The Song of the Panther Kill
By Will Nixon

Years ago, soon after graduating from college, I visited a wealthy acquaintance who had purchased an apartment on the Upper East Side in a glassy high-rise as dark as limousine windows. The fountain sculpture in the front rock garden was twisted like a giant lemon slice with water cascading down the rind. In the lobby, the doorman in a green uniform with padded shoulders and exaggerated cuffs, greeted me at his black marble counter. On his desk phone, he alerted my friend that “Mr. Nixon” had come to visit, then asked me to sign the guest register. I wondered if my friend’s pot dealers followed the same procedure. Walking to the elevator, my old sneakers squeaked on the shiny floor.
At the time, I rented a railroad flat for $315 a month in Hoboken, New Jersey upstairs from the Clam Broth House. Rather than a doorman, the building had a buzzer and a wobbly downstairs doorknob. But the street wasn’t threatening. If anything, I felt guarded by the wino who slept on the steps beside the doorway. He often said hello and smiled with his bony wet gums and sticky yellow teeth. One Sunday morning, I even heard him singing a popular gay disco tune with two friends, a boozy trio croaking: It’s fun to stay at the YMCA!
I didn’t think of myself as being poor so much as rugged, starting in a low valley of the economy to climb my own route up the mountain of achievements. In fact, I found the grittiness of Hoboken refreshing after my upbringing and schooling in affluent suburbs. I felt serenaded by the heat kicking in my steam radiators, the pigeons cooing under the eaves, the lovers quarreling in Spanish on the street after the bars closed, the ocean liners bellowing from the Hudson River, which flowed past the abandoned piers at the end of my block. I left my windows open for the sounds of the street and refused to buy an air conditioner. On weekends, I donned my black leather jacket for the downtown nightclubs of Manhattan and didn’t return home until 4 a.m. The next morning my ears rang from music speakers bigger than gorilla cages.
Rather than disdaining the suburbs, my acquaintance accepted his family’s fortune and lived at their estate for several years after college. He drove a yellow BMW and put his friends’ Heinekens on his tab at their favorite fern bar. Each summer, he hosted a popular “cocaine and croquet” weekend party at the estate with rented outdoor klieg lights to play through the night.
After accepting a bank job in Manhattan, he invited me to admire his new apartment. In the freshly painted white rooms, his only furnishings were a mattress, a frying pan, and a white noise machine. As we waited for his regular friends before all heading out to a Yacht Club bar, I took an undue interest in his white noise machine. A plastic box like a minimalist radio, it had a tuning knob to shift the rhythms from the imperial crashing of beach waves to the cool shushing of wind in the pines. I acted mocking and cruel by playing all of the sounds at full volume, feigning my wonder at each one. But the machine seemed the ultimate statement of suburban blandness. My friend would live in the city, but he wouldn’t listen to it. He preferred nature in box.
We never met again. Most likely, he led a happy life filled with family and friends, rather than jealousies. As for me, I endured many troubles in learning how to write and coming to terms with my own family heritage. In time, I also moved from Hoboken to Manhattan. After 16 years, I finally established myself as a freelance writer, but I no longer heard the pulse of urban excitement. I heard the loud harassment of commerce and progress.
Every night at 10:30, a monster dump truck from Staten Island backed its pregnant rear end into the loading dock for a nearby office tower. For 20 minutes, our midtown block echoed with compacting trash so loud I couldn’t talk over it on the telephone. From the noise, I imagined the truck maw eating discarded desks, lamps, filing cabinets, soda machines, and drop ceilings. It was the final crescendo after a day of jackhammers, car alarms, EMS sirens, musical horns, truck beepers, and rattling pothole covers. Even in winter, I turned on the air conditioner as a muffler. A therapeutic masseuse once told me that these blasts of noise triggered people’s adrenal glands so frequently that she treated young women growing mustaches. While I doubted her claim, I appreciated her point. Even the City’s most popular mayors, Ed Koch and Rudy Gulianni, had hectoring voices. Soothing David Dinkins was mocked as a dandy.
I adopted a Marxist view that urban capitalism had transformed aural pleasure from a common human experience into a private commodity. In the subway tunnels and street canyons, I heard the noisy byproducts of transportation and enterprise, from screeching train wheels to vendors hawking bull whips. In a community garden in the East Village, I heard the commercial mutation of nature, as a mocking bird sang the warning beeps of a delivery truck backing up in reverse.
The walkman symbolized the civic war between the public racket and private pleasure. Wearing one myself, I strode down the sidewalk in a separate dimension of stereophonic rhythm and joy, as if starring in my own music video. Without one, however, I found everyone else’s tinny headphones as grating as miniature metal stamping machines.
Only the wealthy with thick apartment walls could afford silence. To listen with others to pleasurable sounds, people paid admission to concert halls, movie theaters, and nightclubs. To sleep many people bought earplugs. I woke up unplugged and usually tired. Early some mornings, an ethereal whistling song played from the street, a moment of purifying clarity before the jackhammers started. Maybe the songster was a house finch, but in my urban pessimism I suspected this smooth and beautiful sound of being a synthesized new alarm system derived from an avian love song.
For a fresh start, I moved from Manhattan into a cabin in the Catskills. Perched on a hillside of hemlocks, my new home overlooked the Panther Kill, a gray cobblestone stream with small pools, smooth boulders capped with moss, and whitewater ripples and braids. But this serene setting wasn’t manicured like a park. Several years earlier, a flood gouged deep bites from the opposite bank, exposing raw dirt and tangled roots. The bank hadn’t yet healed itself with moss and mulching leaves like my side of the stream. The flood had also upended the cinder block abutment of the previous footbridge, which now lay downstream like an overturned campground fireplace.
Yet this raggedness gave the Panther Kill its charm. It was a working stream, more than pretty scenery. During heavy rains, it flushed dead branches and trees, leaves, grasses, mud, and plastic litter from the mountains. Sometimes I collected kindling for my stove from the dead wood jammed between the rocks. Occasionally, I added my own trash, tossing a rotten apple or egg from my porch and watching it bob downstream as future fish food.
With time I learned the stream’s seasonal rhythms. In early spring, the tangled roots on the opposite bank provided cover for a winter wren, a tiny brown bird that sang like a melodic avant-garde jazz musician with bottomless lungs. During the gray weeks before the first buds, I cherished this song as the color in my life. By late spring, a kingfisher patrolled his territory, flying up and downstream in fierce Prussian regalia while rattling like a plastic machine gun. In summer, the green stalks of jewelweed and coltsfoot grew several feet tall in the damp cobblestone shoals. Water spiders treaded the eddies under the dappled sunlight. By September, the stream carried yellow birch leaves that tumbled slowly in the current. In winter, the lowest branches over the stream grew icicle combs, while the boulders wore snow berets. The deer tracks always crossed at the rocks, but foxes occasionally trotted across my bridge.
Yet I enjoyed the Panther Kill most of all as a sound machine. For the full effect, I stood on my footbridge and focused on the white noise—the constant shhhhh—then picked out individual sounds: splashing, chortling, plunging, gulping, and grinding as if stone marbles rolled on the bottom. It was mesmerizing, an experience like staring into a campfire. I wondered if with pure concentration I could hear the underlying pattern of sounds, the secret song of the Panther Kill.
Try as I might, I never could hear this song. Yet musicians explained that the magic of the stream was this endless and unpredictable variety within a limited range. “It’s a mixture of complexity and order, confusion and regularity,” said David Rothenberg, a jazz clarinetist who records with natural sounds. If the stream repeated a song, I would eventually grow bored. If it tumbled with total chaos, I would feel lost. Instead, the stream offered a complex rhythm both stimulating and calming, the aural equivalent of a massage. All these years after mocking my acquaintance’s white noise machine, I finally understood what he heard.
The Panther Kill had its moods. After drenching rains, the stream rose up and filled its banks, becoming a roaring avenue of chocolate water. (In truth, the color came from an eroding clay bank upstream.) The water poured over formerly dry boulders like fluid windshields. It sprayed from rocks in whitewater rooster tails. It drowned the plant stalks that had grown in the damp cobblestone shoals during dry weather. It sounded like a locomotive. It thrilled me and scared me, as I stood on the footbridge, catching spray and watching branches shoot down the rapids like twisted torpedoes.
More often, the Panther Kill flowed gently through the lower channels and pools in the stony bed, slipping through gaps and sliding down steps with a peaceful gurgling sound. From the cabin, I heard the stream as a percolating hush that drifted in and out of my attention. Sometimes I wondered if I heard it at all when my mind dwelled on other matters. But Doug Quin, a composer from California who collaborates with David Rothenberg, reassured me, “We close our eyes. We don’t close our ears.”
On summer days, I left my door open to enjoy the lulling sound of the water splashing and tumbling. For a break from my computer, I stood on my porch and listened, while the stream calmed my mood. It was the murmuring soundtrack to my new life. And, like Hollywood directors, I believed that the soundtrack supplied half of the show’s emotional experience.
As humans, we often think of our intelligence as our only natural advantage. Other animals have keener noses, sharper eyes, stronger teeth, and warmer fur. But in evolution, hearing was by far the last of the five senses to develop. Several billion years ago, single-cell parameciums already possessed the rudiments of sight, smell, and touch.
The first traces of hearing appeared in fish only 300 million years ago. “A school of fish can skitter and pirouette in near-perfect unison because a chain of pressure-sensitive cells called the lateral line organ stretches along each side of a fish’s body, sensing every nearby movement of friend or time,” writes Robert Jourdain in his book, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy. With evolution, this chain of cells extended into the fish’s head and created a new organ of tiny canals and nerve hair sacs that gave the fish a better sense of balance and speed. But these nerve hair sacs also happened to detect sound waves. As an unintended byproduct of balance hearing was born.
When fish slithered onto land, their water hearing systems performed poorly in the air. In time, amphibians, reptiles, and birds developed better hearing, but not until mammals, did the outer ears appear, such as our own curved and folded half-shells of cartilage and flesh. And mammals alone have an inner ear with three separate chambers rolled up in a bone like a snail which captures a wide variety of sound. “Many mammals emphasize a range an octave higher [than humans]—perfect for sensing a predator brushing against tall grass,” Jourdain writes. Human hearing is tuned an octave lower for human voices. But within our range we are masters. And with our brains we can understand sounds in ways unimaginable to other animals. “One reason we hear music when animals don’t is that our brains are able to manipulate patterns of sound far more complex than those the brain of any other animal can manage,” Jourdain writes. Even birds can’t hear other bird species’ songs as well as we do.
In Western civilization, we shifted loyalties from our ears to our eyes during the Renaissance “with the development of the printing press and perspective painting,” writes R. Murray Schafer in his book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. “One of the most evident testaments of this change is the way in which we have come to imagine God. It was not until the Renaissance that God became portraiture. Previously he had been conceived as sound or vibration.” Once our knowledge, history, and beliefs were spoken and remembered through an oral tradition. Now they’re written in books or taped on video.
Other societies still rely on their ears. Since the late 1960s, Bernie Krause from northern California has traveled much of the world, recording natural sounds that in many places have already disappeared. “His collection of environmental sound, the largest private collection in the world, contains 3,500 hours or entire habitats—20 percent of which are now extinct,” writes Jack Turner in an introduction to Krause’s book Into a Wild Sanctuary. And noise pollution from airplanes and other sources has become so pervasive that Krause must now record a habitat for 2,000 hours for 1 hour of clean material, compared to 10 hours of recording in 1968. From this experience, he believes that every place has its own soundscape as distinctive as its landscape. And some people can still hear it.
One night in the Amazon rainforest, Krause joined a hunting party of Jivaro men who walked under the dark canopy without torches. Instead, they navigated by the sounds of insects, frogs, birds, and mammals that formed a soundscape as clear to them as a landscape of gas stations, street lights, and road signs would be to us. And like the landscape, the soundscape changed from place to place, as different creatures filled the acoustical niches. The Jivaro were so good, he writes in his book, they could identify “unseen animals far down the path by the slightest variation of insect and frog articulation.”
“We have as discerning and sensitive hearing within our auditory range as any other animal,” Bernie Krause told me in an interview. But in modern life we have turned our ears into defensive organs that filter and muffle unwanted noises. We whisper at 30 decibels, speak at 60 decibels, and shout at 80 decibels. For much of our existence, we made the loudest sounds around, save for thunder and church bells. With the advent of the Industrial Age, the volume soared, as steam engines hissed along at 85 decibels and boiler works hammered away at 118 decibels, partially deafening their workers. To this day, we haven’t really turned down the volume, as crowded restaurants drown our own conversations at 80 decibels, subways screech around corners at 90 decibels, motorcycles roar at 100 decibels, and jackhammers pummel the urban soundscape at 120 decibels. To counteract the racket, our buildings generate a muffling pink noise, considered even better than white noise, and known in the trade as “acoustical perfume.”
By leaving Manhattan, I freed my ears to listen again. Once in a while, an annoying sound pierced the comforting hush of the stream, such as gunshots when my uphill neighbor took target practice or a whistling dental drill whine whenever my downhill neighbor groomed his small lawn with his new leaf blower. But, in truth, human sounds remained so occasional that I enjoyed most of them as a sort of greeting. Some mornings, my neighbor’s flatbed truck backfired all the way down the hill, making loud popping farts as if the old beast was revving up for one more day of work. In winter, the grating sound of the snowplow pushing up the road reassured me I hadn’t been forgotten. After an icy storm transformed my road into a slippery slide, the snowplow scraping asphalt and tossing sand was the happiest sound in the world.
For the most part, I heard nature alone. On sunny days, a breeze brushed through the hemlocks and yellow birches. In drizzles, raindrops pattered on my roof and snapped on the leafy forest floor outside my window. During the heaviest rains, my roof sounded machine-gunned by water, then thunder made the cabin shiver. In winter the woods turned crisply quiet. On the coldest days my boots squeaked in the snow.
The birds took their turns. The phoebes arrived in spring and inspected the shaggy nests still sitting on my outside window frames. They honked their names with a whistling nasal flourish: phoe-be! phoe-be! By summer, a red-eyed vireo spent long afternoons hidden in the treetops, singing like an inhibited monotonous robin. In August, a broad-winged hawk arrived in my little valley, surprising me once or twice a day with a beautiful falling call, che-wee-e-e, like the first herald of autumn.
Yet the stream remained the dominant sound. “All roads lead to water,” Schafer writes in The Soundscape. “Given the chance, probably all men would live at the edge of the element, within earshot of its moods night and day.” Water has “the sound which above all others gives us the most delight in its myriad transformations.” Lucky enough to live beside the Panther Kill, I took full advantage of this chance to listen. Every time I walked across my footbridge I let my ears lead the way.
The sound of the Panther Kill taught me that time doesn’t always need to be the ticking of the clock; it may be a continuous chortling flow. In the city, my time always seemed limited, overscheduled, too easily interrupted. And ultimately, of course, my time was running out. Yet, as Schafer writes, “Water never dies. It lives forever reincarnated as rain, as bubbling brooks, as waterfalls and fountains, as swirling rivers.” Listening to the Panther Kill wouldn’t grant me immortality. But if it brought me into the present, I hardly needed eternity.