Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
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Our sense of spatiality is not grounded in only sight but in sound; we listen to perceive distance and space. Our interactions with the world fully engage the senses, and our ears are constantly attuned to a wide range of sounds: language, music, rain, even birdcalls.7 It is from these sounds, and other sensory data, that we form Schama’s “constructs of the imagination.” These are the landscapes of songs, maps, names, stories, rituals, and histories.
Long before Count Zinzendorf’s mid-eighteenth-century journey through Pennsylvania’s forests, this was a landscape that had been sung, storied, and mapped by Indigenous communities. According to current archaeological data, as glaciers receded from Pennsylvania around the end of the Ice Age, people migrated into the Ohio, Susquehanna, and Delaware river valleys from the more populous interior regions of the continent.8 Pennsylvania’s first residents would have encountered an ecological patchwork of environments in the lands south of the glacial ice. Thick forests of spruce, fir, birch, pine, and alder dominated the lower slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and the ridge and valley systems that stretched to the east and south. Over time, as the climate warmed, hardwoods such as oak, chestnut, hickory, and beech began to populate the forests along the Appalachian Plateau. These new forests supported a rich understory of edible and medicinal plants: mushrooms, berries, ginseng, chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts.9 In the middle canopy, dogwood, ironwood, viburnum, spicebush, witch hazel, and honeysuckle vied for sunlight and sustenance.10 On the alluvial plains along the Susquehanna and Delaware Watersheds grew carpets of wild strawberries, so notable a feature of the riparian landscape for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years that early European travelers would eventually write of “whole plains covered with them as with a fine scarlet cloth.”11 Even during the sixteenth century, and the first recorded journeys of Europeans along these eastern river valleys, more than 90 percent of Pennsylvania’s landscape was covered in densely packed forests.
Pennsylvania’s diverse geographic regions and forests supported a great variety of animals. The grasslands of the higher elevations and pools of salt and brackish water along creeks and streams were home to deer, elk, moose, and buffalo.12 These salt holes attracted predators such as wolves, panthers, lynx, cougars, and foxes. In the denser parts of the forest, thickets of mountain laurel, witch hazel, and chokeberry harbored bears’ dens and crouching panthers, wild cats, mountain lions, and boars hiding in the underbrush. The dense carpet of leaves on the forest floor teemed with field mice, moles, chipmunks and squirrels, as well as ticks, fleas, and beetles that carved the bark of trees or fed on the blood of passing animals. Minks, otters, muskrats, and beavers flourished along the many creeks and streams that flowed off of the Appalachian Front.
The acoustic ecologies of Pennsylvania’s forests were dynamic. Depending on the particular place, time, and season, the sounds of wind, water, fire, rustling plants and trees, and falling rocks carried quickly over dry terrain or were muffled in the humidity of a rainy day. Even the dynamic sounds of water fluctuated from ice to snow to rain, or from stream, to creek, to river. The quiet sounds of winds moving through the dense hardwood stands had their counterpoint in the vigorous blowing of salt breezes on the riparian plains of the Susquehanna. The branches of trees that remained silent and still in the heat of summer crackled in the brittle cold of winter. These natural sounds were augmented by birds, insects, and animals who responded in their calls and communications to patterns of light and dark, fluctuating seasons and climates. The dense heat of a summer day could suddenly transform into a cacophony of birds, insects, and frogs after an afternoon thundershower. Spring evenings resounded with the dense soundscapes of insects and amphibians that resonated over wetlands and along the margins of ponds.13 Common horseflies, mosquitos, grasshoppers, yellow jackets, wasps, and locusts clicked and scraped in densely layered soundscapes in the upper canopies of forests and along the grassy edges of meadows. The calls and songs of forest and meadow birds—pigeons, turkeys, turtle doves, woodpeckers, bald eagles, owls, wrens, bluebirds, hummingbirds, and thrushes—resounded through the skies.14
Within this densely layered landscape and soundscape of plants, animals, insects, and birds, Native American settlements clustered around Pennsylvania’s distinct geological regions and river systems. A majority of travel and commerce centered on the three major watersheds of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. An intricate network of trails and pathways linked different settlements in the river valleys, although only a few pathways, such as the Great Shamokin Path and Kittanning Path, traversed the high mountains of the Appalachian Front.15
For Native Americans, these borderlands of the forest were filled with the sounds and voices of stones, dirt, animals, plants, wind and air, water and fire, trees, insects. The patterns of these geophonic and biophonic soundscapes articulated distinct sonic languages that characterized particular geographic areas.16 Careful attention to and meaningful interpretation of aural cues from animals, insects, and birds, as well as wind, water, and storms were important in a typically dense, forested environment where distance could not be adequately judged or easily remembered by sight.17 The paths between well-established and populous towns such as Shamokin, Kittanning, and Onondaga were carefully charted through trail markings, painted trees, and mental maps that preserved the spatial relationships of the structured world of villages and agricultural land, to lighter forest thickets and dark “swamps,” places where the trees grew so close and so high that they blocked the sun.
Human journeys into the forest were often accompanied by a complex system of songs and offerings that could be sung to appease or beguile the spirits who resided there. These symbolic methods of naming, remembering, and sounding the landscape were especially important in navigating the miles of forest lands that lay between villages and towns. These forested spaces were crowded with spirits, who sometimes helped or hindered the people who encountered them. In the darkness of the liminal under-canopy, accidents could easily happen: broken legs, starvation, mental illness, and stripping of the powers of sight and hearing. People listened carefully for the dynamics and counterpoint of the natural environment, observing climate, season, weather, and time of day through the soundscapes of frogs, trumpeter swans, or wild geese. Shades of darkness were measured by the calls of nocturnal birds: spring and summer nights resonated with the songs of the whip-poor-will and the noisy calls of owls. But in the liminal spaces of the forest, these sounds could also disrupt human activities. Upon their return to villages and human spaces, travelers were immersed in complex rituals designed to counter the ill effects of the woods. For eastern Woodlands cultures, “Edge of the Woods” ceremonies were critical pathways to healing that cleared the eyes and unstopped the ears of those who had ventured “thro’ dangerous places, where evil Spirits reign.”18 The particular ability of owls to imitate the human voice could create misunderstandings or cause messages to go astray.19 According to a Delaware legend, screech owls were particular bearers of misfortune: “Enta wa chululhuwe pèchi lihëlak hìtkunk tali kochëmink ènta awèn wikit luweyok hùnt, ‘O, mata wëlëtu.’ Alëmi wishas’hatuwàk, wëlusemëneyo në sikhay òk patamaok. Elaihòsihtit hùnt lòmwe Lënapeyunkahke lòmëwe.” (When a screech owl comes to your home and lands outside in a tree where a person lives they say, “Oh, that is not good!” They began to be afraid and they burned some salt and they prayed. That is the way the old Delawares did long ago.)20
The perching of a nighthawk on the roof of a house was also to be avoided at all costs. Its “singing with a mournful note” portended impending disaster to those who heard it. The cooing of turtle doves was even worse—a harbinger of death.21 The bald eagle could cause thunder if angered in spirit.22 But rather than bringing ill luck, some animals were simply noisy nuisances. Meadows and agricultural plantations were frequently inundated with flocks of wild pigeons so loud that they prevented people from hearing each other. These birds could appear suddenly in large groups and descend like a cloud, forming “a ceiling between earth and sky.”23
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