Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Background Noise

In West Memphis two interstates - I-40 and I-55 - run together for a few miles. I've heard that this is the busiest stretch of road in the United States, though that may be an exaggeration. It's certainly busy.

I grew up a few blocks away from this stretch of highway. The hum and whine of truck tires has always been in the background, as far as I'm concerned. I remember sitting by the fire in my grandfather's workshop in the backyard on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving one year. I was ten or so, and it was cold and gray outside, but warm and smelling of cedar shavings inside. My grandfather was whittling and probably smoking his pipe. The only sound was the crackle of the fire, his knife slicing off paper-thin slivers of wood and the interstate, murmuring in the background.

It's a few years later. A summer night in high school. My mom has already gone to work, my grandmother is in Florida at my sister's house. I'm outside, following the dog around the yard. I'd been off on some teenage adventure - drinking, chasing girls, or some combination of the two - and just gotten home a few minutes before. Life is good. The interstate agrees.

Even sitting in the house you could hear it, assuming neither the heater nor the air conditioner was on. Turn off the TV or the radio, sit and listen for a minute. There it is: endless tires on concrete. I would crack the window in my bedroom and there was the finest white-noise source in the world.

I went to college in Conway, Arkansas. The background sounds were very different. First in the dorm, where there was a constant babble of young man swagger, female yips, and drunken howls. It never stopped, though it did pause a bit in the early hours of the morning.

After Sonya and I got married we lived in some cheap apartments near the school. The ghetto mamas would walk outside their doors and whistle across the courtyard and then hold screaming conversations. If we left the bedroom window opened at night we'd hear cows in a nearby field. Livestock in town.

We moved to a new place, big and cheap but very, very close to the railroad tracks. Very close. We were on the third floor, and the whole building would shake when a train went by. If the windows were open conversation was impossible. We'd stand on the walkway on the second floor and throw apples at the train. It was very close. Not a bad place, though. It was a big apartment complex, full of college kids. We had lots of friends there.

Then, Memphis. At the Gayoso we were on the sixth floor, looking across the Autozone parking lot to the river and Arkansas to the west. Busses and garbage trucks would shake the building, but we rarely heard anything except the dogs in the apartment next door. The place was old, and built solid.

After a couple of years we moved down the street to the Claridge. Eighth floor, this time, and facing into the block. Six floors down from our bedroom window the HVAC system for the building roared and chundered all day and night. I felt right at home.

We lived at a place called the Orphanage when we first moved to New Orleans. We lived in a building out back, in the middle of a block, surrounded by the backyards of townhouses. The place was poorly build out of spit and chopsticks so we heard our nieghbors TVs and bedtime conversations. They heard our dog and almost got us kicked out. At night, though, it was dead silent. Maybe a passing car with a thumping stereo or a gunshot down towards the river, but most of the time? Nothing. Just quiet. I would wake up, sometimes, in the middle of the night and listen to the quiet. It was weird.

That place threatened to go condo, though, so we moved down the street to Sophie Wright to a long cinderblock building between two restaurants. It was nice, though. We had two off-street parking spots and a little garden out back. And bars and restaurants everywhere you looked. The bedroom windows looked out over the garden and into the back lot of Cafe Roma. They were busy over there until two or three in the morning, but they were usually pretty quiet. Still, it was the back door of a restaurant. We heard lots of stuff. Pots hitting the concrete. Busboys making weekend plans. Sonya once heard a guy get fired.

Then we moved to River Ridge when we needed a place by the end of the month and Mardi Gras was raging all around Uptown. It was great living in the suburbs, really. Everything was convenient, and it was a quick drive into town. The background noises were cars on Citrus and Hickory and the fountains scattered all around the apartments. And wind in the trees.

And, speaking of wind and water, I find myself back in Arkansas, living in a brand-new house where the sound of the interstate comes across the soybean fields with spooky clarity on cold winter nights. They used to be soybean fields, at least. Now they're all staked out and waiting for the builders to come in the summer and continue churning out my new little neighborhood. The train runs about a mile away, too, and I love the sound of the horn. So does John.

"What's that, daddy?" And then he'll answer his own question. "Train. I like trains."

There is a metaphor here, or symbolism, or something in growing up near the road and the contrast (irony? I don't know) of settling down by the same road years later. I don't care to look for it. I am where I am. It's more than good enough.

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