Between the Facts

Picture this: a table covered in bowls filled with cheese and sour cream, chives and bacon and ham and chicken. Picture all those fixin’s piled on a steaming baked potato that’s dripping with melted butter. Picture all of us gathered around the table in the sun room at Sue’s house in Lander, having our fill of this goodness as we drink from clear plastic cups filled with homemade wine. Filling ourselves with wines made from kits and wines made from fresh backyard fruits. Rhubarb white and Raspberry red.

Picture us struggling then to make room for brownies and ice cream in stomachs that should be too full to allow any more. Then picture us gathering in the living room, 13 of us in front of a small TV that seems huge, in a tight space with more room than we know what to do with. And there, on the screen before us, picture Gail, talking to the world about the Fembot, on a PBS show about What Females Want.

Now picture that!

I’ve finally finished. The lek is now dotted in specks of florescent orange, in small strips of labeled flagging nailed into the soft earth. Tons of them. Less than a hundred, probably, but not by much. From each section stake they stretch outward in a line, one marker every 10 meters, often for 100 meters. They splay out from the stakes and slowly away from their neighboring lines, stretching in line with the distant viewpoint on the hill. All these orange points mark the locations for noise measurements, to map out how the road noise playing from our rock speakers propagates across the lek.

I’ve just finished. All not-quite-one-hundred points are marked, every last one GPSed, and the batteries for the noise changed. The sound of traffic, of trucks and big rigs, is once again emanating from the speakers. Yet the sound I hear is different. It’s mechanical, certainly. Vehicular even. But it’s not road noise, and it’s not coming from the lek.

The sound grows quickly, a low drone becoming a shrill din of a rumble as the source comes into view. The small white plane rises from behind the ridge on which the tripod marking the viewpoint stands. It is flying precariously low. It arcs toward me as I stand in the middle of the lek, loading heavy batteries into the Jeep. It flies right overhead, just a few feet above the rook of my vehicle. The Doppler sound of it passing roars in my ears. I can feel the rush of air it pushes my way. Their laughter I only imagine.

I make a point of not even looking up. They must have enjoyed that.