The Blue Sky

ONCE upon a time the charm of lakes and rivers was their stillness. The ripple of the current, the curl of waves along the beach, only deepened their calm. The swimmer slid through the water; the canoeist dipped his silent paddle; a faint whisper at the prow, an infrequent drip from the paddle blade, scarcely distinguishable from the tiny movements of fish or insect — these alone marked the passage of an alien. Man was assimilated to the element. Infinity opened about him and gave him peace.

But now the silence of lake and river is shattered by motor boats, and the water churned by racing launches whose occupants can barely hear each other shriek above the engines. Imprisoned in a cell of noise, man is no longer one with nature, but bound within his petty personal limits — infinitesimal and alone. As the pedestrian has fled the highway, so swimmers and canoes venture no more upon the open water, but hug the banks in terror of these mechanical demons which banish the very charms they were invented to exploit. Happy the Psalmist, who could walk with God beside still waters! Happy Tennyson, who, at the launch owner’s favorite hour, found only

Happy Longfellow, for whom the lovely night in June echoed across the river merely a striking clock, and for whom no motor boat put-putted along the bright reflection of the moon! Alas that the Ancient Mariner was not last as well as first to burst into a silent sea! For the bursters now possess the scene, and few waters are ‘stilled at even’ in America — not within reach of rock road or steel rail. Silence has retreated to the polar seas, to the mountain tops, and to the heavens. And even there her reign is nearly done. Exploration roars into the arctic; the railroad chugs along the glacier; and the once pathless coast of air is crossed by many trails.

‘Thank God,’ wrote Thoreau, ‘man cannot lay waste the heavens as he has the earth! ’ Rash optimist! The devastation has begun, and the child is now living over whose manhood the skies will not bend clear and blue and spacious and serene.

will no longer be for him an image of healing peace. The blossoming stars will be eclipsed by the glare of aerial traffic, and the heavens will look to him not so much like meadows as like a railroad yard or State Street during the evening rush.

A single airplane winging its silver way through the blue, swooping and sailing like a great bird, shimmering like a celestial dragon fly — here is beauty and strangeness and romance. But what of the heavens when navigation by air has reached the volume of current auto travel? When this truly virgin territory is filled by truck and pleasure planes, by mail lines and freight lines and passenger service? When, instead of the few fine and well-conditioned craft which now soar aloft, the aristocrats of the air are crowded by cheap popular models? When the kids take off in their second-hand plane ‘with the cut-out open’? When loose parts begin to drop, and oil to drip, and exhaust fumes obscure the sun? When careless passengers toss out their banana peels and cigarettes? When the speeders crash aloft, the drunks spin on their tails, and the gang goes up with the portable victrola for a little flight after the early show?

Nor is this evil time so far away as one might think. Yesterday, as I stepped from my door, my ears were struck by a loud-speaker broadcasting from above the virtues of a special brand of cigarettes. I stared aloft, and there hung a plane directly overhead, so close that, as it circled to repeat its blatant message, it touched the summit of a giant oak beside my gate. The tree, thus rudely brushed after two centuries of lofty dignity, shook angrily. And, for my part, I felt that the human game was up and the last defense of machine-bound man cut from over him if the loud-speaker had claimed the heaven, whose only voice had been the thunder and the wind.

Perhaps laws can be made — and indeed they should be quickly, before vested interests in airways grow up by use — forbidding extraneous noise aloft and confining planes to certain lines of flight and certain altitudes above the city roofs. Yet legislation cannot alter facts. Traffic rules may have prolonged the lives of those who would rather die like men than live like grasshoppers; but they have not made city streets less clamorous and crowded. And so I dread the coming invasion of the skies.

Already the privacy of life has been shorn of two dimensions, and now the third, or vertical, surrenders to assault. Till now the vault of heaven stretched above us to infinity. Till now the soul had room to soar. Till now we had above us only God and the stars. Our lives were roofed by silence, and the narrowing walls of noise closed upon us only from the sides. Yet, even under this horizontal pressure of sound, man at large has almost ceased to think; and, when earth and sky both clang with engine, thought will perish and public opinion die. No doubt invention will devise a semi-silent plane as it has already devised a potentially semisilent car. But men it cannot change, and experience proves that, given a machine, most men will make a noise. A generation ago the poet could picture in lovely fancy

But his argosies had ‘magic sails,’ not roaring propellers. We who have seen and heard the airplane can only gaze at the blue sky above and ponder sadly, ‘After Lindbergh, what?’