Listening to Ventura’s Summer Soundtrack

What am I doing on these summer evenings?

The same thing I have done for years on summer evenings.

I walk through the neighborhood. It’s a sweet little trip, not so much for what you see as what you hear.

Through open windows, you hear the omnipresent TV. This summer, people are sitting in the blue glow, watching people on the screen watch each other choke down roasted rats. For unfathomable reasons, these are called “reality shows.”

But that’s not the reality that makes my patch of reality special. In my midtown Ventura neighborhood, you can walk block after block, inhaling the smoke of sizzling meat on two dozen white-hot barbecues, and smell not one roasted rat.

Wandering around my neighborhood, I stop for a moment when I hear an interesting chord or a sudden swelling of cricket noise. I stop a lot.

My block is alive with the sound of a million tiny Pacific tree frogs. A few years ago, my neighbor, Perry, became a frog enthusiast and gave a few of us small plastic foam troughs filled with tadpoles. Now, strangers walking their dogs on a summer evening suddenly stop as the frogs go into full cry, resuming their walks as the frogs inexplicably stop.

We’re just a few blocks from the train tracks that run along the coast. At night, the mournful whistle drifts through the neighborhood like a blues refrain. I don’t know if the engineers are clearing drunks from the track or expressing their appreciation for being alive on a summer evening, whipping a million tons of iron on a moonlit ribbon to Salinas or Seattle.

The ocean lies just beyond the tracks and down the hill. Sometimes you can hear the moan of the foghorns at the end of the jetties, pulsing every 10 seconds, fog or not. They’re just meant to ward off the odd pleasure boat, but it’s easy to close your eyes and picture the docks of, say, Liverpool. On the nights you hear both train whistles and foghorns, congratulate yourself; you’ve hit the daily double of aural fantasy.

When we first moved in 12 years ago, I was convinced that on some summer nights I could stand on our front lawn and and hear the waves crashing half a mile away.

“Listen to that!” I told my wife, squinting as if that would somehow sharpen my hearing: a roar and a whoosh, a roar and a whoosh, a roar and a whoosh. “Must be high tide.”

She stared at me with a strange, sad expression.

“It’s not the ocean,” she said. “It’s the stock car races. At the fairgrounds.”

Ah.

The fairgrounds provide much of our neighborhood’s summertime background music. Just the other night, I thought I heard Bob Dylan blowin’ in the wind. And, it turned out, he was.

On Tuesday nights, Indian drums reverberate. Members of a Native American group pound them for hours in the long-vacant Washington School around the corner from my house. A few nights I’ve gone over to watch as they pour themselves into the ancient rhythms, drowning out the constant chorus of crickets. No neighborhood is complete without a little Indian drumming.

Up the street, you can hear the piano at the Billy Clower Dance Studio and the tap-tap-tapping of students working out some tricky turns on a familiar tune from the ‘40s, a song that’s on the tip of your tongue.

The piano stops, the tapping stops and they take it from the top yet again. You want to knock on the window and dole out some encouragement: “Way to go! Great job! Now you’ve got it!”

There’s something so innocent about the sound of tap dancing on a summer evening that you almost want to cry.

At home, my wife and I get through the night with a sound machine in our room. We bought it to drown out the shrieking mockingbirds, but it also comes in handy for absorbing the surplus sounds from our daughter’s stereo, like baking soda absorbing onion smells in a refrigerator.

The machine gives us spring rain, babbling brook, crickets, waves, the static of white noise--all soporific, all of the time.

It’s not as good as a walk around the block, but it beats any reality show you can name, soundly.

*

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.