It’s So LOUD.

Art imitates life imitates art- musings from a line out of “Outlander”

I finally got fed up with Outlander. I can only take so much damsel-saving, sword-waving, gasping sex and bosom-revealing. Just exhausted. I tip my hat to high-quality production values but I am done with Netflix programs which feature Men Who Likely Smell Very Bad.

However, just as I was about to slap the top down on my aging computer, the main character, Claire, who has been transported from 1743 Scotland back to 1948, is shown sitting near a window watching traffic.

To her bewildered modern-day husband, she says in obvious distaste, “It’s too loud.”

Finally. Something I can relate to. It IS too loud.

Like Colorado is. Already.

I wonder how many of us can relate right now. Right about the time some of us, if not many, were beginning to really enjoy the sounds of birds, owls, and all the other winged and four-footers curiously exploring where cars were once too dangerous, the cars are back. ( I don’t argue the need for all of us to get back to work, I just argue whether or not we’ve learned a goddamned thing abut the environment from lockdown).

They’re retreating. I would too, the way folks drive in my neighborhood.

As a two-footer, I again have to watch out for cars whose drivers could care less.

Already.

If you didn’t grow up in the country, but instead were born and bred to Brooklyn, the sirens and clatter and shouting that is a part of city life, then I can understand why getting “back to normal” means getting noisy again.

To this, I might recommend my fellow Medium writer Lanu Pitan’s piece on noise pollution:

Many of us have no idea what quiet is, what it sounds and feels like, and how healing it can be. In fact, more folks are terrified of it, for the now-famous experiment that showed people would rather submit to painful shocks than sit in the quiet for a mere fifteen minutes.

Interesting. Sitting in the relative quiet for much of his adult life turned Nelson Mandela into, well, Nelson Mandela. But I digress.

On Friday I delivered my friend Melissa’s huge mutt to her house after a day of dog-spoiling. On the way I got stuck in classic Colorado mid-Friday afternoon traffic, pre-Conditions.

Sure didn’t take long. Traffic jams on side roads, and the floodgates haven’t even been loosed yet. People seem eager to get back to polluting, annoying, beeping, honking, shouting, and generally shoving “civilization” down the throat of Mother Nature, who was probably enjoying a few days of clean air.

And quiet. At our expense of course.

The startled native sons and daughters of Nairobi were right shocked to discover that there really is, in fact, a Mount Kenya on their skyline. Been there a very long time, in fact. Nobody saw it until our Conditions caused an impromptu Clean Air Act.

When you get our shit out of the air, amazing what you can see, and how far.

As a child of farms and forests, of winds and whippoorwills, of campsites and caverns, for me, traffic with all its smells and annoyances is about as offensive as it gets. A writer penned recently that we sit in traffic complaining about it as though it wasn’t us. Well.

We are also the traffic.

If I’m out driving, I’m part of the problem. If it’s loud, I am part of the noise.

That’s hard. However, having done this before, I want to live where I can ride my bike or walk to a market. Where I can get around for many things on foot. That’s most certainly a dream. I hope to make it happen. It may, it may not. It depends. Like everything else.

There is a slow movement towards opening. It doesn’t matter one bit whether I think it’s stupid. Better writers than I am have called that out. Of course after watching a few shows on Netflix I am better informed about why we stay stupid, but I digress again.

If my governor says we stay sheltered, I unpack the few things that I just started to put into my car trunk, and shelter. If we are allowed to sell and view houses, I will move, but only with the strictest of safety measures. If that means I camp along the road, I camp. With all due respect to my fellow Coloradans, after two months of joyously remembering why I moved here, I would prefer, if possible, not to be reminded why I am so eager to get the hell out.

I grew up wild.

A part of me has never been civilized and I have no intention of trying to tame the bird in my chest at this point. My bird is getting louder and I’m getting wilder by the minute.

I probably have a quick window within which to sell and move, and find a new place in Oregon where I have long wanted to live. Extremely attractive options- homes surrounded by woods, wildlife and near water- have opened up in my price range. I am hardly rich, but I have just enough to secure a spot with a tiny plot of wooded land. That is a return to my childhood, but without the heat of Florida’s unbending humidity, and the horrible bugs. To say nothing of the NRA lugnuts who run the state, but that’s just me.

I have no idea, nor does any of us, how much time I have left. If I have to spend a good part of it at home, I prefer that home to be a place where I can hike the woods largely alone, rather than have to dodge the Dodge trucks that threaten to smash my aging hips when I run. I wish to trade concrete for compost. I want to build a full gym in my basement in case I can’t use the one in town. Lots of work to do.

I am getting ready to return to the woods. There is work to do first before I can, but I am coming home.

…The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening