ghostwolf howl

I heard the sound late at night in a Wal-Mart parking lot. It seemed to cut below the other noises, the whispering October leaves, the omnipresent highway rumble. I listened closer, catching its long, lonely whine blending with the bare branches as they scraped the trunks of the other oaks. It was coming from the opposite direction of the highway, out behind the store, behind the tall black trees that loomed over the lot. I pulled myself half outside my sleeping bag and leaned forward to peer out the bay window of my van. The store’s all-night lighting cast a shrill yellow glow onto waving tree limbs. As I watched, the sound bent down in pitch and disappeared, leaving me to strain my ears into the rustling quiet. A brittle clatter of dead leaves over asphalt, and it was back, literally sending chills down my spine. There was something out there in those woods, and it was howling.

I pulled open the side door to the frigid air and the sharp smells of the forest. Crouching on the metal floor, huddled against the chill, fumbling with my recording equipment, listening: this is just what I had hit the road to do, I thought with a thrill.

I tried listening to the howl more intelligently. What was it? It sounded like a wolf, but deeper, and each utterance seemed to draw out far longer than any animal’s lung capacity could allow. I began to hear modulations. Once in a long while, the pitch would abruptly shift one or two overtones up and then rapidly fall back down, the way you breathe through a flute without really knowing how to play it, or if you run your hand lightly up and down a violin string without pressing. Maybe the source was man-made? Perhaps there was some abandoned structure out there in the woods, a busted machine or a hollow shed, and the wind was rushing through it, creating different frequencies? The pitch, however, didn’t seem to have any correlation to how hard the wind blew. And besides, it was coming from the woods – it was out in the wild and sounded lonesome as hell. I sat there for hours listening, shivering, trying not to breathe too hard.

Wal-Mart was closing for the night, and I could hear the manager’s day-end announcements over the PA system. They drifted to me from the outdoor loudspeakers of the garden department, but the sound was far away and strangely warped. It came as a sort of wordless whine, a perfect complement to the howl. It occurred to me that it didn’t really matter what my ghostwolf – as I’d come to call it – was. The divisions between the civilized world and the wild have long become blurred to the point of irrelevance. I was reminded of characters in a DeLillo novel, disappeared old people, lost for days in a supermall, presumably stealing candy bars from the vending machines, trying to decode the anthropomorphic corporate sculptures through frightened, rheumy eyes. Is a Wal-Mart any less a jungle than the forest I saw before me? The whine of the manager was every bit as inchoate as the howl of the ghostwolf. They came, ultimately, from the same place. And what sound could be more distinctly American, this strange counterpoint of frontier savagery and urban alienation, this marriage of Wal-Mart and wild?

I was terribly disappointed to find the next day that the tracks were not that good. My recording equipment did not share the human ear’s ability to distinguish between and focus on particular sounds, and the ghostwolf was lost to the trees and traffic. I could bring it up by fiddling with the equalizer, but only at the cost of any sense of environment. The ghostwolf was like a lightning bug, I guess: so mesmerizing in its crepuscular dazzle that I felt compelled to capture it, but dead in the jar by next morning. In retrospect, it would have been a difficult musical tool anyway. In my recordings, I’ve consistently avoided music in favor of sound. Unlike music, which is already complete in and of itself, sound is raw sonic material waiting to be organized into music. But this ghostwolf tricked me; even had I taken a suitable recording, there was nothing I could add to it. The howl was already a coherent music of its own, rife with its own messages and mythology, whole as the hungry, wiry wolf it evoked.