The Quiet Sound of a Whistle, Far in the Distance

I plan on relating stories as they come to me, not in a chronological fashion. Live with it.

During this holiday season, I’d like to relate a little story. In high school, the “downstairs cellar gang” had a very strong feeling that Christmas had become way to commercial and greedy. We
felt that we needed to do something, as a group, to reject that commercialism and bring us back
to reality.

One Christmas Eve, we decided to take a night walk from our homes, to a state park about 25 miles away. The weather had been fairly bad for the week before, but, the evening that we
started the walk, it was cold, but clear with little wind and it was not snowing. We started in the evening and walked to the park. It was incredible.

When you drive a route, your mind sets up a timeline. This, then this in a minute, then this in
two minutes. Plus, because you are watching the road, you never look back and have a visual reference of what things look like behind you.

When we walked, we could see the distances between the intersections. We could look back to see where we’d been. Since it was Christmas Eve, the traffic was fairly light so most of the walk was quiet. The road to the park went mostly through country areas, not city, so it was dark and pleasant. You could hear trains and other sounds very far into the distance because of the quiet.
We went through one small town where the town center was a small park. The sidewalks around it were lined with the candles in paper bags (I forget the name for them) glowing in the silence. It was really very nice and very peaceful.

Yet, as a reminder of the intrusion of Man on the peace, at 2 am, when the bars closed, there was about 30 minutes of relatively high traffice flow as the drunks headed home. The activity surprised us, and, when we thought about what was causing the activity, it just made us sad.

When we got to the park, we spent a couple of hours hiking around and enjoying the peace far, far from the “commercial” world. Finally, at a pre-determined time, Joe’s brother Larry drove to the park to take us home. It took many quiet hours, full of surprises and new vistas to get to the park. It took less than a half-hour to zoom home back in the convieniences of modernality.

I will always remember that walk. It was a bold reminder of the peace and the lives that our ancestors would have had on this special day. It broke the modern mold of rushing, driving, and buying. It restored the soul. And I have thought of it every Christmas since, whenever the pace gets too quick and the demands a bit heavy. It always brings back to me the real reason for the season.