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Welcome to Wedgwood
 Charles Johnson’s new neighbors had hardly settled in when all hell broke loose — or so it seemed.
A
new Rasmussen Reports survey finds that 69 percent of Americans think
their fellow countrymen are becoming more rude and less civilized. Men
are much more likely than women to have confronted someone over their
rude behavior, though more women than men think sales and service
personnel are more rude than they were a decade ago. Adults over age
fifty are more likely than their younger counterparts to think it is
rude for someone sitting next to them in public to talk on their
cellphone.
"I
have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the
intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange I am ungrateful
to those teachers." —Kahlil Gibran
The
trouble started on a late afternoon in September. It was around 6 p.m.,
and I was sitting under one of the trees in my backyard, watching a
brace of pigeons splash wildly around in our stone bird bath, beneath
which a stone head of the Buddha rose up from the grass. My dog Nova, a
West Highland white terrier, rested peacefully nearby. I’ve always loved
this hour of the day, when the spill of late afternoon light, so
ethereal, filtered through old-growth trees in Wedgwood, a neighborhood
of gentle hills and slopes at the edge of strip malls, burger joints,
auto dealers, and Rick’s topless nightclub in Lake City. But here you
never felt you were in a big city—with all those big city
problems—because before the Second World War this area used to be an
orchard filled with more apple, pear, and plum trees than people, and
all that lush plumage absorbed the whoosh of traffic on Lake City Way.
Here, traffic moved along at thirty miles an hour. Years ago, it was
outside the city limits, and so mailboxes were not attached to our
houses but instead were out on the street, which had no sidewalks. It’s
been called a “Prunes and Raisins” neighborhood, but don’t ask me why.
All I know is that the spirit of place in Wedgwood (named after the
English china), where I’ve lived for half my life, was that of a quiet,
hidden oasis within Seattle, inhabited mainly by older, retired people
like myself who all owned dogs, and quite a few college professors since
it was only two miles from the University of Washington. A wonderful
place, if you enjoyed walking. But here and there things had begun to
change. Younger people were moving in, and some years ago the police
raided a home that someone had turned into a meth lab. Yet and still,
violence in Wedgwood was rare.
So
that afternoon, I sat in a lazy lotus posture under an evergreen tree,
the forefingers on each hand tipped against my thumbs, thinking about
images from a new poem, “The Ear Is an Organ Made for Love,” I’d
received via email from my friend Ethelbert Miller. Behind me, floating
on an almost hymnal silence, a few soothing notes sounded from the wood
chimes hanging from my house, accompanied by bird flutter and the rustle
of leaves at about ten decibels. Up above, the light seemed captured in
cloud pluffs, which looked luminous, as if they held candles within.
The soughing of the wind in the trees was like rushing water. I began to
slowly drift into meditation, hoping today would bring at least a
tidbit of spiritual discovery, but no sooner than I’d closed my eyes and
felt the outside world fall away, the air was shattered by a
hair-raising explosion of music booming from stereo speakers somewhere
nearby, like a clap of thunder or a volcano exploding. Now, I love
music, especially soft jazz, but only at certain, special hours of the
day. This was heavy metal techno-pounding at 120 decibels, alternating
with acid rock, and sprinkled with gangster rap that sounded to my ear
like rhymed shouting. And it did
rock—and shock—the neighborhood with a tsunami of inquietude. Its
energy was five billion times greater than that from the wood chimes. It
compressed the air around me and clogged my consciousness. I looked at
Nova, and behind his quiet, blackberry eyes he seemed to be thinking,
“What is that, boss?”
“Our new neighbors,” I said. “We haven’t introduced ourselves to them yet, but I guess they’re having a party.”
You
have to understand, I talk to my dog all the time, which is better than
talking to myself and being embarrassed if someone caught me doing
that, and he never says a word back, which is no doubt one of the
reasons why people love dogs.
One
or two hours went by, and we listened helplessly as the exhausting,
emotionally draining sound yeasted to 130 decibels, moving in concentric
spheres from my neighbor’s place, covering blocks in every direction
like smog or pollution or an oil spill, and just as toxic and rude, as
enveloping and inescapable as the Old Testament voice of God when He was
having a bad day. And now, suddenly, I
was having a bad day. This was exactly the opposite of the tranquillity
I wanted, but there was no escaping the bass beat that reverberated in
my bones, the energy of the shrill profanity and angry lyrics as they
assaulted the penetralia of my eardrums, traveling down to the tiny,
delicate hairs of the cochlea, and from there to the sensitive,
sympathetic nervous system that directed the tremors straight into my
brain. Unlike an unpleasant vision, from which I could turn away or
close my eyes, wave upon wave of oscillations passed right through my
hands when I held them against the sides of my head. The music, if I may
call it that, was intrusive, infectious, wild, sensual, pagan,
orgasmic, jangling, indecent, and filled me with foreign emotions not of
my own making, completely overwhelming and washing away my thoughts and
the silent, inner speech we all experience when our soul talks to
itself.
I
no longer recognized Wedgwood as my neighborhood. All its virtues—the
magnificent views of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountain Range, its
old world charm—had vanished, and I felt as if I’d been suddenly
teleported to Belltown at 11 on a Saturday night. I wondered if the
Generation X new arrivals knew how fragile our ears are, and how many
scientific studies indicated that noise pollution interfered with
learning, lowered math and reading scores, and was responsible for high
blood pressure, dry mouth, blindness, muscular contractions, neurosis,
heart disease, peptic ulcers, constipation, premature ejaculation,
reduced libido, insomnia, congenital birth defects, and even death.
Now
darkness had fallen, but still the pulsions continued across the
street, surrounding my house like a hand squeezing a wineglass on the
verge of shattering. My ears felt like they wanted to bleed. And only
heaven knows how Nova was feeling, since his hearing was four times more
sensitive than mine. I shook my head at the thought of what a
dangerously noisy species we humans are with our clanking, humming,
churning machinery and motorcars, our loud music and household
appliances with their anapestic beat, and fire sirens wailing. Walking
into the house, I saw my wife coming down the stairs, wearing her round
reading glasses and looking dazed. At sixty-two, she was slightly hard
of hearing in one ear, but the stramash had shaken her and made her feel
exiled from the familiar, too. She started shutting all our windows.
But that didn’t help. The sound curdled the air inside our house, and
her sore ears were burning as badly as mine. From the porch we could see
cars lining the street, beer cans thrown into the bushes, and from our
neighbor’s property there wafted pungent clouds of Purple Haze and
Hawaii Skunk marijuana.
“I
was reading the Book of Psalms in bed,” my wife said, “but I couldn’t
concentrate with all that noise. What do you think we should do?”
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