to hear a somewhat mechanical noise ahead of us, guessing that the neighbouring quarry was being pumped out after the rain. Another 150 meters and the real sound became very clear to our left in an old fire fighting pond refilled by the rains. It was the frogal fugue…a low thunder of different frogs and crickets and who knows what celebrating the possibility of a late season mating melee. We are quite used to a small version in our garden, the remnant players of an original gene pool established there 25 years ago by a neighbour's child. But they all play the same come hither tune, in near perfect timing. And there's seldom more than 3-4 players.


This was something different – thundering almost, and so many notes played in different volumes and keys; an orchestra in olive drab variations. The attached file will give as good a rendition of the experience as a mobile's note facility can produce. Jack up the volume a bit til you feel slightly overwhelmed and you'll have the feel of it.


Enjoy…we did.

Nuts!!! - I've just discovered audio files cannot be uploaded to the blog!!! If you want one, email and I'll send it by return!!! Worth the effort for us both.


*A not-to-be-recommended event which left me 10kgs lighter (which could have taken months of training to achieve but only a week of nil-by-mouth in hospital). The standard recovery period is 3-6 weeks, of which I am now into the fifth week, restarting moderated work today (therapy) and developing new self-management regimes in eating (no coffee or alcohol, neither of which I miss at all; smaller meals, etc.) and morning relaxation and exercise practices with daily consistency, so far!

Optimysticals – the weather according to the BOM

Optimysticals – the weather according to the BOM
Torrey Orton
June 22, 2009

Now it has been almost 2 hours of constant shifting from susurration to light roar as I pass back and forth between eating and writing. At last, nothing. Probably I can sleep.

It has been two weeks since the above appreciation of rain. We (Jane and I) were walking across one of Melbourne’s better outer city parks, 30 kms from our place near the city centre and 30 minutes drive time total door to gate. It sprinkled as we walked. That is, we felt a drop here and there. Nothing visible. But we now notice a level of wet we never have before – the barely perceptible; if you blinked or sneezed you missed it. ‘Sprinkle’ is not a forecast category.

The forecast for the day was “showers”. It had dropped like that on the windscreen on the way out to the park - the visible part of the forecast. An on and off day like this reminded me of the perilous but permanent optimism of the meteorological services here, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). They have a forecasting regime consisting of: “intermittent showers”, light showers, patchy rain, or a little rain, rain easing, thunderstorms occasional….What’s so optimistic about the forecasts is that it takes nothing to forecast showers, which is so often what we get with that forecast.

We can also get nothing in Melbourne when there are a 'thunderstorms' or a 'little rain', or a 'rain increasing' forecast. And some of us, me among them, really pine for rain, dream consciously of it, hope for it (but not the pray-for-it fraternity; that’s another level) with mindless intensity. It’s mindless because rain so seldom comes – well below the average which hoping should cause by chance!

Until today I had looked intensely askance at the BOM for its mindless persistence with their clearly faulty promise – rain is coming. A farmer friend assures me this so (the rain is coming), and I know enough stats to appreciate his point. But, since seeing the BOM as a chief purveyor of local climate hope, my esteem of them has turned around.

So, it occurs to me that the BOM is the patron saint of optimysticals* - a symbol, an exemplar of the type - and so they should be noticed. If you like to help you will send this paean of acknowledgment to anyone you know in the BOM. They probably need more than we to know that others notice their mystical level of optimism, drawing what fantastic hope from it we may.

PS.
You may have a favourite optimystical. I’d like to post them. We’d probably have to negotiate a bit to develop a shared standard for them. Once negotiated, you can become an authorised poster on this site in the optimystical stream. Howzat?


* an optimystical is a purveyor of hopes I wished someone would purvey once I heard/understood they were doing it. It is often a counter-intuitive, maybe ironic, communication.

Appreciations (6) …sounds of rain

Appreciations (6) …sounds of rain
Torrey Orton
June 10, 2009

Sounds of rain, not sights or feels or smells of it, are a blanket to my spirit in the cool of drought. The rain in Melbourne comes slowly, lightly, a susurration on the roof, but felt as a slight change in air pressure almost, at the verge of audibility for my fading hearing. Maybe almost a complement to my tinnitus, falling as it does at the edge of my hearing range. Sometimes the fall advances to a discernible patter of delicate feet, ramping up suddenly into a splash or rolling thunder approaching the downpour’s roar, to fall again, more vertiginously, down the hearing scale to the background sounds of our street and the splatter of drops from eaves and bushes outside my windows.

Sweet music this… one that I grew up with in New England where drought was a content-free concept. Here in the second half of my life I have learned to embrace drought in its austere and astringent beauty. It is a comparatively soundless condition when searing northerlies stop. I long, intently, for rain; almost any will do. Early winter is a clouded time but mostly, still, rainfree this year like the 8 before it only even more free!

Our rain often wakes me at night when it comes, though too often it’s just a squall, a rush of spattering breeze long enough to blotch the dust on exposed surfaces but not to wash anything clean. The sound is the greater than effect. It cleanses the internals if not the surfaces. I can live longer better without a bath than I can without a clarification of my innards.

Now it has been almost 2 hours of constant shifting from susurration to light roar as I pass back and forth between eating and writing. At last, nothing. Probably I can sleep.