After three days in the Dayton arena listening to drum line after drum line in the Winter Guard International Indoor Percussion World Championship, we have time to kill before our flight home. We decide to visit a place completely void of drum lines and find ourselves at the Cox Arboretum MetroPark. That place was fresh out of drum lines. Instead, the show here featured miles of walking trails surrounded by trees, shrubs, irises, alliums, lilacs, ponds, a few geese, and turtles. There were some people around suspiciously preparing for some celebration or another, maybe a wedding, a little girl carried the top of a cake around, escorted by a couple of dressed up adults. Mostly, the park was quiet except for the traffic noise from a nearby invisible highway, and a helicopter flew over once. We walked about a mile and a half, cleansing the palate, lingering on the flowers, taking pictures of them, and taking pictures of the turtles, swimming, sunbathing on rocks, making no audible sound. Not one beat.
michael jarmer 