I want to tell you about the sound of winter wind through a New Hampshire forest. Some of you have heard the sound I mean, though it's heard only in great stretches of northern woods, far from freeways and flight paths, and if you haven't been to such a place lately, you will have to work to remember it. It's the sound a whole forest makes, unlocatable and everywhere, near and far, intimate and impossibly remote. I don't mean a storm wind, full of high drama, but the gentle, subtle voice of a forest as it speaks of winter peace and winter desolation. Two mountain ridges lie between me and the interstate highway 20 miles off, and with no sizable town in earshot, I can hear the sound such a forest makes when gently dithered by winter air.
Leaves are down, of course, so it's the pines that matter most.
They stand tallest and catch the wind. Theirs is a finely sifted sound, a soft hiss through unnumbered needles. Stand by one as it takes the air, and you'll know how God breathes. Hear the accumulated sound of such trees coming at you over the miles, and you hear something like the breath of Being itself, the very sigh of our becoming and passing away. Unless the ground is covered in snow, the sound is accompanied by shrub turbulence and dead leaf scuttle.