Portage River Farm

Prior to our move to this farm, we lived in the city of Ypsilanti. We lived on a little postage stamp of a yard in a little brick ranch house surrounded by a sea of little brick ranch houses. Our house was located two blocks from a major freeway and the roar of it permeated our existence. We also had neighbors who would sit in their cars late into the night and listen to their car stereos until 2 or 3 in the morning. Those cars sat in the driveway a dozen or so feet on the other side of the wall from our headboard!

Since our move, I have been reveling in the serene quiet of the countryside. Whenever I am outside I am always listening to the birds and any other sounds that come to me. I have been shocked at how easily I can pick up conversations from my neighbors' houses that are a quarter mile away. When our dog Finn barks to be let back into the house, the sound rolls and echoes through our woods and back again like a shock wave disturbing the tranquility of the world around us.

In late winter, I happened to be walking through the woods with my seven-year-old son Aidan. We were intently listening to the sounds of the nuthatches and woodpeckers as they flitted from tree to tree around us. It was then that he looked up at me and said something that I just couldn't wrap my mind around. "Dad, it's so noisy here!"

I remember expressing my dismay at his statement. "How can you say that?" "It's amazingly quiet here!" His statement made no sense to me. He didn't offer an explanation that I could grasp and I gradually forgot all about it as I immersed myself in the pleasure of our walk in the winter woods.

It wasn't until Aidan had uttered the same phrase to my wife and I several more times that it finally dawned on me what he was saying. Aidan has lived his whole life in the sonic shadow of the freeway. To him that background noise was normal and it drowned out or at least diminished everything else in our surroundings, especially distant bird songs and conversations.

Now I understand that his experience of having the background noise turned down is one of suddenly being conscious of so many noises around him. The birds, dogs, people and cars out on the gravel road are all so much louder to his perception than they have been in the past. While I am confident that the overall sound level is much quieter here, the individual sounds against a background of relative silence make them seem so much louder.

So I guess I have to agree that it is noisy here but it's the kind of racket that is music to my ears!