If you stand at the top of Pravčická Ridge with your eyes closed for long enough, the wood begins to give itself away. The wind, which from a distance is one sound, becomes — close up, and with patience — three or four different sounds, one for each kind of tree it is being asked to pass through. This took me about an hour to start hearing on the first afternoon, and was completely obvious by the third.
The spruce, which dominates the upper third of the ridge, makes a sound like a long inhale. It is continuous. It does not start or stop, exactly; it builds and falls. If you had to put a colour on it, it would be a deep blue. It is what most people are imagining when they imagine wind in trees, but it is in fact only one kind of wind in one kind of tree.
The alder, lower down, where the slope eases and the ground gets wet, is a quicker sound — papery, almost like a crowd applauding from a distance. Each leaf is broad and flat and gives back the wind in a tiny, dry slap. A whole grove of alders in a breeze sounds like someone shuffling through a stack of newspapers very fast. It is a pale, busy, almost amber sound. Not at all the sound of the spruce.
First afternoon · 14:00I had gone up the ridge in the late morning of the first day mostly to see the cliffs and the famous arch, but the wind on the upper path was strong enough that I gave up on the cliffs around two and sat down in the lee of a single old spruce, on a patch of needles that had been compressed by deer. The deer had picked the spot first. The deer had been correct.
From there I could hear the spruce above me and the alders below me at the same time. It was the first time I noticed that they were two different sounds.
A wood is not a single instrument — it is an orchestra of leaves and needles, each species playing its own part of a much longer piece the wind has been composing since the last ice.
The birch, which I had been missing.
The birch I did not learn until the second afternoon. There is a small stand of them about halfway up the eastern flank, on a thin shelf of soil over the sandstone, and I had been walking past them for years without noticing. Their leaves are smaller than the alder's, and held on longer, finer stems. The result is a sound that is almost — and I am aware how this will read — tinkly. It is the highest, lightest wind-sound in the wood. You can mistake it for a small bell, or for water moving over very small stones, or for a particular kind of laughter very far away.
Once you have heard it, you can never not hear it. The wood is, from that point onwards, three sounds at once. You hear them as a chord.
By the third afternoon I had given myself a small test. I sat in the same lee of the same spruce with my eyes shut for twenty minutes. The wind was lighter than on the first day but coming from the same direction. I tried to count, just in my head, when the wind moved across the spruce, when it moved across the alder, when it moved across the birch.
I got about half of them right. The other half were the same things layered on top of each other, so that I could not pick them apart cleanly. This is, I think, a fine result. The wood, after all, was not trying to be heard separately. It was just making the sound it was making. I was the one trying to take notes on it.
What it means, if it means anything.
It does not, I think, mean anything in the sense that people normally mean that word. But it does mean something to me, which is this: that places have a music, and that the music is not metaphor. It is a real physical fact about how air moves through a particular arrangement of leaves and needles at a particular angle of slope. You can hear it. You can write it down. You can come back to it.
I walked off the ridge in the long sideways light of the third evening with the three sounds still going in my head, and they followed me down through the alders and out into the open ground at the bottom, and I think I am going to be able to recognise them now, every time, for the rest of my life.