Sound travels farther on cold days. The sound waves that would normally dissipate into the air instead bounce against layers of warmer air that blanket the surface, and so fall back to the ground. That’s the physics explanation, at least.
I think it’s that there’s no one out making noise. When I first stepped outside one Saturday two weeks ago, that was what I noticed. The quiet, the stillness. Then, the sounds I didn’t normally hear — faraway sounds, the hum of heating units from buildings I couldn’t identify and the sputtering of cars I couldn’t see. I could also hear myself. Breathing, footsteps, the echo of wind in my ears. I could imagine, for a second, being the only person in the world.
This is my second year in Evanston, but my first time really facing the winter. Last year’s season was mild; this time around has been the coldest in years. I feared the cold, but recently I’ve come to love it. However unpleasant the winter may be, it’s also beautiful.
I’m a proud NorCal kid. My freshman year, I put on a brave face and held out as long as possible before getting my winter coat out –– just to show I wasn’t weak against the cold.
I am very, very weak against the cold.
This year, while Evanston shuddered from wind chill in the minus 20s — cold enough that it doesn’t matter if you report it in Fahrenheit or Celsius — the temperature back home in the Bay Area didn’t dip below 40. I’ve learned my lesson. The coat goes on without shame.
On that walk two weeks ago, I did see a few other people on the street. They were bundled up like me, behind scarves, beanies and masks. Hidden in thick coats, they looked like children dressed by loving parents, top-heavy. Unlike children, they looked down and hunched forward, as if gravity pulled them at an angle. It is a kind of gravity, the cold. It pulls you to wherever you’re going.
My friends back home divide people into two types. There are the purposeful walkers, who know where they want to be and will be there shortly. They travel the hypotenuse of every right triangle, the shortest path between their departure and their arrival. That’s not me. I’m a meanderer. I don’t take the hypotenuse, nor the two sides, but I’ll wander between and around the three sides until eventually I stumble upon where I’m going.
When I walk — and I love to walk — I prefer to do so without a destination in mind. A meanderer can do anything on a walk. Sometimes I want to think, or to feel happy or sad, or just to avoid doing whatever I was doing. I end up by Lake Michigan a lot. I’ll walk up and down the lakefill choosing my favorite painted rocks, or I’ll head south far past street names I recognize.
Not this quarter, though. I’ve been to the lake only twice, and each time only briefly. It’s too cold to meander; the hypotenuse looks much more appealing when my eyelashes start to freeze. The winter makes purposeful walkers out of us all.
And yet. On that quiet, still, cold, cold Saturday, as I walked past the top-heavy strangers toward some destination I’ve since forgotten, armored with my heavy coat and scarf and beanie and frozen eyelashes, I found myself stopping. I looked around, and I listened. The trees had long since lost their leaves, so I could see the bend and split of each branch hovering in front of the blue sky. The breeze stirred lightly as if the wind itself didn’t want to break the silence. And the snow — the snow! — in its crisp white, untrodden upon. I was wandering through a snapshot, frozen in temperature and in time.
This was the meanderer’s dream. The winter cold pushed everyone inside, and it left behind a gift: a world outside the norm. No, I couldn’t wander out there forever. But for a short while, I could feel out of space and out of time, alone with my breath and footsteps.
Sound travels farther on cold days — or does it? Maybe the best explanation is something else. Maybe as we rush from building to building, we cannot help but notice something missing: the noises of our normal days. We pause to notice it. Maybe the cold begs that, just this time, we listen a little closer.
