I am a singer. During the first 20 years of my life, I performed hundreds of free concerts. They were well attended.
My stage was the leather seat of a 1950 John Deere AR tractor. The concert halls were the 335 acres of fields on my family’s farms in Canada. My inattentive audiences were the birds, mice, snakes, foxes, squirrels, ground hogs, raccoons, dogs, cats and cattle that occupied the fields where I practised my craft.
No humans ever heard my dulcet tones. And that is just the way I wanted it. I learned how to project my voice so I could hear myself over the noise from the tractor. I always knew I could not be heard by anyone in the vicinity of those fields. The tractor sounds were too loud. That was fine with me.
One afternoon, towards the end of my John Deere days before the city called me away, I was standing in our farmyard when I heard something going by on the concession road at the end of our lane. It was a farmer singing at the top of his lungs as he rode past our place on a tractor. I couldn’t hear the tractor. I realized the tractor noise must have been travelling through the air on a lower and slower sound wave than was the farmer’s voice. His voice reached my ears loud and clear; the tractor putt putts, not so much.
It was an awakening. I realized that at least some of my back forty concerts were probably heard by humans somewhere who happened to be in the vicinity, even if just the occupants of the surrounding farms.
If I had known I actually did have non-critter audiences, I might have charged admission to my shows and would still be a big star today.
All those farm critters were such a bunch of tightwads and would never have ponied up enough to even keep me in toothpicks and straw hats.
©2016 Jim Hagarty
