The hunt for silence on Sunday under fire

And on the seventh day, God rested; maybe He watched football or golf on the Sabbath, but He never hunted, not grouse nor any other game. So, wherefore art thou, Gov. Baldacci, who cometh up with the idea to add a measly $3 in revenue for Sunday hunting?

Tell that to all of us who take to the woods or fields or the banks of streams or snow-covered roadways each Sunday for our communion, for our private church service when solitude and silence edify one’s spirituality.

No kidding with all that alliteration: Sundays are sacred.

When society rests – when carpenters aren’t pounding, when chain saws aren’t whining, when trucks aren’t revving, when workers aren’t working – the world on Sunday is quiet enough to hear a trickle on the hillside cease, suddenly to become part of an icicle, then another tiny stream spills into the ditch, breaking some of the icicle’s teeth.

The day is quiet enough that the honking of oldsquaws – or are they eiders? – gathered in the cove for their own Sunday meeting time sounds as loud as the Blue Hill Brass in concert. The Sunday is so still, why think of shattering that silence with the sound of a shotgun?

Only the noises of fishermen unloading traps at the town dock echo around the peninsula, perhaps joined by the familiar sound of boisterous crows annoyed by interlopers on foot crunching the snow and ice.

Otherwise, the Sunday is so quiet one can almost hear the sporadic snowflakes fall like dandruff; a tree, leaning against another for its very life, creaks. No doubt, it will topple in a strong wind before the winter ends.

But on this particular Sunday, there is no wind- just a flurry or two of snow, gray skies over the mountain and gray water in the darkness of Frenchman Bay. No sounds of boats out shrimping or scalloping, or collecting urchins or lobsters.

Just the occasional gurgle under a culvert, just the crying of a sea gull or the distant barking of a dog on its run. No noise. No interruption in one’s serene Sunday walk, except the ringing of a church bell, or later, the siren sound of the fire department’s noon whistle.

Certainly no hunting sounds to disturb the peace or break the privacy of this soul on its search.

One poet wrote about “a Sunday morning” in the summertime when “my love and I would lie, and see the colored counties, and hear the larks so high about us in the sky.”

Songwriters and vocalists The Mamas and the Papas sang of “Sunday morning…”

And a poet by the name of Robert Hillyer, who died in 1961, wrote about Sundays and about columnists … and probably about columnists writing about stupid Sunday hunting proposals:

“Silence! The Columnist is on the sill!” he wrote. “She enters with triumphant condescension exuding promises of Sunday mention.”