Bird Heard
Rebecca Johnson
Word Count 868
As we drove down the long driveway, my husband and I looked at each other excitedly. The wooded plot of five acres ringed with hydrangea bushes, a weeping cherry and boxwoods was stunning. The house itself, a manque cotswoldian pile was eccentric, but charming--a relief after the dozens of bland suburban colonials we had toured over the previous months. It was even priced below our price range, a balm to my cheapskate soul. “This looks great,” I enthused. Then we stepped out of the car.
“What’s that noise?” I asked.
“What noise?” the real estate agent asked, blinking dumbly, as brokers are wont to do. What termite rot? What ceiling leak? What tree growing through the ceiling?
I put my nose to the air, like a dog on the trail of a distant barbecue. Somewhere, in the distance, I could hear the diffuse but unmistakeable roar of tires pulverizing the pavement, pistons clanging and valves vibrating.
The agent ushered us into the house, where the thick, stuccoed walls blocked all sound. I let myself be charmed by the exposed beams, the two toilets in the master bath (genius) and the vaguely Gothic mullions on the window. There was nothing standard in this odd duck of a house.
Warily, I stepped onto the back porch, braced for the aural assault, but heard only the calming chatter of chickadees and sparrows. I let myself relax. Perhaps I had imagined it? After all, I-84 the highway connecting Pennsylvania to Connecticut, was almost two miles away. Could the sound of traffic really travel that far? (The answer, I later learned, is yes. The sound of “tire pavement interaction,” as experts call it, can travel up to three miles. At 1.7 miles, we were well within the cone of misery.) Because the back porch is slightly lower than the driveway, that side of the house was protected from the noise. I walked down a set of stone steps to the pool and listened. Nothing. Reader, we bought the house.
We moved in during winter, when I rarely had occasion to be up early but in the spring, we got a puppy who needed to pee at 5:30 in the morning. The first morning I stepped out the front door, I was in shock. The sun had yet to rise but the sound of the highway was so loud, I felt like I was at a Nascar rally. Not only could I hear the atomized noise of the tires, I could also distinguish the grinding of gear boxes and the pneumatic whoosh of brakes. Trucks. Apparently, one truck sounds as loud as 27 cars on a highway and truckers, no dummy they, like to be on the road when the traffic is sparse. In the stillness of the predawn hours, the hills were alive with the sound of hydraulics.
My husband, who is much more sanguine than me on all matters, assured me I would get used to it but my mood, already darkened by the news from Washington, continued to blacken. People advised me to “mask” the noise by buying a fountain. I fantasized about the limestone beauties in a Renaissance palazzo but that’s not what they sell on Wayfair. Instead, the fountains, are made of gray plastic molded to look like igneous rock with little pumps that often break after a few weeks (according to the reviews) and cheesy LED lights that whisper Vegas, baby. It would be the equivalent of listening to a toilet constantly running. Besides, ordering said monstrosity would necessitate yet another truck trip of the sort that was already giving me such existential agita. In my early career as a magazine professional, I once heard an ad executive explain that twenty and thirty somethings were their prime target. Being a broke ass twenty five year old, I thought that was nuts. But now I understand. At my age, stuff has become toxic.
Was I overreacting? Perhaps. But after a lifetime of believing I had some measure of control over my fate, I felt I had reached an ugly denouement at a relatively late stage. Between our noxious leadership and the immutable laws of noise, it seemed I was utterly powerless to change the things that bothered me.
In the spring, I attended a birthday party in a friend’s (very quiet) garden. An acquaintance asked me how I liked the new house.
“Great,” I answered. “Except for the noise.”
She told me about her own struggles with a certain bird who sat on a branch right next to her office window and screeched, “RE-Search,” “RE-search” all day. I laughed, thinking she was making a joke. She was one of those women who had been blessed with beauty and charm in her youth. The world wanted a lot from her and she had given it freely. Now, the kids were gone and she was trying to find her way back to her early creativity, but it wasn’t going smoothly. Oh, how I coud relate! She could tell I didn’t really believe her so she pulled out her phone to play a recording she had made of the bird. Sure enough, the bird was cawing “REsearch!” over and over. Crazy. But it gave me an idea.
The next day, I deleted the ersatz stone fountain from my Wayfair cart and added three new bird feeders. The birds were standoffish the first week and I fretted, like a host who has given a party where nobody came. But slowly, word seemed to spread, and my multiple bird feeders are now alive with blue jays, sparrows and rock doves (ok, pigeons) who shuffle through the seeds, creating a mess of discarded husks and white bird shit. The birdsong doesn’t mask the highway noise, but I take comfort in the susurration of their beating wings and the fact that no bird ever screeches, “Write your novel!” “Write your novel!”
Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020). Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.
