This audio documentary immerses the listener in the world of oyster farmers as they labor. The sounds I heard on the water and land during my fieldwork are a cornerstone of my experience there. Humans, animals, and the environment are sonically entangled. Birds fly in and out of the microphone’s range. Their songs build into a cacophony and recede, mirroring the flow of waves that wash the nearby shoreline. This gently gives way to work sounds. Boat motors hum as the pilot slowly maneuvers out of the boat slip. Bags of oysters swish as farmers flip them in the water. Oysters clatter loudly against the metal drum of a tumbler. As the farmers count the oysters, their smooth hard surfaces move rhythmically across the stainless steel table — one, two, three, four, five– clack! Counted oysters drop neatly into a mesh bag.  The low rumble of conversation between farmers meander in and out of our ears, and excerpts from oral history narrators are interspersed through the soundscape. They share memories and tell stories of labor and exploration in Spring Creek. The listener is meant to locate the individual’s story in the images of the place they see in the photographs, further underscoring the interconnectedness of the narrators and their environment. 

I return to Spring Creek when I listen to these sounds again. Place bleeds into the oral history interviews and environmental recordings. Suddenly, it is May 2021, and I sit on the dock beside Bud’s Marina. As I listen to the tape, Carolina wrens shout “teakettle, teakettle, teakettle!” and punctuate the constant low roar of an enormous cicada brood. Chains rattle from trailers bumping along the graveled path. The hum of the boat chugging into the slip brings Charlie the fisherman and a cooler filled with redfish and seatrout. When the recording pauses, I know that I paused my recorder to behold their rounded bodies laid on ice. They heave and erupt into a sparkle of golden scales with each breath. In another interview, I sit on a porch under the stilts of a raised house. As I hear the wind blow against the windscreen of my microphone, I can feel the wind against my face, the threat of an August tropical storm brewing in the Gulf. A documentarian aiming for technical perfection could see these sounds as polluted audio, a failure to create a quality recording. But to me, the sounds of the coast assert its presence and importance in the lives of my narrators.