New York City Roars

There’s a constant roar in New York City. I step out on the balcony at 5:30 in the morning, and it’s there. Walking in the evening in Tudor City, or Riverside Park, or up high on Central Park West, or deep in the West Village—wherever I go, it’s there. It’s a machine-sound, not specifically traffic, or any one isolated sound, but an overall and underall roar, like a huge fan that never stops.

On top of it are layered the distinct, easily named sounds:
• the deep rumble, clatter, and bang of the dump trucks from hell as they bounce over metal plates in the road
• sirens
• horns
• traffic
• helicopters taking off or landing
• loud, inescapable cell phone conversations
• scaffolding being put up or torn down
• buses pulling to a stop and accelerating away, doors opening and closing, wheelchair lifts descending and ascending
• young people who’ve been drinking, laughing and talking loudly on the streets
• homeless men belching and yelling curses at strangers
• parents calling out to their young children as they bolt down the sidewalk
• couples talking, flirting, arguing, deciding where to go, what to do
• dogs scuffling and their people pulling them back with sharp “no’s” and yanks
• even the occasional bird peeping, tweeting, cawing

Then come the lulls, which are never, ever silent, but are filled with the roar of a river of sound that never sleeps.

The only places I’ve ever heard silence in New York City are indoors: wealthy homes with sound-deadening windows, churches with thick stone walls, apartments with back rooms facing other back rooms—these are actually rarely silent because of construction, people blowing horns, kids playing outdoors, and so on, but every now and then, all of this activity ceases at the same time, and there is a moment of blissful silence.

In his book This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel J. Levitin explains that pitch is directly mapped onto the brain: “If I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precisely that frequency, causing the electrode to emit electrical activity at 440 Hz—for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain!” (p. 29).

I wonder what living in the constant roar of New York City is doing to my brain.

When I went to the mountains of Colorado this summer, there was no constant roar, just the occasional car passing by below the hill and lots of birds and bugs making their calls and cheeps and creaks. I heard the silence, but I also heard a constant internal roar in my ears. Now that I’m back, I notice the roar in my ears is there all the time, and I wonder if it was always this way, or if it’s only been this way since I’ve lived in the city, and if so, when did it start? And if this is the case for me, what is the case for others? What do others hear?

Bonding with Nature: Part 7—Fierce Mothers


I was out in the country, visiting a friend’s home in the woods outside of Woodstock, NY. It was night time, and we stepped out on her deck to look at the view. The sky was a beautiful blue-black, and we saw stars and the ground sweeping away down below us into the valley filled with trees and mountains out in the distance. The air was chilly, and we turned to look back at the warm indoors, the lights glowing through the sliding glass doors. Then something moved.  We heard a rustling and then saw jerky, erratic, fast dark wings flying hurling at the doors. What was it? A bat? No, a bird. Throwing herself at the door, over and over. Weird, death throe movements. Was she poisoned and having a nervous system meltdown? We huddled as far from the door as possible, not sure what to do. We didn’t want to watch the dark body flinging itself in grotesque contortions at the glass, but it was hard to turn away, and we had to get back in through that door. All the other doors were locked, and no one was inside, and it was cold. Was this a mother trying to protect her young? But where was the nest, and it looked more like she was trying to kill herself, and why wasn’t she flying at us if she was trying to scare us away, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could just tell her to let us go through the door, and we’d leave her alone? She paused in her bombing of the door. We ran to it, opened it slightly, and squeezed through as fast as we could. She didn’t appear again. The next day, my friend found her nest close to the door.

Here’s to fierce mothers who protect their young even at the cost of their own lives in any way that they know how, even if it doesn’t always make sense to those on the outside, and sometimes not even to those on the inside.