It’s different in the city.
There’s all that noise in the air. Every writer that ever wrote at one time or
another mentioned “the hum of the city,” or some like metaphor. Once you’re
used to it the white noise backdrop becomes a comfort. I’ve seen offered for
sale white noise generators designed to aid the onset of sleep that reproduce
the sounds of air conditioners, traffic and so forth. The hum of the city
indeed, in such a context perhaps it does approach musicality, eh?
It’s different in the country
as well. For all that soothing noise in the city there’s much to be said for
the silence of the country. Of course, it’s only silence for the first wee bit
you live out here. There’s the soughing of the breeze through the pines and
junipers, in season there’s the crickets and frogs. With the dawn comes the
birdsong that changes with the season, larks, martins, swallows of the summer,
chickadees of the winter and with the addition of ducks and geese a
happy mix of all in the spring and fall. Of an evening in the winter if you
listen close you’ll hear owls talking in the trees behind the house. Then there
are the ravens, crows and magpies croaking and screeching all year round oft
times joined by their quieter jaybird cousins. Oh, there’s the occasional hum of
traffic on the unpaved county road out front but it seems to fit with the rest.
Sirens are rare enough to cause you to go look make sure it's not a neighbor in
distress.
Of course that’s all outside.
Once inside a well-insulated house--and yours had better be or you’ll either
shiver all winter or propel the children of propane or electric company execs
through college--things get a lot quieter. Well, in winter that is. With a lack
of air conditioning up here in the altitude—Denver may brag about ‘Mile High’
and all that but they’re all flatlanders to us here at a mile and a half and
up—your windows are open all summer letting in the gentler hum of the
country.
Still and all when things
quiet for the night, just the frogs and crickets providing a soft ambiance, all
those noises masked by the city creep into consciousness. Yes, stolen by the
hum of the city, here in the country they still exist—Things That Go Bump in
the Night.
It’s amazing how much noise
there is when the refrigerator stops, the fans are off, the TV quiet. If you
sit quietly, perhaps reading or just drifting, the sound is deafening. Clunk.
Thump. Crash-tink-whump. Scritch-scritch-scritch. BANG. What the hell is
making all that noise?
After my wife died the kids,
family and friends all went home. I sat in the living room all alone and
listened not to the hum of the city but the symphony of an empty house. Some
you could identify with practice—the dog scratching while in his crate,
creating a whump-whump-whump noise with overtones of rattle-rattle-rattle. The
soft scurry and scritch of mice and voles you understood. The romance and
battles of the barn cats outside—terrifying when first heard but merely
annoying once understood. The bump and hum of the refrigerator singing its
measured song. All these things are accustomed, perceived, understood and
ignored. Oh, you might put a mouse trap out now and again or throw something
handy at a cat in a moment of pique, but by and large, like the hum of the
city, you just don’t really hear it on a conscious level.
The other though. Sometimes
there’s a bang as loud a slamming door out in the garage. So you go out there
with a bit of trepidation, bear maybe? Probably not a mountain lion—they’re too
solitary and people-phobic. Oh, shit, not a skunk I hope! You think, "how
did they get in there?" All the windows are closed, the doors latched . .
. thinking thusly out you go to find . . . nothing. There’s no animal foraging.
Nothing seems moved; everything remains in its place. What the hell made
that noise?
It’s not the only one.
There’s bumps and bangs, thumps and thuds, crashes and creaks from upstairs if
your down, downstairs if you’re up, elsewhere from where you are, all in the
amazing talking house. What the hell is making that noise!
So then. Is this the genesis
of the scary stories that we’ve heard? Ghouls, zombies, the sidhe, changelings,
ghosts, nightwalkers, skinwalkers, banshees, vampires, werewolves-werebears and
werewhatnots (Hm. Are there werechickens?), well, you get the idea. The human
imagination that harnesses fire, invents the wheel, the lever, pickup trucks
and ultralight jet-packs also invents all that scary stuff. Sorta gives
credence to the eastern concept of yin and yang. Yep, it’s like, “Come to the
Dark Side, Luke, we have cookies.” Ok, maybe the cookies are a bit much and it
should be, “. . . we have scary crap.”
Then too, there’s the
Original Slick Willie’s take in Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and
earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I cannot remember if
all these noises have been a part of this house since we came in August of
2000. Honestly I cannot. In addition I am not so jaded in my aging view to
think that creation exists only in corporeal form. Even in the birthplace and
converted habitats of that most logical of religions, Buddhism, are there
legends of spirits unbound that wander the earth. I do suspect all that we
think we know of spirits and their kin are, to again quote the Bard, “. . . a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”
Maybe one of the things
investigators of the paranormal talk about is accurate. Maybe spirits do hang
around where they died and try with little success--unless you believe in
mediums--to communicate with us. Maybe the clunk, thump, crash-tink-whump,
scritch-scritch-scritch and BANGs are someone trying to say, “Hey! How’s it
going? I’m here!” My wife Beth maybe? I don’t know. But you know even if all
the noises are just the odd creaks, groans and bumps of a twenty-four year old
house, somehow that thought that it could be Beth makes them a little less
scary.
