THE CALLS OF THE WILD

Rex Burress

Down in the town of Spivey's Corner, North Carolina, population 49, the National Hollerin' Contest will be held on the third Saturday of June.

The art of “hollering alive” in North Carolina State and raising funds for Spivey's Corner volunteer fire department, has been held annually since 1969, where visitor attendance now booms to 10,000 on that hollerin' day. It seems contestants really let it out, mimicking a time before cell phones--and even telephones--when communication was by yelling messages to farmers in the field or the neighbor down the hollow.

When I read about that back-woods event, I instantly thought of Aunt Mamie yelling to neighbor Gully Shepherd on Grandpa's Black Oak, Missouri farm in the 1940's, when, indeed, they had no land-line telephone, and certainly no wireless...except for the battery-powered radio! Her shrill voice would carry down the hill and across the creek to Gully's house a good mile away: “COME ON OVER GULLY,” and he said he could hear every word. She would have placed well in the “Ladies Callin' Contest” at Spivey's Corner!

Not to be outdone, neighbor Flo Patterson and I would yodel to each other across the ravine every morning from our “Dunlap Corner” farms when I was a boy, even though only a quarter mile away. That was in the 1940's before the hand-crank phone lines came. Dunlap, MO was a one-store burg a few miles north of the highway corner near where I was born, but I don't think the retired farmers there did much hollerin'.

A more ominous sound came at the time when Flo's husband John died, and during the all-night wake, a 'panther' screamed from the ravine. Years later, when Jo and I were California-camping in a pup-tent, similar cat screams caused us to pull our legs into the tent! The ranger said the calls came from a mountain lion that had been hit on the road.

A lion can't compete with the squalls of a running red fox, though. Seldom heard, their night cries can mystify if not terrify most people, right up there with the wolf and coyote and screaming women. The dog family seems possessed of super vocal cords, as any nocturnal coon hunter can attest. When old bluetick hound Chief and friends bugled their bawling signals of being hot on the trail of a masked query, the melodious sound from the swamp would send shivers down your spine.

Those MO summer's are full of sound, especially the nighttime uproar of the insects. Katydids, cicadas, and crickets can convene into a shrill convention! Whippoorwills, frogs, and a parody of unknowns add to the symphony in the humid, hot nights. More arid California is relatively quiet at night.

People are familiar with the call of the wild coming from wolves, lions, gorillas, howler monkeys, and a host of other dispensers of sound, plus a rooster crowing at dawn, but the 'holler' of a peacock might startle and surprise recorders of sounds! From that delicate neck and an abundance of beautiful feathers comes a series of raucous calls echoing over the farmland.

To hear the sound waves of life, a number of factors are involved to analyze the disturbance being forged through the molecular curtain, not the least being the sound receivers in your ears. Young people are picked to go to wars because of their keener senses, and tragically often return with impaired senses, especially damaged hearing. Mechanical noises can do it too, and the erosion of time often sends a senior to hearing aid dispensaries.

The calls of the wild are often lost in the clamor of civilization, but listen closely on some dark and misty night, and you may hear the plaintive cry of some lost soul singing in the wilderness.

“Is a sound only a sound if a person hears it?” --George Berkeley

“Whether we hear them and instantly identify the originators, or we are clueless as to what it is [and probably a little frightened], the noises that fill the woods when we're in the backcountry are some of the greatest parts of being outdoors.”

“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primordial wood, and the sound of the outer ocean on a beach.”--Henry Beston