Noise Isn't Always Joyful

We hardly ever get pea soup fog in this area. I don't know why that is. I've traveled in places where it's supposed to occur, but have only experienced such an impenetrable fog a few times. It's foggy here this morning, Whatever the weather situation is that causes the fog also causes it to keep sound from escaping upwards.

It's sort of like how I've seen smoke coming out of house chimneys when i was a kid, and the smoke appeared to stop going upwards at some point and gather in streaky layers that fascinated me.

I heard an unusual sound last night as I was sitting around writing e-mail responses, and eventually it seemed so close to my house it motivated me to go outside to figure it out. It was the sound of the mechanical room over at the Wal-Mart strip mall about two miles away.

It sounded louder that it might have standing inside the equipment room itself. As it the low clouds were not only reflecting ambient sounds back downward, but magnifying them by making them louder than they normally would be. There are times when I wonder if I didn't select a weird location to build my house on.

I thought about and considered as many possible intrusions on my privacy as there might be here, but the idea that it might be contaminated by unwelcome sound wasn't factored in. Too late now. I guess I'll buy a new box of foam earplugs and learn to live with it.

I'm kind of a nut for ear protection devices. I worked in industrial construction where the job sites were usually populated with all sorts of loud heavy equipment. On large projects like power plants, oil refineries, and pulp mills there might be twenty or thirty diesel engines all running at various noise levels at the same ti-me. Much less all the jack-hammers and grinding tools whose aural output sometimes produced screeching sounds and low rumbles out of the human's audible range, but causing deafness without warning.

It might appear as if I've been at war with noises that were literally threatening my ability to hear well all my adult life. In the Navy the whole steel hull and decks of the ships rattled one's bones with the noise and the vibration of the huge boilers and turbines, as well as the sounds of the eight 5" artillery weapons firing and lobbing explosives to indiscriminately kill anything around where the projectiles landed.

I worked on shrimp boats working the Gulf of Mexico on and off for years where the diesel engines ran 24/7 the entire ti-me we were away from land. It was such a pleasure to work out of Cameron, Louisiana where we might pull into one of the bays, run the boat up on the sand banks, and shut that diesel engine off.

Sometime groups of wooden shrimp boats that worked the shallow waters just off the Gulf coastline would pull into Cimarron Bay, and with the diesel engines thankfully shut down, the only thing I could hear would be the sounds of laughter and cussing in Cajun French on into the night, and when it stopped, only the wind whistling or nothingness. I love nothingness. It's so easy to not do, there's nothing to it.

I don't know why I didn't think about the fact that the big semi trucks I wanted to learn to drive were diesel powered. I was so excited that this huge trucking company would hire me and train me to be a truck driver at the age of sixty-one. It wasn't until I finished the training and the company issued me my own truck that it began to sink in that I'd painted myself in a corner with the roaring sounds of diesel engines again.

I found myself doing all sorts of things to take my mind off the noise. I could and did wear foam earplugs to soften the blow, but I was driving 14+ hours a day, and the lining inside my ears couldn't take it. I really think I undermined my chance at being a professional driver by having little accidents to use as an excuse to git outta Dodge. Accidents are not unusual for new drivers. Getting use to hauling a 53 foot long trailer takes a while, but i may have unconsciously pushed the limit to get away from the diesel noise. I dread seeing those orange trucks now. Truck driving was one of my rare, but definitive failures in life.

Now that I'm reflecting on diesel noise, the whole thing may have started with the first tractor my father bought to do the farm work instead of the mules and horses I was used to. The mules and horses wouldn't work in the dark. Sunset was the limit of my work day because they would literally head for the barn whether I liked it or not. The new tractor changed all that.

I was a teenager and sudden found myself frenetically attracted to girls. I didn't know anything about girls, but I wanted to go where they might be at night so I could figure it out. Even though the animals limited my work day to sunset, I still had to clean up and make myself presentable. I didn't have a lot of time before the teenaged girls had to go home. Practically none after the tractor arrived.

The tractor had lights on it. It didn't head for the barn automatically at sunset. My father had this notion that make-do work would keep his oldest son off the streets and out of trouble. He'd have me out working the fields with that tractor until the neighbors would call to complain of the noise messing with their sleep.

I grew to hate that tractor. Soon, I ran away from home to explore what becoming a man meant from my own perspective. It didn't do any good. I was returned to my misery by threats of my father taking legal steps. My father couldn't stop me from joining the Navy when I was eighteen years old. He cried like a baby when I got on the bus to California and out of his reach.

Presently, from the point of view of an old man with only four months to go until I'm seventy years old, it didn't mean all that much to find out about girls. No matter what color lipstick they wore, the whole deal was about procreation and enslaving oneself to your children. I ran away from that just as surely, and by then, nobody could make me come back. I did though, and here I am. Waiting and watching for the ti-me to co-me when the chance is gone.