How’d It Get So Loud?

Noise, The City, and the Silence of Mountains

Yesterday I woke up to my neighbors bickering at five in the morning. The sun was barely out and yet they were already at it. I’m not sure how it started, but the last thing I heard before I woke up was them yelling at each other about drinking milk, I think, straight from the carton. I heard her laughing and wondered what it meant. If she laughed so hysterically to calm down this man who, at times, seems to grow angry easily. But I don't know. I fell back asleep as the argument died down.

I was woken up again, but this time by blaring music. It sounded like two songs playing at once—one sort of early 2000s RnB, and the other some soft 70s  jazz. I’m sure it was the same song, but the way it must’ve ricocheted between our two buildings and this quiet alley made it impossible to be certain what in the hell I was hearing. Once I got out of bed, the music died down. I made some coffee, and it all started again.

Usually, this sort of thing doesn’t bother me. I love the sound of silence, but also the noises of everyday life. As the youngest of a family of four siblings, I often went to bed with everyone still talking as I fell asleep. I was usually late to wake up so the sounds of people moving around, even obnoxious noises to me, have their own form of entertainment value. But not yesterday. 

It’s been a week since I came home from my short backpacking trip in the mountains and the silence, the pervasive stillness of the alpine Sierra Nevada, is something I want to go back to as soon as I can. If I didn't have to work, I’d go back now.

I spend my days full of sound. Most of us do. Living in the city, it's one of those things you sort of just have to accept. For all the liveliness of a city and the ways in which we can fall into new worlds and ways of seeing things so quickly, we must face the cacophony. And I find it not inherently bad. The speeding v6 drag cars busting through stop signs, sure they’re loud and obnoxious and make me curious why those driving them feel the need to be so loud and seen, but this has been happening for years since before I moved here, and hopefully will continue. It’s part of what makes this place what it is, for better or worse. Each sound, even the noises of garbage trucks, are all essential to what the city is and will be. And yet the silence is deafening, literally. It’s not something we can properly handle. Do a quick Google search and you’ll see that, beyond just impairing your hearing, it can even affect the health of our heart. But none of this is something I much of until heading out to that little lake with my siblings. 

From the dirt road it was only a four mile hike over a pass and into the small high valley that tucked the lake between ridges. Within it, you could hear nothing but the breeze. Sometimes I’d look up and there would be a plane, but I couldn’t hear it. There would be the occasional solitaire, or Clark’s nutcrackers, drab gray birds flitting between juniper trees full of berries, the trout hopping out of the water, hunting for flies. There were a couple other groups around the lake but we couldn’t hear them. It sounded as if it were just us, alone in the bright and idyllic mountain range.

Our phones were well out of service, so we spent the days staring into the water or trying to fish hoping to see just one under the blue veil of the undisturbed lake. We had books and so we read. The sun was out so we laid in the sun. Sometimes we talked, but not about anything too heavy. We just sat in the day, unstuck from all the devices that make this newsletter and the greater joys of our hyper-connected lives seem potentially worth its drawbacks. I couldn’t hear a single thing. Couldn’t be bothered by a notification. We only attended to the impulsive and beautifully emotional whims of my brother and sibling’s dogs.

We were captivated in this silence. 

Since returning it's most of what I can think about when it comes to that trip, what stands out beyond the rugged granite, ponderosa, Jeffery’s, and lodgepole pines. More than the sun that so easily burns at 7,000 feet. And I want it back. 

I’m not sure I have some grand statement to really say about silence. I marveled at it maybe because it was so unusual for my normal life. Each day in Oakland I get up, do some work until the early afternoon, listening as cars screech by, my neighbors bicker, or some other tenant in my building makes some chaotic and mysterious noise, or stomps frantically down the stairs. I get in my car and I go for a walk, a run, do some errands, drive to the beach. When I do this I pass cars convinced they're in Grand Theft Auto, or Fast and the Furious, cutting between passing trucks and blaring their horns convinced at how inconvenient it is that other people have to live their lives. And then, often I will arrive at the beach, my favorite place. The waves will be loud and people will jostle and argue over parking. I’ll get into the water and all I’ll hear is the blaring of the sea. Only in rare moments does everything become still and quiet consumes us. We’ll hear the soft lapping of the water around us. This quiet always feels special, only to once again fall to the torrent of waves.

But, up in the mountains it’s silent. I would love to have more of it, but I wonder if I’d just grow sick of it too, the way that I sometimes get sick of all the chaos and noise of this city, of any city. I likely would. The lack of sound, I’m sure in some odd way, would become deafening. But I’m not sure we really need all this sound in our lives. It can't be all that good for us.