Disquiet

When I posted my two-minute footage of a recent redwood forest hike, I mentioned how YouTube is full of far longer journeys. I wanted to share another example of what I’m talking about. This video (not by me) is an hour straight (with a tiny bit of editing) of a walk at Mount Brunswick in British Columbia. The location is beautiful, and the footage fairly high resolution, as high as 1440, which isn’t 4K but will certainly do. Right from the start, the videographer’s footsteps are plainly evident. When walking, one isn’t quite aware of such sounds, because our brains largely blank them out, as they do any repetitive noise that should be ignored in favor of chance sounds that might provide evidence of danger or other reason for alert, if not alarm. That’s evolution for you. By 15 minutes in, the hiker’s breath makes itself heard, and by halfway through, that panting is almost as loud as the footsteps. While the footage remains breathtaking at times (take a look at the view at 50:01), we’re also plainly aware of the effort required to share it with us — it is breathtaking, quite literally, and anything but blissful. At times, the hiker pauses to look around, and in those moments birds might be heard cawing, but for the most part, the panting and foot stseps are our accompaniment. The video is titled “Mount Brunswick Virtual Hike No Music No Talking,” but of course humans can be present, can be heard, even when they’re not talking. I’m not posting this mention here as a critique of the video. Quite the contrary, it’s absolutely gorgeous, a generous act on the part of the individual who posted it. I am registering it as an interesting aspect of the culture of posting nature walks and, by extension, city hikes — that even when there is no talking, it is not as if the world beyond our own presence simply fills the sonic void.

Video originally posted at youtube.com.

You hear the cars before you see their lights. You hear the footsteps, a deep, constant pulse in contrast with the pointillist rain. You hear the pressurized air, when it comes into view to clean off the lens. You hear a small thudding, somewhere between footsteps and raindrops, this being the sound of the rain hitting, no doubt, an umbrella or a broad-brimmed hat. You look for a reflection, a shadow, to confirm this inference. This is the Rambalac video “Rainy backstreets of Japan at night 5.” Rambalac has nearly half a million viewers on YouTube, admirers of often hour-long, unedited footage of long, winding walks that are, like this one, generally set in Japan. Sound is a byproduct in these videos, a part of the document, but more frame than focus, more color than subject. Still, here the crackling — the sort that always, oddly, sounds more like fire than rain — is very much a centering component. One can be tempted to just watch, and sometimes I do have one of these running, perhaps at quarter speed, on a side monitor as eye candy, but the full audio-visual experience is where it’s at.

Video originally posted at youtube.com.