I'm soliciting feedback on this excerpt. Let me know what you think. As he walked, he let the sound of the trees and the slant of the light guide his footsteps, knowing without concentrating that his feet would lead him where he was supposed to be.
Wow, he thought to himself. That was a damn good opening line.
He played it through in his head a few times as he walked, inserting more adjectives and changing the order of the words, but then decided that he had gotten it right the first time and put some effort into remembering it so he could use it later.
He stayed on the paths, eyeing the open spaces between the ferns longingly, but too many tourists with careless feet had necessitated the installation of sign after sign reminding hikers to stay on the trails to prevent additional damage and erosion. He remembered when he had been able to go whatever direction he wished, and he had always been careful not to trample or yank on branches. But as he could hear the complaining when he did such clumsy things, it was in his own best interest to step lightly.
Trav did not remember when he couldn't hear the music. It had always been there, whispering to him, although growing up in Midwest suburbia had not afforded him more than city parks and the small lots that passed for yards in the track housing developments. It hadn't been till a vacation to California when he was nine and a trip to the big trees, these very trees in fact, that he had really been able to hear. Stepping out of the car had been like stepping into a concert hall in the middle of a symphony. And if he hadn't been able to feel it building, to feel the sounds coming at him through the open windows as they'd neared the park, the onslaught of sound would have been terrifying. His grandparents thought him sick from the heat of their non-air-conditioned car when he wouldn't answer them and walked in a daze across the parking lot, achingly desperate for the shade of the trees that were singing to him so deeply.
That vacation had resulted in a number of small trips, and so he'd learned what the redwood groves, the oak groves, and the coast all sounded like. They were all different. The coast was soft and high pitched, like a small group of woodwinds. The oak groves with their open meadows were rich and mellow, golden sounding like violins and brass. But the redwoods - the redwoods were tympani drums, the bass, the lowest notes on the pipe organ. And the feel of it coming up through his feet drew him back time and again.
His unusual talent had etched a niche for him in the hazardous waste disposal programs in the Environmental Protection Agency. His co-workers all thought he had an unusual instinct for the location of buried drums, leaking barrels and invisible seepages. But the truth was, as long as there was vegetation nearby, he could hear it when something was killing the plants and damaging the ecosystem. More than one indignant business owner had threatened Trav and his team with lawsuits for slander, libel, trespassing, search without due cause, you name it. And some of them had truly been ignorant that their processing or storage systems were faulty. At least, he believed that some of them really didn't know. He couldn't hear people quite as well as he could hear trees.
He had only ever told two people about his unusual gift. One was his sister. And he believed that the only reason his sister didn't think him a total nut was because he had confided in her when they were still children, and things like the ability to hear music in the landscape seemed completely normal. He would describe what he heard to her, and they played a game on long car trips where he would close his eyes and describe the terrain by sound. She never doubted, never questioned. The only other person he'd told was a girlfriend, whom he'd mistakenly initially assumed to be charmed by his descriptions, only to leave later with a note that suggested he consider Prozac.
He listened as he walked over the ground, the smells and the colors harmonizing with the trees. The smaller plants had their own sounds, but they faded in and out as he walked, unable to compete with the grand tones of the redwoods. He thought, occasionally, that the sound was so great, the resonance so strong, that the vibrations alone would lift him off the ground, allowing him to walk on a bed of music.
Trav had found that long exposures honed his ear, although his perceptions eroded over time away from the environment. But long vacations in a certain place would refine his ability to hear to a level where his perception was almost radar-like, and he could walk with his eyes closed and hear his proximity to objects by how the sounds changed and bounced off surfaces. He'd spent three weeks once hiking in the mountains of Montana, and by the end of the second week he was walking around with a bandana tied over his eyes, able to navigate trees, rocks and shrubs without getting a scratch. He found himself with a monumental gash on his shin the next visit, when he discovered that his sensitivity had diminished significantly in his year's absence and he had blithely marched headlong into the underbrush with his hat pulled down over his face.
He was near the second week of his current vacation, and his ability to move about the redwoods sightless was getting better, although he hadn't quite dared to actually blindfold himself yet. But he felt brave enough to close his eyes for a few seconds at a time as he hiked, and so far had suffered no serious injury. He was deep into the forest, enjoying the feel of the dappled sunlight on his face as his head swam with sound, when he heard the first note of dissonance.
He didn't become alarmed at the first disharmonious tones, because he had learned that a dead and rotting tree was often out of tune with the rest. He glanced around to find the culprit tree, watching for the telltale signs of decay. When he couldn't see it he closed his eyes and tried to listen for it, as he had often been able to hear the demise of a tree before the signs of it's erosion were visible. But as he turned, his eyes still closed, he was puzzled to discover that he couldn't localize the sound at all. He opened his eyes again and looked carefully as he walked, and was distressed to find that as he took more steps the disharmony increased, becoming deeper and more pervasive. He stopped walking and sat down to think. The dissonance he was hearing was very similar to the sounds he heard when he was crossing the ground, trying to locate the source of a spill. It was a painful sound, sick and achy. And it always, always meant that something was killing off the vegetation. In his twelve years of doing it, he hadn't been wrong once. He looked around the woods again, beginning to feel a little nervous. His instincts were starting to tell him things that he didn't care to believe were true, but his instincts were very very good, and he'd been burned more by not listening to them than by listening. He sighed, got to his feet again and continued on.
And as he walked, the sounds grew uglier.
The dissonance was beginning to hurt, the bones in his skull were vibrating and it was setting his teeth on edge. The tones were stark, harsh and loud, but still very deep, and he felt his stomach beginning to rebel. He stopped to rest, sweating profusely despite the leisurely pace of his walk. He knew at that point that he could not go any further into the forest - his body wouldn't let him. He looked around, sweat stinging his eyes, and still could not spot any signs that anything was amiss in the greenery around him. Nothing seemed discolored, or wilted. There were no areas of dead plants, and no blackened bark or epidemics of fallen limbs. He slipped off his backpack and pulled out a handful of plastic baggies. He leaned forward and scooped some dirt into one. Then, taking a deep breath, stood up and walked a few hundred yards and scooped up some more. He pulled a few leaves off shrubs and scraped some bark from trees. He took a half a dozen or so more soil samples, digging deeply into the earth for a few, and then slipped them all back into his back. He shouldered his load again and reversed his course, beginning the trek that would take him back to the main park campgrounds and home. As he walked in the opposite direction, the music shifted back to its proper harmony, and his body settled as the discomfort of the sick cacophany of the deeper woods dissipated. He hiked without stopping for the rest of the morning and afternoon until he reached the main park entrance and his car. He shoved his pack into the rear and climbed in, thinking about the samples he had taken. A list of possible eco-toxins played through his mind, and he wondered what he would find when he got them to the lab.
"Nothing."
He frowned at Jerry, the head lab technician. "What do you mean, 'nothing?'"
"I mean 'nothing.' There's nothing in any of these samples that shouldn't be there. You brought me a lot of very pristine leaves and dirt. Thank you. I was worried you'd forgotten my birthday."
Trav frowned some more.
Jerry looked up from the reports. "What did you think you'd found?"
Trav shrugged. "I wasn't sure."
"But you thought you'd found something?"
Trav scowled down at his coworker. "No Jerry, I really was in search of the perfect birthday present for you."
Jerry laughed. "Well, you've never brought me a clean sample before. Your hunches always amaze me." He looked up at Trav. "Why can't you ever get hunches like that at the track?"
Trav rolled his eyes and wandered back to his office.
Nothing. The word repeated itself over and over. Nothing.
Nothing?
He'd never been wrong before. Jerry was right, he'd never brought in a clean sample. Because, despite the assumptions of his coworkers, he wasn't playing hunches. He could hear it when something was there that shouldn't be. Was he suffering from auditory hallucinations? He didn't think so. The rest of the park had been normal and sounded exactly like it was supposed to. Just that one place. He shuddered, remembering.
He sat down at his desk and tried to stretch his shoulders out. If it had been any tech other than Jerry he would have asked for them to be run again. He had been positive there would be something there. He scowled out his window at the parking lot.
"I thought you were supposed to be on vacation?" A voice asked from the doorway.
He looked up and saw his supervisor. "Hi, Gina," he said in a semi-depressed sort of way.
"And you sent the lab on a wild goose chase?" It was not said unkindly, he knew that she only meant to tease, but the hair on the back of his neck stood up. It hadn't been a wild goose chase. Something was wrong there, he knew it. But what?
"I thought I had something."
"I've never known you to be wrong."
Trav decided that that phrase was going to start annoying him very soon. He knew it should be a compliment, but he also knew that he wasn't wrong. He wondered if he was going to be discussed at the water-cooler soon.
Trav folded his arms over his chest, knowing full well that he was sulking but unable to stop himself. He looked up at Gina as she laughed. "You look terrible," she observed.
"I don't feel great," he answered.
"Where did you take the samples from?" She asked.
"From up at the park where I was hiking."
Gina's eyebrows furrowed a bit. "Something contaminating one of the preserves? Redwoods, right?"
Trav nodded.
Gina went from furrow to frown. "That would be a fairly big deal. Logging?"
"Nothing's turning up in the samples. Not logging dump, not anything."
Gina hmmm'd. "You still have a few days of vacation left. Feel like investigating?"
Trav laughed a little. "Great way to spend a vacation."
Gina laughed as well. "If you find anything, you can put the time on the clock and take another vacation. Your gamble."
Trav thought about for all of two seconds. "Deal," he said, and turned to type some search strings into his computer.
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