"It's quiet out there… Too quiet"

“It’s quiet out there… Too quiet”
By David Benjamin

“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”
— Will Rogers

MADISON, Wis. — Early in John Ford’s best film, The Searchers, the doomed Edwardses are settling in for the evening when an eerie silence settles over their desert homestead. The stillness is only broken by the warble of a bird that’s horribly out of place and time. At that moment the whole family knows, in a moment of stark terror splendidly conveyed by Lucy’s screaming fit, that they are going to die at the hands of a merciless Comanche chief named Scar — all except for little Debbie, who escapes out the rear window with the family pooch.

It is to John Ford’s eternal credit that he eschewed here the cliché that countless movie cowboys uttered when the Indians were silently surrounding them.

This hackneyed line came to my mind years ago on the coast of Maine, where I spent a night in a quaint B&B with a Boston-bred ex-wife. She had never heard such profound, unsullied silence. By midnight, the Comanche quiet all around us had driven her stir-crazy. Consumed by the heebie-jeebies, she slept nary a wink.

I understood. Even in my smalltown childhood, I drew comfort from the sounds of civilization filtering into my bedroom. My favorite was the mournful cry of Milwaukee Road freight trains rolling through the wee hours. Later, we lived on the main drag in Tomah, which doubled as Highway 12. There was no interstate in those days, so every all-night trucker bound north to St. Paul or south to Chicago roared, rumbled, ground gears and shook the window panes from dusk to dawn. Of course, when the bars let out every night at 2 a.m., there was a chorus of drunken argument and off-key song, punctuated by the occasional girlish squeal.

This hubbub was my lullaby.

Since Tomah, I’ve frequented some of the world’s noisier neighborhoods, in Boston, Tokyo, Paris, Brooklyn. Long ago, as I drifted to sleep in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, the notes of percussion were often gunshots, and the voices in the dark terrified screams that troubled the darker reaches of my fancy.
Incongruously, my quietest city neighborhood was Boston’s North End, which — after sundown — was the prowling ground for hard-eyed young men with Mafia dreams. They had been known to leave “outsiders” dead in doorways (and the Boston Police had been known to overlook these youthful pranks). I was an outsider. On my last night in the North End, before I crawled out the window, like Debbie, I noted how funereally quiet were these streets. “Too quiet.”
I’ve always preferred the city’s clamor — for what it evokes and what it promises — to its oft-ominous silences.

This timeless clash of noise and quiet was the focus of a recent meeting to which my fellow condo-owners had been invited by the restauranteurs across the street. The restaurant, called Red, has unexpectedly ended a decades-long search by Hotlips (my wife) and me for a palatable sushi joint in the United States. Red is so good and so rare that it should be protected by state law and perhaps subsidized by somebody — the Japan Society or the CIA (Culinary Institute of America).

I didn’t expect a congenial gathering. As a newshound, I’ve covered myriad meetings among white people of a certain age who arrive with monogrammed chips on shoulders, fiercely prepared to defend their property values against Scar and his marauders. I hesitated to go. But my love for Red got me there, and kept me around ’til the petit bourgeois tiresomeness of the condo nazis drove me away.

Red’s chief is a charming, solicitous and gorgeous woman named Tanya. She wanted to install on the patio a sound system delivering to diners a subtle flow of shmaltzy muzak — “Moon River,” “Strangers in the Night,” that sort of thing.

You know already how my neighbors reacted.

One woman dwelt obsessively on the issue of decibels. How many of them would creep across the avenue and crawl like banjo-strumming roaches onto her balcony. Tanya had anticipated this objection. She had brought a sound engineer who explained, exhaustively what a decibel is, how it’s measured, how many decibels there are in a recording of “The Girl from Ipanema,” and finally — but politely — how decibels are a piss-poor way to gauge actual noise.
The woman thanked him for his fascinating disquisition and then returned to the topic, repeating the same objection and receiving the same response, twice more, covering a span of more than thirty excruciating minutes.

That woman is alive today. No one strangled her.

After one plaintiff demanded a copy of Tanya’s “playlist,” another noted that people like me, who live on the “back side” of the building, away from the street, do not suffer equally from urban cacophony. Hence, we freeloaders will be spared the hellish racket of David Rose and his orchestra playing “Over the Rainbow.”

I was tempted — but was saved by another Red fan who spoke first — to remind this woman that she had once visited a condo overlooking one of Madison’s busiest streets, inspected it, opened the window, looked out, listened and then — of her own accord, inexplicably — she bought the place. Our street, West Washington Avenue, begins to stir with the arrival of the first garbage trucks at 5 a.m. Delivery trucks — booze, produce, furniture, packages — traverse West Wash from dawn ’til the last UPS gasp of the day around 8 p.m. West Wash is a city bus route. Other buses stack up in front of the Hyatt next-door. Commuters rush by — speeding, roaring, jockeying and honking — twice a day. We are the vortex of a downtown revival, construction sites in every direction, clanging, thunking, clattering and shouting. Two blocks away, a fire station sits poised to launch engines, ladder trucks and deafening ambulances, in all hours of day and night, at the merest hint of an emergency. There are birds squawking, dogs barking, girls laughing, music seeping from a hundred sources, jet planes roaring overhead. And every morning at closing, the drunks and celebrants, pouring from a hundred bars far less sedate than Red, wander the sidewalks of West Wash, bellowing, singing, fighting and damning at 90-odd decibels the Golden Gophers and Chicago Bears.

“Lady,” said her pro-Red antagonist (not me, and I’m paraphrasing), “you moved into the middle of town. What did you expect?”

Of course, this ordeal wasn’t about noise. Meetings like this are always about the trivial, tiny power that stirs the deepest human passion. It is the power of the toddler who learns the word, “No!” Sayre’s Law applies: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”

Ironically, my dyspeptic neighbors praised, almost unanimously, the quality and class of the restaurant they seemed determined to cast from their midst. They kept relentlessly amplifying their fears, again, again and over again, because they could not escape the intoxicating drone of their own voices, ringing in their heads and drowning all other sensations.

Even more ironically, for all their sound and fury, these folks will not persist. They all admitted that they had never before complained about any noise, from any source, anywhere on West Washington Avenue. They were kvetching now, at last, because they’d got invited (ad there was free food).

Tanya had to stick it out to the bitter end. I didn’t. Hotlips and I snuck away assuming that nothing would come of the meeting. Tanya would eventually get her mood-music license from the authorities — because, after all, this is the city. The city makes noise. The city has a voice. It has a melody, if you listen close. It leaks music from every doorway. Its sounds are always distant, ambient and vaguely revealing. Its cries and murmurs mark the hours of the day, from the pre-dawn garbage clangor to the peals of woozy laughter after every publican has flushed the die-hard drunks and swabbed the bar.