I an laying awake at 1:33 AM listening to the traffic noise going down the major highway that is about 200 yards from our house. When we bought the house we figured we would eventually get used to the noise. Hubby hardly notices it. Me - it bugs the heck out of me, both day and night. This is Interstate 71. It runs from Cleveland, Ohio south to Louisville, Ky. Most of it is a four lane highway. Two lanes running each direction. We had no idea that there would be that much noise from it all the time. It never slacks off like so many roads and streets do. Not even at night. In fact, I think it gets worse at night. I know we need to move people and products from one place to another. And I have seen lots of houses much closer to the highway than ours. I don't know how people that close can stand the noise.
But then I think about people in big cities complaining about the noise on the streets there. And not just vehicles passing by but people talking loud, even yelling, as well as barking dogs, sirens, and worst of all gun shots. From what I see on the local news Louisville is one of the worst places for noise from gunshots. I used to think it was bad in Albuquerque, NM but that was nothing compared to what the news puts on here.
This has led me to think about the noise I have had to listen to and put up with in all the different places I have lived. At least here we have very few airplanes. We do have a helicopter once in a while and you can usually bet it is a medical emergency flight taking some one to one of the big hospitals in Louisville, KY or Cincinnati, Ohio,
When I was a small child my father was in the Air Force. Ever live on an Air Force Base or any kind of military base? Airplanes are a fact of life there. You hear them constantly. Day and night. Ever wake up to the sonic boom of a jet plane breaking the sound barrier? Or the constant whine of the jet engines as the planes got ready to take off? We learned to live with it, ignore it, and even sleep through sonic booms.
I have lived in residual areas where the sound of cars leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening could get fairly loud. Plus the sound of school busses and delivery trucks. We all know the sound of the UPS truck. I have never lived in a big city, in an apartment building with lots of coming and going, and sirens, people out yelling at all hours or anything like that. But I have known lot of people who have and I think that would be worse then the noise of the traffic on I-71 that we have here.
Think of the all the noise we listen to all the time. There is always some kind of noise. But have you ever lived or even been where it is really quiet. I have lived a few places where it was so quiet the sound of a car going by could wake you up and make you wonder what was going on. I have been out in the desert or the mountains were the sound of the wind through the trees might be the only thing you can hear. The sound of a bird would seem very loud. To just hear
the soft sigh of a light breeze can be a very pleasing sound. To go camping and wake in the night to total silence, to not hear anything at all is something that everyone should experience so they can understand just how much noise there is in the world and maybe, just maybe the engineers and scientists will start to invent things that won't be a noisy.
In the photo the tree you see is in our yard. You can see the big trucks out on the interstate highway.
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