Changing a tire

Friday, April 24, 2009

If you have commuted on a big expressway, say the Edens going north from Chicago, to and from work, it may have crossed your mind what it might be like to have to change a tire alongside this river of a road. Or perhaps you have had the pleasure of doing so, as I once did. It was fascinating and terrifying. There is hardly a gap or a pause in that wall of sound. There is a sense of urgency to get the task done. But you gradually get the hang of it, changing the tire against the backdrop of the highway's scream.

Let me show you something here along US2.

Let's pull over to the side, partway between Wolf Point and Oswego. This looks like a good spot.

Here is the view looking North.

Pull well off the road so any trucks or cars coming by will have safe clearance. Turn off the engine, radio and anything else that makes noise. Let's get out of the car. Step down the road a little.

Now listen.

Listen some more.

You will hear something that you don't really get to hear in a small town or a city. Silence. Particularly if there is no wind. If there is a breeze or more, you might be able to hear the wind singing in the powerlines.

In the city, you might be aware of living in this vast machine that does not know stillness. Or has this roar become to us like water is to a fish?

From Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean:

I'd grown up learning to listen, straining to measure sound against the silence of open space. There, where the landscape repeated itself for miles in all directions, even everyday sounds meant something. A bull's high-piched challenge drifting in from the wrong direction told us a fence was down; the honk of a car horn meant trouble, a call to come. We knew the sound of a rig turning off the main road, the pitch of a strange motor, the growl of our own pickup pulling in for dinner. When our dog barked at night, Dad got his rifle and followed the ruckus to the skunk in the chicken house.

Your ears may get used to the silence momentarily, and you may begin to hear the small sounds—a grasshopper's characteristic pulse of the wings, a meadowlark or kildeer, a car from a long way off. On a rare day, maybe a far-off single engine aircraft.

This gives you a taste of what man did not create.

So let's get back in the car and head on west.