There is an old question people like to chew on. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The scientist says yes. The tree hits the ground, it shoves the air around, and those waves are real whether an ear is there to catch them or not. The philosopher says no. A sound is something that happens inside a head, and with no head there is just air moving in the dark. I have spent my whole life on the scientist’s side of that fence. A falling tree makes a sound, and if you do it right it makes lumber too. But I am going to tell you about the weekend that gave me a little more perspective for the other guy.
When I was in high school I spent some time down on the Northern California coast, cleaning up the old Rule Ranch for my dad, who managed the place. The Rule Ranch had been a working ranch since 1867, a few thousand acres of grass and timber and fog up on the headlands above the town of Jenner, right where the Russian River runs out into the Pacific. My buddy Bruce Nikolai would come along, and between the two of us we made a fair clean-up crew. One winter dad set us to burning rubble, a hundred years of broken-down everything piled around the barns and the outbuildings. We spent weekend after weekend feeding fires.
I will say this for the job. The view was hard to beat. We worked three, four, five hundred feet above the ocean, and on a clear day you could see twenty miles out to sea. Up on the hill above the barns sat the original farmhouse, tucked behind an old cypress hedge gone wild. It was a tall Victorian, prominent, the kind of house that looks down on everything around it. The grounds ran better than an acre. Folks in town told stories about that house. There were ghosts up there, they said. Somebody had even written it up, the haunted house on the hill above Jenner. Bruce and I did not know any of that, and would not have cared much if we had. We had fires to feed.
Once the outside was clean, Dad turned us loose on the contents of the house itself, on a part of it that had been shut up and abandoned for years. We burned what would burn and hauled the rest to a dump a couple miles away. One Saturday afternoon we were digging out a room that was packed clear to the ceiling. There was so much junk you could not even swing the door open, so we passed most of it out through the window. And down at the very bottom of all of it, under everything, was a coffin.
We did not open it. We looked at it, we left it sitting there, and we quit for the day and went to dinner. Then we called my dad to ask what in the world a person does with a coffin. He did not miss a beat. Take it out of there, he said, and if it’s empty, burn it.
Now a coffin is just a wooden box, and I came up in a family that knew wood. So Sunday morning we drove back up the hill and got the burn pile going, and mid-morning we worked up the nerve to look inside. Empty. Just one old red sheet, some linens, nothing else. We carried it over and threw it on the fire. It burned hot, the way good dry wood does. We finished out the day, drove home, and I did not give it another thought.
Not for a while, anyway. Later that year, off at college, I heard the house on the hill was not haunted anymore. The ghosts were gone. And a few weeks after that, I heard the big Victorian had burned right down to the ground.
Coincidence? Maybe. But I do not think so. I think two kids dug a coffin out from under a hundred years of junk and set it on fire, and in the doing we let something loose up there. And whatever it was came back and did to that house exactly what we had done to the coffin. Lit it up.
Those headlands are still there. You cannot build on them now, or buy a lot, or run a ranch across them. In 2009 the Sonoma Land Trust and a long string of partners put together thirty-six million dollars and bought the whole place, all five thousand six hundred and thirty acres. The biggest piece of land ever set aside in that county. Now it is the Jenner Headlands Preserve, wild and open and protected for good. The haunted house is gone. The hill it stood on will be there forever.
If a tree falls up there today, I suppose it still makes a sound. I just would not bet my life anymore on who is doing the listening.