Essay:  Lessons in Mangrove

Published in Action Spectacle

One small, stone bridge packed with crushed oyster shells and sand instead of pavement connected Mangrove Island to Siesta Key. The bridge arched over a bayou no greater than twenty feet across that circled the accumulation of sand in mangrove roots on which we and six other families lived in modest bungalows. Sand crabs clattered up the rotting supports of wooden docks. Manatee napped their passage under the barnacled hulls of neglected boats. Mullet glinted like coins flipping in moonlight. Cormorants shat from the weathered intracoastal marker and the “No Wake” sign at the bayou’s mouth then join the flock on one of the tidal islands, islands that disappeared at high tide so the birds all also shat then flew to the more permanent island in the middle of the bay. I canoed around it in the weekend mornings. I paddled Canadian-style facing the stern and leaning the canoe over to one side with my hip pressed against the gunnel as I knelt. It’s a way of paddling with minimal drag and maximum control. Motorboats rocked me. In 1992, the FBI would come for my dad, and he will have disappeared into the Caribbean and not contact any of us for three years. In 2017, he will explain to me over the phone that the mafia had taken a hit out on him, my mom, my sister, and me, and that’s why he vanished. He said, “I guess I should have told you.” I kept talking with him anyway because he would be dead soon from the amyloidosis, and because I finally had an answer. An answer like that can hold you in place, and even if the place is somewhere life-threatening and undesirable, at least it is somewhere. I accepted it much same way that Christopher Robin’s animal friends accept a stick as the North Pole after an “expotition.”

The greatest honesty I have ever known came from Mangrove Island itself. At the end of the island, about 2000 feet from our house, there was a little park, a tiny park, actually, where some Australian pines had been cleared for enough space for a picnic table that wasn’t ever there. Past the clearing, an opening between mangroves lead to a 10-foot long wooden dock with the familiar barnacles, salt-decayed wood, and dock spiders. No houses were visible from this dock, only the mangroves, the egrets and herons, the mullet, and the occasional manatee. The smell of these organisms combined reconstitutes itself in my dreams sometimes. It is a scent unique to not only the island but to that dock. It’s a scent of peace and quiet. Continued . . .

HAL-9000, BACH, AND THE PERSONAL PHYSICS OF GOING DEAF

Laura Hope-Gill

There is no sound in space. Beyond our noisy atmosphere stretches an infinite quiet. There are waves in space, but they are not sound waves. They are simply waves of silence moving through. All that vibrates keeps to itself, does not shout, scrape, or otherwise draw sonic attention. Black holes erupt in their introverted manner. The sun splashes itself again and again with its magnificent tidal flames. And not a sound comes from any of this. Solar systems are born, stars collide. Deafness prevails. 

Earth, in comparison to its surroundings, is a noisy planet. We talk almost all the time. DVD players and iPods keep sound flowing directly into our heads. We use electronic devices to broadcast TV and radio around the globe and beyond. We send signals out in search of someone else to talk to. We rely on the molecular vibrations we call sound to feel “at home” in what we perceive to be a lonely and too quiet universe. 

 In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer, Hal-9000, cuts off Frank Poole’s air and sends him drifting into space. We see this scene through the computer’s unchanging red eye; we hear the sounds of machinery and Poole’s breathing. The breaths are loud in the way that my own breathing was loud when I once snorkeled with a faulty mask in Bermuda. As I entered the preliminary stages of drowning it was the only sound in my world. At first Poole’s breath is even—it is our breath, normal and safe. As Poole enters the preliminary stages of his own death, the amplified breath becomes irregular. Hal is killing him. Watching the scene, I find my own breath matching Poole’s. I stop breathing when he does. We only hear breathing when we are watching from Hal’s perspective; watching Poole die floating in space, we hear nothing. We see only the convulsion of a suffocating man.  Perhaps it is this that makes this scene so terrifying. The air we breathe, like the sound we hear, does not exist in space. It is the absence of air that causes the absence of sound. And I wonder if we don’t equate silence with suffocation. We feel, at some level, that if we stop talking the world will stop moving, as though the vibrational nature of speech is what keeps everything in motion. What would happen if we were to fall quiet? Are we uncomfortable with silence because it makes us feel “deaf,” a near homophone of “death?” 

As quietness takes up ever more space in my world as a result of my progressive deafness, I have had to come face to face with my own relationship with sound.   As I’ve grown accustomed to hearing aids, I’ve had to learn about frequencies and decibels and waves as I’ve had to learn sign language. Sound has ceased being an abstract, and the laws that rule sound have become laws that also rule me. Deafness has made the universal laws of physics personal.

I watched Kubrick’s 2001 in 1980 (first row, balcony, in an old theater in Ybor City, Florida) and yet I can remember it as though it’s playing right now on a little insert screen on my laptop.  The feeling I had when I first saw Poole go drifting off has been a fundamental feature of my emotional landscape. The image has a signpost sticking out of it, one which reads “Worst Fear Imaginable.” It’s that peculiar brand of cinematic knowledge, suspended disbelief, that remains forever in my imagination. My belief is still suspended in a state of perfect silence, death. Poole just keeps on drifting, suffocating in his spacesuit, drifting forever, away, away, away. Continued.

FLUIDITY – Laura Hope-Gill

Published in The Porch

When the little red light lit up, they didn’t raise their hand. Instead, my sixteen year old child rested their hands on the edge of the physician’s examining table, as though the hearing test was over. They repeated the test. Again, at 500 Hz, my child did not respond. The other four tones were fine, but I knew from my own two decades of Audiology, that you only have to lose one frequency for your whole world to change. Signs had been showing. There’d been more requests for repetition, more instances where they would slide out of a chair and walk toward me as I was talking. All behaviors I have indulged in order to hear what someone is saying. My child has learned these skills from me, these skills of communication, these skills of concealment and survival. I had hoped it would skip a generation, but here it is. Here we are. 

The emotions feel almost impossible. This morning, after taking them to school equipped with Bose Hearphones I purchased yesterday, I curled around the steering wheel of my car in the driveway and wept. The deafness tears. Old Friends – but the kind of old friends you avoid because they carry with them so much knowledge of all you’ve done and gone through – are forgiving in that they don’t bring it up, but you know what they know. You know the truths they carry. That even though you have grown “used” to it, that even though you wear your hearing aids and lateral Bluetooth devices with a sort of ADA-flare because the hearing aid casings are in fact “Merlot” in color, the earmolds zebra-striped, there are Times. You don’t talk about the Times. You don’t let anyone see you during the Times. The Times are the moments when you sit absolutely bare with difference. Usually, something technological brings it on. When I go to the movies, the person managing the closed-captioning device fumbles with it then hands it to me for me to figure out. When I can’t remember where I placed my hearing-aids in their gray, circular case and panic because I have to be at a meeting. When the closed captioning device at the movies begins to hurt my face because there’s too much tech weighing on my nose. When someone says “I’ll call you in two hours,” and I have to charge my Bluetooth interface. When I am face to face with the ways that deafness impacts my life, I feel myself enter the Times. It is a drop in frequency, a full-body form of deafness. I feel my sinking. I am sinking. My soul is sinking, shrinking into the frame of my form, and the form is flawed. There’s no rapid raising of the vibration, of course. There is only the honesty of the descent, the dwelling at the river basin until the water rises and lifts me out. Doing this as the mother of a child is different from doing it just as myself.

My child is gender non-binary. We are accustomed to living between worlds. Between the he and the she of it, between the hearing and the silence of it. My child never had to “come out” to me because while there have been phases of princess dresses and phases of flannel shirts with buttons on a particular side, I have always had enough sense to keep it open. There was a rough phase during which they wondered if they might be trans, and I assured them that gender is fluid and whatever they feel they need I would always listen. My only goal in being a parent has been to be there for them. That was the promise I made the first five seconds I held them in my arms when they were born. With the exception of being very late to pick-up from daycamp when they were seven, I’ve done a good job of it. 

Living between worlds has also been part of our shared life because of deafness. I started signing with them immediately, just as I was also getting accustomed to the thought of my own deafness. I had ASL books in every room in the house and would look up signs as I taught the words. They signed their first sentence at nine months as we watched a Baby Einstein video, “The corn is hot like the fire is hot.” I only ever scolded them in sign language because it seemed much more peaceful than raising my voice. We know enough sign to have a conversation, and we often communicate under the radar at public events, but we have always skewed back into the hearing world between us. We have stood on the edge of spoken language together. And it has been like the phenomenal chalk drawings I’ve seen on the internet featuring a chasm in the pavement. We know ASL is literally at our fingers’ tips, but we have clung to speech. Speech is our “known,” even if it has never been wholly comfortable.

Continued.