Noise
I live in a fairy middle-sized city —a quarter million people or so — in a reasonably-sized metro area — 3-4 million people. I enjoy many aspects of city life: concerts, museums, shopping, dining; all the advantages you get by simply having a large population of people in a small area.
There are parts of city life I really dislike, of course: all the straight lines, the constant presence of people, traffic, the lack of natural areas (even though we are relatively blessed in the Twin Cities). Mostly, though I dislike the noise.
Noise has been difficult for me my entire life. When I was a child, they extended the freeway in my hometown to the point where it ends now: four blocks from my house. Suddenly, I had to deal with something I’d never really thought about before: traffic noise. I remember lying in bed in the summer, the window open — nobody in Duluth had AC, because Lake Superior served us better than any AC unit ever could —unable to fall asleep because of what seemed to me excessive traffic noise.
I would later learn that “excessive noise” is a relative term.
I live in a city now. Not a very noisy city, in the grand scheme of things, but a city nonetheless. St Paul mostly shuts down after around 9PM on the weekdays, and 11PM on the weekends. Even so, there is constant traffic on the street outside our apartment. We are on an emergency route, so we get the addition of sirens Dopplering by our windows at odd times of the night. People talk and yell, sober or otherwise, and I am a light sleeper: I wake up every peep.
On the other end of the spectrum, I went to college with people from NYC who had the opposite problem: they had difficulty sleeping in the quiet of the middle of nowhere, Maine. Many of them could not sleep without a TV or a noise generator in the background, because they had grown up with the constant sound of the City that Never Sleeps.
Strange . . .
The ubiquity of noise was driven home to me viscerally the other day. I went for my normal run on a day when I was particularly stressed. When I feel stressed, my run tends to take me down to the Mississippi. Growing up in Duluth as I did, the mere presence of water has always calmed me down.
There is one particular spot on the river where I stop whenever I pass it on my run. It’s a spot where barges dock in the summer, just downstream from an old grain elevator. We had just gone through a cold snap, and the river was partially frozen, blocks of ice floating downstream and crunching into each other.
I sat and listened to the ice crunch for a while, but the sounds of the city — the traffic on the road behind me, the constant “beep beep beep” of construction vehicles backing up, the sirens of the occasional ambulance — kept intruding, and I couldn’t help but think that all this noise cannot be good for us. The constant stimulation, the incessant background hum.
Even the Boundary Waters, far from the sounds of any city, lie underneath an international flight path.
I don’t know of a solution, but as I sat there on the bank of the river that day, I longed for a moment of quiet.
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