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 since, including ToneStream. I think of it as my own small version of a Garden story—a moment before I knew there was any such thing as “spiritual practice,” before I knew the world could be unsafe, before I started building the armor that comes with growing up.
I was five years old.
My family was living on New Castle Island in New Hampshire while my father worked on nuclear submarines at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Our rented house backed onto a marsh. Out there, half‑buried in the grass, was a large, smooth, oval rock I had claimed as my own. I called it my submarine.
When I sat down on that rock my eyes were level with cattails. The world was very 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 that I remember, the fog was so thick that everything seemed to dissolve into it—my house, the island, the shipyard, the harbor beyond. But somewhere out there were fog horns singing to me.
These 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 I didn’t have words for at the time. I simply heard, and felt, that the fog was full of tonal voices.
They called and seemingly answered in patterns I didn’t know then that existed. One horn would sound somewhere nearby our little island. Another in the direction of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Another sounding from farther out as a ship approached the mouth of the Piscataqua river. All of these would trigger echoes from other directions as their sounds reflected back to me. As I listened they overlapped in asynchronous, looping ways—never exactly repeating, but never chaotic either.
I did not have the language for it then, but my nervous system was learning something: simple tones in overlapping patterns can prompt both feelings of vastness and feelings of home.
On one level, those horns were literally sending signals. To mariners returning in the fog they were saying, “Here. Over here. This is the way in. 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 hearers 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 exhalations of tone were traveling through space, touching other lives, and returning.
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. But the sound gave me a different kind of boundary, one that did not feel like a wall. It felt like an invitation. The horns located other beings in the distance and, at the same time, anchored me. I was still safe on my familiar rock. I was also, somehow, connected to that wider, vibrating field.
I remember two feelings at once: a deep sense of safety and a powerful curiosity.
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.
