I was sitting out on the deck just now, drinking a hot chocolate milk and listening to the night.
Off in the distance, a freight train is coming to a crossing, but that is not the only sound of the night... You can hear cars starting up at a red light miles away. But even more amazing is the roar of I-84, four miles away—the tire noise from the traffic.
On the Cape... quiet! Relatively. Rt. 6 is less than a mile away, but at that time of night the only traffic is trucks resupplying the tip of the Cape. Sixty miles out in the ocean does make it quiet. But...
The New Hampshire cottage had them all beat... it was quiet. Really quiet! There was a story circulating that some folks from Queens couldn't stand the quiet. The nearest streetlight was 20 miles away! When you ordered pizza, you started driving as soon as you hung up because it was a 20-minute drive... you got to like pizza. It was an old fast-food restaurant with a drive-through window—you never had to get out of your car.
The background noise is something we don't think about because... well, because it is background noise. It's kind of like tinnitus—it's always with you, but your mind tunes it out.
You're correct about how intrusive vehicle noise can be. I live far off the I-5 freeway. If the weather conditions are right I hear the tire noise on concrete as if it were in my back yard a mile away. Worse as far as distance goes I can hear the bugle call of reveille or taps from the air force base miles away. My place of solitude is the shoreline on the Pacific coast where it's only the gulls and waves.
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