You Can Always Hear the Highway

June 2026. SATB with divisi, a cappella / 4:15

Claire Wahmanholm was walking around a nature preserve north of Chicago listening for birds, but realized there was something else she was hearing: the ever-present hum of a nearby highway. “When you're trying deliberately to hear something else you really notice it,” she says. You Can Always Hear the Highway sets the poem with singers coming in and out making background highway sounds - disturbing the peace.

You Can Always Hear the Highway by Claire Wahmanholm

YOU CAN ALWAYS HEAR THE HIGHWAY

beneath the Eastern Phoebe. It hums alongside the Hermit Thrush
and Indigo Bunting. It is almost like a river but it is not a river.
It is not out-runnable. There are moments when the Marsh Wrens die
down, and the highway fills them like the blood in your ears.
There are no real lulls. You could call the highway a zipper
because of the way it buzzes above the Ruby-crowned Kinglet
and the Willow Flycatcher. You could call it a drone or a moan.
I have never heard a Vesper Sparrow or a Dark-eyed Junco.
A chickadee is hatching crisply from its egg, a Gray Catbird is ripping
a millipede from the meadow, but how would you know.
The highway’s sound is like a strong wind, or like a heavy curtain
being dragged along the ground. It is louder than the alarm call
of any bird, louder than the noise a Barn Swallow makes when it is
being eaten. I may never hear a Brown Thrasher, a Pine Warbler,
a Rose-breasted Grosbeak, a Common Yellowthroat.
There are 160,955 miles of highway in America.