The Day the Fog Spoke: A Childhood Moment, Part 1
-Michael Joly
My earliest memories are sound memories.
One of them has been with me for sixty‑five years. It has shaped almost everything I’ve done with sound, including ToneStream. I think of it as a personal Garden story—a moment before I knew words like “spiritual practice,” before I knew the world could be unsafe, before I started armoring up.
I was five years old.
My family was living on bucolic New Castle Island in New Hampshire while my giant of a father worked on nuclear submarines at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Our rented house had a large rock in the backyard. Half‑buried in the grass, it was a large, smooth, oval rock with a flat top surface. I called it my submarine.
When I sat down on that rock my eyes were level with cattails. The world was small: the stone under me, the stems and seed heads in front of my face, the patch of backyard. It felt ordered and safe.
On the day I remember, the fog was so thick that everything seemed to dissolve into it—I don’t remember being able to see our house. But somewhere out there sounds were singing to me. Before I had the vocabulary to talk about them, I had a direct experience of hearing fog signals, and experiencing “the vast”.
Those fog horns were the old pneumatic kind, on land and on ships. They spoke in short 2 or 4 second blasts repeated every 20, 30 or 60 seconds. Nearly pure sine wave tones, near and far, low and higher, each on its own timing. Of course I’m describing something now I didn’t have words for then. I simply listened. That fog was full of tonal voices.
They called and seemingly answered in organized patterns. One horn would sound somewhere nearby our little island. Another in the direction of the shipyard. Another sounding from farther out as a ship approached the mouth of the Piscataqua river. All of these would echo from other directions as their sounds bounced off of structures back to me. As I listened they overlapped in asynchronous, looping ways—never exactly repeating, but never chaotic either.
I didn’t have the language for it then, but my nervous system learned something: simple tones in overlapping patterns prompt feelings of home and security, and create urges to explore vastness beyond what can be seen.
I eventually learned those horns were literally sending signals. To mariners returning in the fog they were saying, “Here. Over here. This is the way. This is the way home.” To ships that didn’t know these waters, they were more like warnings: “Be aware. There are submerged rocks here. There are other hulls moving through this same white space.” Each blast carried information about where it came from and what it was trying to protect its listeners from.
At five years old, I didn’t know any of that. Sitting on my submarine rock, eye‑level with the cattails, I only sensed that something or someone out there in the unseen was speaking to someone else using sound alone. Short tone blasts moving through space, touching other lives.
In an instant, my world became much larger than my body, my backyard, or even my island home.
The fog took away my visual boundaries. I couldn’t see where the land ended or the harbor began. The fog horns suggested spaciousness beyond what could be known. And this felt like an invitation to explore, beginning from a place of safety. I was still safe on my familiar rock yet somehow sensed an intelligent vastness.
I remember two feelings at once: a deep sense of safety and a powerful curiosity about that vastness.
That combination—the rock under me, the fog around me, the unknown voices in the distance—became the first place I can remember feeling both completely at home and quietly called beyond what I could see.
In the next part, I’ll skip ahead a few decades, and look back at that morning from the vantage point of a life spent listening.
