Quiet, please.

I’ve been told – mostly by my grumbling family when I ask, “What’s that?”of a sound no one else hears – that I have exceptionally keen hearing. If so, it may be compensation for my poor, corrected-since-the-fifth-grade eyesight, just as my husband Bob’s excellent vision could in part account for his (by my standards) so-so hearing. In that, we may be typical. Female homo-sapiens, I’ve recently read, have a better-developed auditory sense. After all, we descend from the gatherers, the ones likely to keep offspring fed and safe, the quick responders to sounds of distress in the crib or a tardy teen-ager’s key in the door. Our male counterparts with their ancestral hunter linkage require keen sight and spatial perception and have thus developed, or so it’s been concluded, and mostly, I suspect, by them, a greater proficiency in driving, interpreting a GPS system or reading the fine print of seldom-consulted instruction manuals.

I doubt my hearing is exceptional, but I do know that without fail, on one of our first days back on the island, an exchange takes place. Reading on the deck mid-afternoon or settling into bed at day’s end, I nudge Bob and whisper, “Listen to that.”

“To what?” His look is, understandably, wary.

“The quiet.”

 It’s a Midas-and-his-gold moment, when I want to scoop up as much of the treasure as I can – the quiet, so rich and full in itself.

Though, when it comes to quiet, I do have to exempt the birds. Or, rather, birdsong, the morning choir of peeps, tweets, chirrups, trills erupting from forest and shore, the myriad phonetic variations urging “get up, get up, get up” – or as one urban houseguest assessed last summer, “What racket!” when she stumbled into the kitchen at 6 a.m., looking as if the rowdy congress of crows on our lawn had in fact physically assaulted her.

Which raises the question, doesn’t it? What’s noise? 

Not too surprisingly, scientists now believe that of all environmental stresses, noise may influence behavior most. It’s likely to make people more aggressive, less social and civil. More broadly, it’s acknowledged that noise is a man-made plague that rarely occurs in nature, my awakened, grumbling houseguest notwithstanding. In other words, people and their machines make nearly all the world’s noise. Naturally, some of this is unavoidable. Hospital machines, for all their incessant squawks, whirs and beeps, do save lives, not to mention the hurtling, siren-screaming ride that often precedes them.

Most of us would probably agree that the shrill, grinding screech of a dentist’s drill evokes discomfort by sound alone – one mega-size nails-on-a-blackboard reaction. But on so much else, there’s little agreement. Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” blaring at 100-plus decibels may not be noise to the person for whom rap at any level is intolerable. A worker’s daily decibel exposure to just thirty 110-level minutes is mandated by federal safety limitations but no standards are put forth for how long or at what amps that worker can later rave at a favorite dance club. And no doubt our objections to gas-powered leaf blowers wane a bit when it’s our yard being cleared.

In discussing the hurdles of attempting to define noise, Winifred Gallagher in The Power of Place points out the obvious: “Noise is any sound the individual listener doesn’t like.” Some folks enjoy television commercials at their ratcheted volumes but I can’t hit the mute button fast enough. I’m also bothered by the loud beeping of reversing trucks and the amped up drone of overhead airport TV monitors installed it seems at each already fraught and noisy gate. Once, at an artist colony, the loud thudding rock music a painter required to do her large canvases distracted this writer who needs quiet to hear the rhythms of her words. Normally, I object to piped-in music at stores, some marketing executive’s notion that loud music propels us to spend. But one Sunday afternoon back in Illinois, in the produce section of a Whole Foods Market, I, along with fellow shoppers of similar age, welcomed the familiar strains of Bob Dylan and vintage 70s Motown – in choosing music, someone had obviously gotten the demographics of its customer base right. Bopping our heads, lip-syncing lyrics, we picked over cauliflower, tossed kale into our carts, looking as though we might suddenly break into song or dance, someone’s ill-conceived notion of a hip musical.

Certainly this island is not without its man-made noise. Here, the customary summer orchestra of leaf blowers, weed whackers, power washers, jackhammers and heavy construction equipment is translated into piston-banging lobster boats leaving Stonington at dawn, whining chainsaws after a storm’s blow-downs and power outages, assorted power tools and generators, some rumbling granite trucks, the occasional dynamite blast at nearby Crotch Island quarry. And the late night squealing of tires.

In patterns some call graffiti and others proclaim as signatures, the laying of rubber tire tracks on certain roads here is done by island youth – and a few decidedly not-so-young practitioners – known as “burners.” Such primal territorial marking can’t be accomplished without standing on the brake and flooring the accelerator, melting rubber into pavement, maybe blowing out the rear tires or dropping a drive train, and all at noise levels usually associated with Nascar. But this isn’t about noise, say burner supporters, or even the potential danger to other drivers on the roads. It’s an island rite of passage, a handed down tradition, an artistic expression akin to folk art, and recently heralded as a cultural phenomenon in no less than The New York Times.

Still, I’m in agreement with my neighbors. It’s reason enough to keep this end of our quiet road unpaved.