Late into this January night and early morning I listened for what I once had heard.
Recent findings give information about daily life in pre-volcano Pompeii, yet I must stretch my imagination for what it was really like. So too is it hard to describe life before television, the years of my young life when my knowledge was limited by geography, by experience, by the school library, and by the magazines my mother subscribed to – Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Liberty, Grit – and the one station radio.
We were seven in number, I the middle child, with lives closer to the 19th century than the 21st. We farmed on the mountainside, two miles off a paved road, with neither electricity nor running water. It was not the life of a John Denver song, nor the Waltons. It was hard work and the understanding that school was important. We were probably unkempt, dirty, poorly clothed, poor, but we didn’t know that.
Our herd of Jersey cows fed us and provided some income. Twice a week we would deliver cans of milk to the local dairy, milk with a high butter fat that brought premium prices. We took good care of those cows: we could all milk by hand and did. We named them and were proud of the herd.
There were always one or two in the last month of pregnancy. During that time, we had to be extra watchful as often one would break through a fence to find her own place to calf. We children were tasked with making sure this didn’t happen.
In the late winter of my 12th year one of the cows did just that. She broke out of her stall, out the barn door, through a fence, and into the woods. We spent all weekend looking for her and Monday I was allowed to stay home to search. No cow. No calf.
Late that night I coated up and headed to the barn to see if she had returned on her own. The night was crisp, new snow squeaked underfoot, a hundred steps through the trees and all lights, all signs of civilization disappeared. Stars blindingly brilliant as they had been since the beginning of time, my footsteps, no artificial light, no ambient light. Me and a huge mountain of quiet.
I stopped to watch the Milky Way and the universe of more stars as my eyes wandered. I feared nothing drenched in the cold silence and turned left on the barn trail. Out of nowhere, out of everywhere I heard music. Not small music. Huge music. Huge just as, decades later, in the final scenes of Close Encounters, spaceships are there big enough to make me gasp.
The night music was such a huge reality coming over the trees, out of the stars, across the sky, surrounding me in ways I had never experienced. Pianos and flutes and soft drums and violins. I had never heard classical music – this was the west with music from a single radio station, jukeboxes in bars, western music, and the Sunday afternoon Texaco hour of opera I’d listen to with no idea of what an opera was. I knew no more about music than I knew about classical Greek or Japanese tea rituals
Yet on that cold Montana night music enveloped me fully for a second, a minute, an hour. Then it was gone and I was just a young country girl in a cold night looking for a cow and her calf, both waiting at the barn door.
I told no one of the night because I didn’t have the vocabulary and because it was too strange to be believed. In later years I revisited the experience whenever I lectured about the music of the spheres and wondered if at that mountain moment the spheres had been in alignment, harmonious, musical.
If universal harmony is what is needed, I’ll not hear music in these days of chaos. I will always long for it and listen during these cold quiet Arkansan nights.