Noise Pollution

We live in a very quiet place.  Even for a rural setting it is quiet here.  Visitors, especially if they're from a city, often comment on that.   It's because the area is so lightly populated.  We can't see the one house that is close to us, except that occasionally it's possible to get a glimpse of the upper part of it, in the winter when the leaves are down.   It is a little over 300 feet away, and  the next closest houses -- and there are very few of them --  are at least a quarter mile distant, and meanwhile the gravel road that runs past here, along the slope up behind our house, is so lightly traveled -- because it takes people only to areas that are even more lacking in inhabitants by a couple of orders of magnitude -- that I am sure there are long intervals, in the daytime even, when a person could take a reasonably sized nap right in the middle of that road without fear of being hit by somebody who's not watching.

Nevertheless, being people, we all make loud sounds  at various times and thereby create noise pollution.   But what exactly constitutes noise pollution is a subject for debate, because, like so many things, it is so subjective.

As this is my weblog, however, and mine only, in more than one way, I get to say here,  as if it's a purely objective matter, just what the noise pollution is and who the guilty parties are.

By far our worst offenders around here are hotshot young pilots in the military, most likely from a naval station way over on the Atlantic  coast several hundred miles away, who use the skies of this inland rural  area with its paucity of people for joyriding in their extremely fast, extremely expensive, and highly gas-wasting flying machines, roaring directly overhead and not that high up either, with incredibly thunderous blasts of noise, that induce fear because it's always unexpected and you rarely hear them coming -- the planes are so fast that they're already out of sight toward wherever they're not going in the ordinary sense of the word,  before you hear their noise.  They do this on the pretext of training exercises, but in reality it's pure joyriding, and as such, when one day the inevitable happens and one of those low-blasters no longer quite manages to clear the treetops under which presumably nobody lives, I fear that the regrets on the part of those nobodies will be on the ungenerous side.

Then there are the shooters.

As is to be expected, quite a few people around here own guns.  There are even two on my premises, though I rarely fire them.   One is a .16 gauge shotgun that I have fired only about three times, the last being over 10 years ago, so that by now the barrel has probably been throughly blocked up by the little bees called mud daubers.  But other neighbors have a lot more weapons, along with a hankering to fire them, and so every once in a while I hear their work, especially in the hunting season, when, adding to the general noise pollution caused by the firing, the hunters add that of their now released dogs, who like to race through the woods across the creek while yelping at the tops of their voices, I believe only to show their admiring, beer-soaked feeders that they're on the job for which for so many months they've been trained to behave during this glorious occasion ...or religious observance.

And meanwhile up the road lives a sheriff's deputy, and I believe that he has a shooting range, and every once in a while, always on Saturdays, he invites his colleagues for some all-day blasting that is reassuring to hear from a distance as well. 

And then there's the party that was held somewhere also up the road in the same direction, yesterday evening, the latest of such celebrations that are held around here, not often but once in a while,  and at one of  which I may even have been present.

My wife and I couldn't decide on who held this party, but we suspect that it was some young neighbors whom we know extremely well, though we weren't invited to this one.   And we only know it was a party because for about six hours stretching well into the night we could hear rap music being announced and played, and it was so loud that, despite the distance, I might very well have been able to make out some of the words, had it not been for my inability to speak rap, along with my attitude that, though it's supposed to be an art form invented and favored mainly by people with my type of ancestry, rap is still a lot of unending posturing and repetition and nothing more.

But I should complain, because, as with the firearms, even I, as quiet, even awesomely quiet as I have always been taken to be, even I create a certain amount of noise pollution, mostly in the cold months with my chain saw (actually two of them -- a person should have two of everything).  But I justify that on the grounds that it's good, honest work with worthwhile goals in mind, such as maintaining my woodlot while also keeping us warm, in contrast to flying thunderous jet fighter planes just to be flying them, shooting guns just to be shooting them, and lighting up the whole neighborhood with loud rap music, just to be....   Well, I can't exactly say what  -- and in the past I've  thought the same kind of thing with many other kinds of what passes for "music" as well, that were so fashionable with everybody else.   

Just being objective here.....