Open Writing

Unlike many people who suffer hearing loss as they age, my hearing appears to be getting more sensitive. It is also becoming less selective, which I discovered is yet another manifestation of aging to add to the list. Apparently the brain functions that process auditory input become less efficient at filtering out unwanted or unnecessary sounds in a noisy environment. As an example, when I’m eating in a restaurant I can often hear a conversation three tables away more easily than I can hear my dinner companions.

I suppose I should be grateful that I have retained my hearing without need for electronic aids, but unfortunately this has coincided with a considerable increase in the noise of everyday life. When I worked in industry, great pains were taken by conscientious employers like IBM and Dupont to both limit the decibel sound level of machinery and processes, and to protect their employees’ hearing in noisy manufacturing locations. Strangely, these preventative measures haven’t carried over into everyday life.

In Florida, where I live in the winter, there is little escape from the auditory presence of Japanese internal combustion engine technology. On the highways, my ears are assaulted by the 4-stroke, four-cylinder, liquid-cooled, 16-valve motorcycles put out by Suzuki and Yamaha etc. One road they travel is fully 250 yards from my house, but on a quiet night you could believe they were coming right through the bedroom.

On the water, the cacophony is taken up by the Yamaha and Kawasaki sea scooters, and outboard motors from an array of manufacturers. In between, there’s the almost constant buzz of garden machinery – lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, chain saws etc. Over my head, on a nice day, there could very well be an ultra light airplane, powered by, wouldn’t you know, a Japanese snow-mobile engine.

Milford Harbor, where I keep my boat through Connecticut’s summer, seems to have an attraction for the owners of those monster and monstrous craft, the “cigarettes.” From 30 to 50 feet long, narrow in beam, and equipped with two or more engines delivering more than 1000 combined horsepower, these boats typically can travel at speeds over 120mph in calm waters. For reasons I’m not privy to, the owners find it necessary to start up and rev the engines at the dock every couple of days, not once but a number of times. The noise of the straight-through exhaust engines on open water can be heard clearly from 4 or 5 miles away, so in an enclosed harbor it’s almost unbearable.

An increasingly common and unavoidable source of noise these days comes from the 1000 watt amplifier systems in some cars; bearing in mind that 1000 watts is equivalent to the power consumption of small electric radiators or a really big toaster. That degree of sound amplification would be more than adequate for a concert hall, let alone the 50 or so cubic feet of the average car’s interior. Even at a distance of a quarter of a mile or so, the bass reverberations of pop music from these boomers not only can be heard, but also felt.

During my life in England, thunderstorms seemed to be a comparative rarity. When they occurred, the weather conditions that made them possible took all day to build, so there was almost always plenty of warning. With one exception, I don’t remember any of them being so severe as to be frightening. The one memorable storm was so brutal and long-lasting that my parents, my sister and I took refuge on the stairs of our house; it being the one place where we couldn’t see out. But of course we weren’t able to escape the sound of the thunder, which was so loud it was painful.

In the USA, thunderstorms are much more frequent, severe and long-lasting, as behooves a country with such a large land mass. In the security of my house I find them unsettling, but when I’m aboard my boat I want to flee. The storms form suddenly, sometimes literally from a clear blue sky. I go through the old ritual of counting - one thousand, two thousand, three thousand or more, between the lightening and the thunder, trying to gauge both the distance away and whether the storm is approaching or moving off.

Despite my homespun, but usually accurate measurement technique, an overhead strike always takes me by surprise. The sudden bright flash, followed immediately by a sound that’s like a physical blow to my body, is quite unnerving. Those are the times when a little hearing impairment might be appreciated.

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