Brookings resident Carl Kline is an ordained clergyman, part-time teacher and occasional blogger.

Once upon a time, Brookings had a man who shouts.

I first heard him one summer. It scared me. At first I thought the neighbors were having an argument. The noise was echoing off the houses of our wide and canopied street. As the noise came closer, I saw it was only one person. I couldn’t catch his words, stunned and scared as I was by the volume and the rage in his voice. But since it was Sunday morning, and there was something about God in one phrase, I guessed he had come from church and was mad at the preacher.

I had heard shouters before.

I heard them in cities. I’d seen them walk the city streets shouting at the heavens or anyone passing nearby. Their feelings would usually overwhelm their words. One seldom understood what they were saying. They might as well have been shouting in another language.

In cities, shouters harmonize with all the other noises of the urban scene. People don’t notice jack hammers much either, or cab drivers' horns. Shouts mingle easily with sirens and screams. Urban spaces seldom echo people sounds like Brookings streets. There’s too much steel and concrete, and the canopies of trees or skies too rare or distant to reflect human sound. Shouts in the city get lost, like a sneeze, a simple sign of disease, as common as the cold.

I’ve done some shouting of my own. There was one time during the Vietnam War when I climbed in a cherry picker on our college campus. As it raised me high into the air, I shouted at the top of my lungs my outrage at the continuing loss of life in that war. I don’t remember the words. The rage in my shout was what was important.

The Brookings shouter passed our house several times after that first Sunday. A few words were left in the air. On one occasion I caught the phrase “born again.” On another, “wild stallions.” It all makes sense to me, as the only words he’s given me, “God, born again, wild stallions,” go together in my mind, and make his shouts more shouts of hope than shouts of rage.

A friend of mine worked as a chaplain in a hospital emergency room. He told me about an experience with a shouting woman. She was brought to the hospital by ambulance and from the moment the attendants opened the emergency room door, her shouts and screams filled the halls. Everyone began rushing around, doing this and that, examining her here and there, assuming the woman was in enormous pain. Nothing seemed to be doing any good. She just continued to scream and shout.

Finally my friend went over to her, took her hand and whispered in her ear, “Why are you shouting?” The woman went quiet, looked him in the eye, and said “My children are back in the house all alone and nobody would listen to me that I didn’t want to leave them.”

His story made me think that shouters have reasons for shouting. Sometimes, it might be that nobody listens, not even God, or at least God seems hard of hearing. Now I wish I had rolled out of bed early, parked myself on our front porch, and prepared for the Brookings shouter. As he passed I would have screwed up my courage and asked in a quiet but strong way, “Why are you shouting?”