This interview takes place in April 2035, on the back porch of a house seven miles east of Norman, Oklahoma. The subject is fictional. The silence she describes is not.

We arrived at Wren Harker's place around 7 PM, which she'd insisted on. "You won't understand anything I'm trying to tell you if you come during the day," she'd said on the phone. She wanted us to hear the evening. Or what was left of it.

Harker spent 34 years with the National Weather Service, the last twelve at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, before the 2032 restructuring eliminated her position along with roughly a third of the agency's remaining staff.¹ Before meteorology, she studied acoustic ecology at Purdue under Bryan Pijanowski, one of the founders of the field.² She is, by her own description, "a person who learned to think with her ears."

She now teaches a course called Weather You Can Hear at Rose State Community College in Midwest City. Enrollment has dropped each semester. She mentioned this the way you'd mention a dripping faucet you've stopped planning to fix.

The porch faces east, across what was once tallgrass prairie and is now something she calls "the beige." She handed us iced tea in mason jars and sat in a rocker that had clearly been sat in ten thousand times. A weather station blinked on the railing. The thermometer read 94°F.

It was April 8th.

We sat for a while. It was quiet.

You wanted us here at this hour. What should we be hearing right now?

Wren: Everything. That's the answer. April, 7 PM, central Oklahoma — this should be the noisiest hour of the year. Spring peepers finishing up, field crickets just starting their run, first cicadas of the season tuning up if it's been warm enough. Mockingbirds doing their last set. I used to call it the handoff. Day shift clocking out, night shift clocking in. There'd be maybe ten minutes where they overlapped, and it was loud. Just this wall of sound.

Listen. What do you hear?

The wind. A dog somewhere.

Wren: Right. And the highway. That's what people miss. The highway was always there, but you couldn't hear it over the biophony. Now it's the loudest thing in the soundscape. The trucks won the frequency war by default.³

When did you first notice the change?

Wren: So this is the question everyone asks, and I always want to give a clean answer. "It was June 14th, 2019, and the katydids didn't come." But it doesn't work that way.

You know how they say people wait an average of seven years between noticing hearing loss and doing anything about it? Because each individual moment of not-hearing is explainable. The TV was too low. The restaurant was loud. She mumbled.

That's what this was. Each year had an explanation. Late spring. Weird cold snap. Drought pushed the emergence back. I had thirty years of pattern recognition telling me this is a variation, and my own expertise was the thing that kept me from seeing it was a collapse.

I think I actually knew by 2023, 2024. The Sockman paper came out — 72% decline in insect abundance over twenty years, even in pristine habitat.⁴ I remember reading it and feeling relieved. Not surprised. Relieved. Like, oh, I'm not crazy. The evening is emptier.

You've described something you call "the four silences." Can you explain that?

Wren: [She sets down her tea and leans forward.]

When I was coming up, silence meant one thing. Well, a few things, but they were distinguishable. There's a specific quiet before a severe storm. The inflow pulls warm air in, the cool air pushes out, and for a few seconds or minutes the wind just stops. Everything stops. Insects go quiet. Birds go quiet. If you've been in enough of those, your body knows. Your skin knows. There's infrasound below 10 Hz that your ears can't consciously process but your body registers.⁵ I could feel a tornado-producing supercell before the sirens went off. Not every time. But often enough that I trusted it.

That silence had a specific texture. Held silence. Like the air was holding its breath.

Second silence: insects too hot to call. Crickets quit above 100 degrees.⁶ Used to be a rare thing, a few afternoons in July, August. Now it starts in May and runs through October. Feels different from storm silence, but only if you know what you're feeling for.

Third: they're just gone. The population is gone. The field cricket that should be chirping at this temperature, at this hour, in this month, doesn't exist in this field anymore. That silence has no texture at all. It's just absence.

Fourth, and this is the one that gets me: temporal displacement. The species is still alive somewhere, but it's emerging at the wrong time, or it's a different species that moved north from Texas with a completely different call pattern. So the sound is there, but it's the wrong sound for the conditions. Which is almost worse than silence, because it's misinformation. My ears hear a cricket and calculate a temperature and the temperature is wrong. Not because my ears are wrong. Because the cricket is from somewhere else.

[She pauses.]

That's a very specific kind of loss.

Wren: The funny thing is the knowledge is still in me. Every bit of it. I can still hear a snowy tree cricket and count the chirps and add forty and get a temperature.⁷ The formula works perfectly — if it's the right species, if it's present, if the temperature is in the range where it chirps at all. Three ifs that used to be zero ifs.

I keep comparing it to a translator whose language is still spoken but the country it belongs to doesn't exist anymore. You're fluent in a place.

Do your students understand what they're missing?

Wren: No. How would they? I play them recordings from the Cornell archive — a July evening in Oklahoma from 2005 — and they think I'm playing them a rainforest. They literally do not believe that's what this place sounded like twenty years before they were born. One kid said, "That's not here." And she was right. It's not here anymore.

I had another student ask me if the recordings were enhanced. Like I'd run them through some kind of filter. [She almost smiles.] I told her no, that's just what a million insects sound like. She looked at me like I'd told her horses used to fly.

What happened when the NWS models went offline? You lost the institutional tools at the same time your embodied knowledge was —

Wren: [Laughs, short.]

Yeah. That's the joke. We spent a century building instruments so we wouldn't have to rely on people like me. Doppler radar so you don't need to feel the wind. Satellite imagery so you don't need to read the clouds. Numerical models so you don't need to listen. Then the instruments went away, and the thing they replaced went away, and now we've got neither.⁸ A colleague of mine said it was like burning the library and the oral tradition at the same time.

I laughed when he said it. I don't think he meant it to be funny.

What do you do out here every evening?

Wren: [Long pause.]

I listen. I don't know what for anymore. I think I'm waiting for the handoff that isn't coming. Or documenting. Bearing witness, maybe, if that doesn't sound too grand for a woman in a rocking chair.

I have a recorder running every night, have for six years. Thousands of hours of mostly highway noise and wind. I keep thinking someday someone will want to know what it sounded like when it was going quiet. The in-between part. Not the full chorus and not the total silence, but the years when you could still hear it thinning out.

[She picks up her tea again. The thermometer on the railing has dropped to 91. The highway hums. Somewhere east, heat lightning flickers without sound.]

Here's what I can't teach them. I can describe what a full evening sounded like. I can play the recordings. But the thing that made it knowledge — the thirty years of sitting in it, night after night, until your body learned to read it the way you read a face — you can't compress that. And even if you could, the page is different now.

Do you still trust your instincts? If a storm was coming tonight, would you know?

[She looks east. The lightning flickers again.]

Ask me in the morning whether it rained.

We drove back to Oklahoma City in the dark. It did not rain.

We checked the forecast when we got to the hotel. There hadn't been one to check, exactly. The regional mesoscale models for central Oklahoma were discontinued in 2033.⁹ The hourly forecast on our phones was interpolated from a global model that doesn't resolve individual thunderstorms. It said 20% chance of precipitation. It also said the temperature was 88°F. Wren's porch thermometer had read 91.

We didn't know which to believe, and there was no one left to ask.

Footnotes

1. NOAA lost over 2,000 staff — roughly 20% of its workforce — by mid-2025, representing an estimated 27,000 years of institutional experience, per former NOAA chief scientist Craig McLean. Subsequent restructuring rounds continued through 2032. ↩

2. Bryan C. Pijanowski, Purdue University, co-authored the foundational paper "What Is Soundscape Ecology?" (2011), establishing biophony, geophony, and anthropophony as the three components of environmental sound. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228064722 ↩

3. Soundscape ecologists have documented that as biophony collapses, anthropophony — particularly transportation noise — becomes the dominant acoustic feature of formerly biodiverse landscapes. Sueur, Farina, and Krause (2019) described this as climate change "changing Earth's natural acoustic fabric." https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2019/11/what-does-climate-change-sound-like/ ↩

4. Sockman, K. (2025). Study of flying insect abundance over 15 seasons (2004–2024) in a Colorado subalpine meadow documented a 72.4% decline, averaging 6.6% annually, associated with rising summer temperatures. Published in Ecology, September 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/09/12/insect-populations-decline ↩

5. Infrasound between 0.5 and 10 Hz has been observed from tornado-producing storms throughout the tornado lifecycle, including more than an hour before tornadogenesis. ScienceDaily, May 2018. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180514154409.htm ↩

6. Crickets generally cease chirping below 55°F and above 100°F. NOAA Office of Education, "Can Crickets Tell the Temperature?" https://www.noaa.gov/education ↩

7. Dolbear's Law (1897): count snowy tree cricket chirps in 14 seconds, add 40, to approximate temperature in Fahrenheit. The formula assumes the presence of the correct species in its historical range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law ↩

8. High-resolution regional weather models including the NAM, HREF, and HiresW were discontinued as part of NOAA budget restructuring. Weather balloon launches were suspended at multiple stations. ↩

9. Regional mesoscale modeling capacity has been progressively reduced since 2025. The specific 2033 date is a projection based on documented trends in NOAA operational capacity. ↩