The Sound of the Island

What haunts me most about summer at the Bay is just a sound.

If you’ve ever been there, to Put-In-Bay, you know it. You’ve heard it. In the summer it’s something that comes constantly—it hits you every hour, and almost every quarter hour, like some kind of fine island clock.

It’s the sound, in the indeterminate distance, of a golf cart making its way down the road, a sort of whizzing, excited hum, like the cicadas and the locust nesting high up in the lumpy wonderworld of trees.

When you hear it once, it never leaves you. It’s there, tucked off in the far lodgings inside you, where you’ve simply filed it away as The Sound of the Island.

The sound of summer, that is. By late autumn, and all through the lonely desolation of the rocks of winter, that sound is so different.

But here and now, in the open airs of August, in the down dog days of humid heat and lazy sunshine and summer, it’s a sound like no other anywhere on this lost marble earth, a sort of shaken talisman, a wood-chant, hidebound and steady, banked low to the dirt and expanding outward in the thick of the air, a fast-pitched warble telling you that things are happening, and they’re happening here.

Just then the hum and its hidden music rhythm will be given a great chorus, a bugley bleat beep of a horn—you still can’t tell how far or close it is but blam, then strokes of laughter, peals of voices, people talking hard and good and loud in the summer air, calling out in big excited shouts, you see, something is happening and it’s going down on island time, which is its own time, specifically here in the Put-In-Bay time zone of Island Summer Time (IST).

That is exactly when you hear the haunted hum, the call of the carts.

It hits you in the dullard slump of the sunshine afternoon, it calls for a toast of the Four O’Clock Club out at Heineman’s, it rushes in with the blue dusk of the silken evening, and it comes cleanly through the far liquidic roll of mystic night, when the shoreline hugs you tight like a garter. You hear it parading down long stretches of Langram and Catawba Avenues, and it sings softly in your morning waketime window, like some kind of pleasant, warm-weather songbird stopping by.

I’ve been a thousand miles away and I heard it in the enclave of my mind, and I yearned for the Bay every time. It always comes, this call, with thoughts of summer at the Bay, and when I hear that rushing hum I know that somewhere far inside of me I’m already there.

In fact, I’m there right now—and here comes the call, striking out another good long second of IST, the happy hum, a horn, a shout into all the stones and leaves and unfound doors—and Thomas Wolfe might remind us once again that this moment, like every moment, is a window to all time. Well let me hold all time and palm it closely like I made it, examine every careful facet of its exciting grain, soak it in my skin and down it like a dream.

It’s just so fleeting—but also this time, this Island Summer Time, it stays and it sticks with you forever. Ask me again in another golden eternity, and I’ll tell you all about soft and sullen dreams in a grey-shaded lane, a haunted monument that lights the night, and the sound, my lovely friend, the sound of the island.