Sometimes silence is disturbingly like living in a vacuum.
I live next to the train tracks and within whistling
distance of the station. I can't sleep
soundly unless I hear the rhythms of the trains going through, first the 12:04
a.m. train, which for some odd reason lulls me from a light into a deep
slumber, and then the freight trains that rumble through off and on until the
first commuter rail starts up again mid-morning.
I live between two busy streets, and I like the noise of the
cars, trucks, and buses that go by all day and all night. Even though the traffic slows down
considerably after the last few commuter trains make their stops, there is
always someone driving by to work, home, the store, a friend's house. Always the sound of life's constant motion.
I live a few miles from the local airport and directly in
the path of both the hospital and traffic helicopters. There is always someone in the sky going
somewhere, filming the I-93/495 interchange, being airlifted to Boston, or
doing touch-and-go's. In the spring when
the windows are open, the buzzing of the engines matches the buzzing of the
insects that have come out to remind us that longer, lazier days are coming.
When 9/11 happened, all rail service and air traffic was
halted. The silence was, to use a
cliché, deafening. It was as if sound
had been sucked out of the atmosphere, out of my ears. Road vehicles still passed, reminding me that
life, as altered as it had become, still went on. During the blizzard of '78, my family lived
with route 495 in our backyard. When the
snarled traffic halted and people abandoned their cars and trucks, the lack of
noise was replaced by the howling winds and crackling flames of the fireplace. The usual noises to which I had grown
accustomed were at least replaced with busy white noise.
This storm, this Blizzard of 2013, though, has been
silent. Silent. I hear no winds during the night, though I
know they are there. For some reason,
perhaps because the winds kick in from the opposite direction, I hear no
howling, the mailbox cover does not bang off its hinges, and no branches
scratch together outside the windows.
There is no thunder snow. There
are no plows, even though I live directly across from one of the town's main
traffic department launch sites. I hear
no snow blowers as the storm continues to dump its best, intermittingly and in
varying snow bands. The silence is so
unnerving that I turn on fans, televisions, anything to remind me that life is
out there.
I am living in a silent white vacuum. As beautiful as it is, it is unnerving. It is the only part of the blizzard that I
cannot tolerate.
