I was tone deaf half my life, until I fell out of the crow’s nest and woke up with perfect pitch. There are no other cases in the annals or in their executive summaries.

In the beginning I could make nor head nor tail of it, but when the nor’westers blew, and the trees began to sing, I noticed that Forty Mile Creek was in the same key as the Magic Flute. Down at the switching yard, the locomotives were idyling in C, but not a well-tempered sea. The vibrations are arbitrary, but the harmonics are pythagorean. Abstain from beans.