they’d said. But it’s been over two years now and I still hear the
planes. They drive me crazy. It’s hard to eat alfresco, impossible to
talk on the phone with the backdoor open. Between the planes and the
routine security surveillance choppers, I feel like I’m in a militarized
zone when I walk near the river. My gaze is drawn up, and I can read
the logo on the fuselages. Sometimes, I can even make out the theme
animal on the Frontier Airlines tail fins. There’s the mustang! It’s
wildlife-viewing, D.C.-style.
Then there are the nettlesome sounds of competitive landscaping:
the parading whines and drones of weed-whackers, lawn-mowers,
leaf-blowers and, if I’m exceedingly unlucky and under deadline,
circular saws. Such are the afflictions of close quarters, and they
aren’t necessarily new. The Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle didn’t
hear engines while working on his biography of Frederick the Great
from his study in London, but he was made apoplectic by chickens,
carriages and dogs. So maddened was he that he commissioned at
great expense the making of a soundproof room in his attic. It nearly
killed him. It was so airtight that when he lit up for a smoke, he
passed out, only to be saved by the maid.
As Charles Montgomery writes in his book Happy City, “Living
under the flight path of commuter jets is terrible for happiness . . . but
we do not always respond logically to environmental stimulus.”
Right. The logical thing would be to go the hell back to Colorado. My
neighbors aren’t exactly wrong. People can become habituated to
sound, at least partly. We’ve all heard stories of people who say they
can’t sleep if it’s too quiet, or they can’t work apart from a din. Some
writers have apps that replicate the sounds of a coffee shop for when
they are working at home. I know a New Yorker who now lives in the
country, but he plays himself devotionally made recordings of 14th
Street, sirens and all, to fall asleep at night.
I keep hoping this settling into noise will happen to me, that I will
become inured or even nurtured somehow by the city sounds, but it