The Long Goodbye

by Kaat Vander Straeten

I left my home country, Belgium, for the United States for graduate studies, and though that was supposed to be temporary, I met my future husband (who is from India) at university, and we settled around Boston, Massachusetts.  When our child was three we decided to move out of the city to a leafy suburb so we could compost, garden, and be more connected to nature. These “semi-rural” suburbs are home to great horned owls, foxes, coyotes, fisher cats, and occasionally a bobcat or bear.

That first summer in our new house my parents, who live in a (not-leafy) suburb of Antwerp, came to visit. The sun set as we drove from the airport, past the city neighborhood where we used to live, and the tree canopy grew denser, the houses further apart. I always deeply feel this change from city to “wildness” when we travel that route, and I watched my parents’ reactions. They too noticed it, and that made me happy.

It was hot outside and crowded in the car, so the windows were closed and the air conditioning was on. Finally we pulled up our driveway, and stepped out.

“What’s that noise?” my father gasped. 

He was alarmed, and even sounded a little disgusted. 

My husband and I looked at each other. We could hear nothing out of the ordinary.

“That high-pitched industrial noise!” my father insisted. “Why on earth did you move next door to a factory?”

Then I realized: what he was hearing was the drone of crickets.

When I told him, it took him a second or two to accept this version of reality, until a vague memory surfaced: yes, ah yes, that’s the sound of crickets. Then all was well.

But for me, all is not well. I often think of that evening. The next time I returned to the European suburb where I grew up, I confirmed that the song of crickets of my childhood had gone.

I mourn the fact that when these songs go, most of us don’t even notice their going, let alone miss them. When I go further afield now, the first thing I do is open my ears to catch what I may no longer remember – a peculiar kind of listening. And the memory of modern culture (in the guise of my lovely father) disavowing the crickets, even maligning their glorious celebration of life as industrial noise, still makes my chest feel tight. 

Aldo Leopold wrote: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

As we continue along our human journey, more and more of us are receiving this heartbreaking ecological education. Let us support one another as we remind ourselves what crickets sound/ed like – as we say our long goodbye.

Kaat Vander Straeten is a local community organizer in the field of climate change in her town in Massachusetts, US. She also founded a non-profit that supports climate activists and organizers with tools, resources and, most importantly, a listening ear when they need to share their concerns and fears about collapse and their own work. She switches between a Transition Initiatives approach and Deep Adaptation / the Work That Reconnects. In her spare time she writes novels and tends extensive gardens, hens and ducks, and bees.

Image credit: Cricket, by In Memoriam: me’nthedogs, Creative Commons