By Frank Vandervort
“Our cities are veritable beehives dominated
by the sounds of traffic and industry.”
~Sigurd Olsen
They are shooting over at the Washtenaw Sportsman’s Club this morning. It’s a half mile away, but it sounds like I’m in the middle of a firefight. Though a mile off, the din of Interstate 94 is ever present like the constant flow of a rushing river with none of the charm. At first periodically, then steadily, cars pass the house. I can hear them coming from well down the two-lane road on which the speed limit is 45 mph but on which many drive much faster. A car passes, then there is a momentary lull, then another goes by. Think of the inexorable splashing of waves against the shore of one of the Great Lakes and you’ll get the rhythm.
It’s Sunday morning and I sit on the porch overlooking the side yard. Before the day really begins, this spot provides a bit of serenity. This morning, I’ve been sitting here since the light was still faint, reading, reflecting, watching as a flock of turkeys—three hens and their poults, maybe a dozen in all—amble through the yard, and listening to a few birds sing. As the neighborhood awakens, though, I find myself sitting amid what American author, Barry Lopez has called “the holler of contemporary life.”
A loud pickup has barely passed when a jet taking off from Metro Airport courses overhead. It makes a noise that is difficult to describe: a sort of pulsating, static-y, echo-y screech. But the planes that are loudest, that sound like they might land on the roof, are the corporate jets and cargo planes coming from or going to Willow Run. On warmer days, a phalanx of motorcyclists will pass by, getting in their last rides before the weather turns cold, their radios blasting above the bikes’ growling exhaust.
At 8:30, a chainsaw revs up. Around 10:00, the piece de resistance of neighborhood noise: the couple to our east has fired up their lawnmowers. He has one and she has one, matching industrial sized, zero turn riders like landscaping crews use—they are what one on-line guide calls “the Ferrari’s [sic] of the lawn mowing world.” Back and forth and round and round they go, kicking up a dust tail. They start on the opposite side of their property, and as they draw nearer to us, the noise intensifies. The grass hasn’t really grown since its last trim (was it three days ago or four?). They give several acres of the earth a buzz cut that would make a Marine Corps drill instructor envious.
The racket first detracts from and then destroys entirely the morning’s peacefulness. As the layers of noise increase, I begin to feel it as tension in my body. I grow irritable, resentful, until finally, exasperated with the racket, and hoping to preserve my sanity, I retreat inside.
Since about the time Olson made the observation that serves at the epigram for this essay, medical researchers have been studying the impact of modern humanity’s noisemaking on our health. They have discovered that it negatively impacts us in a laundry list of ways. Among these deleterious impacts, some seem obvious, such as hearing loss, tinnitus, and sleep disturbances, but others are less apparent: cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, attention deficits, learning delays in children, and low birth weights in newborns have all been linked to excessive noise pollution.
The non-human world, too, is impacted by what scientists call “anthropocentric noise.” Wildlife researchers have found myriad impacts on a wide variety of species. These include changing habitats, deterrence of breeding locations, changes in feeding patterns and locales, and changes to the balance between predators and prey (because one may not be able to hear the other). As with humans, long-term exposure to noise changes animals’ stress hormone responses.
It has not always been this way. Referring to the pre-industrial age, the writer Ted Kerasote reminds us that “stillness was once the entirety of the world, a baseline quiet of wind and waves, of birds, whale, and human song.” Yet places where humanity’s racket is at bay grow harder to find as human beings have swamped the planet. In November 2022, the world’s human population reached 8 billion. Jenny Morber, a science journalist, explained, “As the global population soars, cities and towns sprawl out . . . [and] quiet is becoming increasingly scarce.”
I have noticed this to be particularly true in and around Ann Arbor, which these days seems to be a nearly non-stop construction zone. The reverberation of pile drivers, the whir of construction machinery, the muscular roar of big trucks crawling around the downtown and campus area were constant. Some of the construction noise was audible three blocks from the site; the noise from one often overlapped with noise from another. All this noise was layered on top of the ever-present sound of buildings’ HVAC systems, run of the mill traffic noise—cars, trucks, buses, delivery vans, garbage trucks, and sirens— and planes both small and large flying overhead.
But even in places like the Arboretum, Gallop, and Parker Mills parks, the noise of humanity is endemic. There seems to be no place in or around the city where one can find peace, quiet, or tranquility.
In recent years, I have grown more aware of and more sensitive to the noise of human “progress.” I trace that heightened awareness to a single experience.
Several years ago, I decided to backpack the Vermont Long Trail. The nation’s oldest long-distance trail, the LT, as it is known by locals, runs along the spine of the Green Mountains the full 273-mile length of the state from the Massachusetts’ line to the Canadian border. Time constraints dictated that we had to hike it in sections. On our first trip, we spent a week hiking though the Green Mountain National Forest and the Glastonbury Wilderness.
When we left the trail after seven days and six nights, we pulled into a little roadside diner to get a late lunch and plot our route back to Michigan. After a week during which we only occasionally heard anthropomorphic noise, I was overwhelmed by the sounds of the place: a dozen conversations taking place all at once along with the clatter of dishes and flatware. Over the counter, a television blared cable news. Above all the commotion, a cook called orders back and forth to a waitress.
While hiking, our days began early. We were up at first light and on the trail a short time later. They ended in late afternoon, three or four hours after lunch and an hour or two before dinner. Frank, my friend and hiking companion, sat through these hours saying almost nothing, simply looking off into the forest and studying the landscape.
I tried to do the same. During down times in the first days on the trail, my head flooded with thoughts of work and home responsibilities. My mind, like my body, was used to living at the frenetic pace of a contemporary, success-obsessed, work-focused urban life. I was unused to being still, to being quiet, to simply being. Frank, who lived for decades aside a small lake in a thinly populated area up north, was much more conversant with the practice of solitude than I. As he sat in quiet contemplation, I would grow restless and had to take a walk down along the bank of a creek or through the woods where I might sit for a time on a small boulder or the rotting trunk of a fallen tree.
Olson wrote, “Our lives seem governed by speed, tension, and hurry. We move so fast and are caught so completely in a web of confusion there is seldom time to think.” He wrote those words nearly fifty years ago. Our world has only sped up and grown noisier since.
I struggled to sit with quiet, to be still, to let go of the mental noise of my contemporary life. But by mid-week, I had at least begun to be able to still myself—physically and psychically—amid what Kerasote calls the “natural symphony.” During those afternoon hours in the mountains, the symphony consisted of small woodland critters scurrying about, the wind in the hardwood canopy, flowing water, and rain falling onto the forest floor.
In the years since we entered that diner after a week on the trail, I have actively tried to build time for tranquility into my daily routine. These are times that I have come to cherish. But it gets more and more difficult to find quiet places. It seems that I have to go further and further from the environment in which I live my day-to-day life to find anything resembling the sort of quiet we found along the LT.
Resettling in the relative quiet of the house (many of the sounds are still audible, though muffled), my mind drifts back to Vermont. I returned last June to attend a week-long conference, and I found myself with an unscheduled morning. I decided I’d visit one of the quietest places I know. To reach it, you must drive several miles down an unpaved, rut-pocked U.S. Forest Service Road to a trailhead, then hike up two-and-a-half steep miles to a mountaintop where a rustic hikers’ lodge sits on the shore of a small pond.
I arrived at the trailhead just as dawn was breaking. The mountain was cloaked by a thick cloud. The forest grew foggier with each step, the mist gathering into droplets on my glasses and arms as I ascended into the clouds. Moisture hung in the air, muffling every sound. Amid that deep quiet, I stopped to listen. After the sound of my own breathing abated, there was near silence, dripping leaves and a few songbirds the only audible things. Further up the trail, I came upon a rill running fat with rainwater. As it made its way down the mountainside, it flowed around and between moss encrusted stones then crossed the trail. I traversed it with a little hop and took a seat on a large rock, listening as the water flowed past. I could hear no human clatter of any sort.
When I reached the lodge, a hiker who had spent the night was just getting underway. Soon, he was gone. I had the place to myself. I settled onto the porch, my back against the lodge’s log wall. Through the fog, I could see only the immediate area around the structure and the ill-defined contours of the pond. The only consistent sound was the faint lapping of the pond’s water.
I sat amid the peacefulness of the place. As usual, it took some time for my mind to settle, to let loose the mundane thoughts that crowd in every day—so many, so often that I lose awareness of their presence, don’t realize that my head is full of junk. I sat for nearly two hours, saying nothing, being as still as I could, my mind as focused on the quiet of my surroundings as I could discipline it to be. Too soon, I had to leave.
In my living room, as the traffic rushes past and the neighbors assault their lawns, I long for the peacefulness of that morning at the lodge, and I wonder once again whether it may be time to seek out a quieter place to live. But leaving the home and community where I have lived for decades is difficult. And where would I go? Instead, as our region grows, we should be thinking about reducing the impact of noise on our quality of life, and we should ensure there are places where residents can find tranquility.
Frank Vandervort is a writer, clinical professor of law, and a resident of Ypsilanti Township. He enjoys being in, and writing about, the outdoors. His writing has appeared in Michigan History Magazine, The Boardman Review, and Bridge Michigan among other outlets.
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They are shooting over at the Washtenaw Sportsman’s Club this morning. It’s a half mile away, but it sounds like I’m in the middle of a firefight. Though a mile off, the din of Interstate 94 is ever present like the constant flow of a rushing river with none of the charm. At first periodically, then steadily, cars pass the house. I can hear them coming from well down the two-lane road on which the speed limit is 45 mph but on which many drive much faster. A car passes, then there is a momentary lull, then another goes by. Think of the inexorable splashing of waves against the shore of one of the Great Lakes and you’ll get the rhythm.