Noisome Noise
December 11, 2009
© Adam Granger
Mike Fisher (not his real name) dropped dead on the University of Oklahoma campus a few month ago. Mike was an acquaintance of mine from the early 70s in Norman, my home town. Apparently, he had in recent years taken on noise as his cause celebre. Not a specific noise like traffic or airplanes or people talking too loudly on their cellphones; rather, he was waging a one-man war against all noise.
His primary weapons were verbal invective and diatribe, and it soon became apparent to all that he was willing to except his own noise from his campaign, so that the upshot was that Mike Fisher was against all noise except that which he himself was making. The cruel irony is that, in addition to being a fecund polemicizer, he was a fiddler—a mediocre fiddler, hard on the ears and bitter to the temperament. (I know it's not nice to speak ill of the deceased; please know that this assessment is a charitable one).
At any rate, I got thinking about Mike's life, and how it must have been wearing on him to be fighting an unwinnable fight like world noise, and then I got to thinking about Mike's death, and how it might have come about. What I had heard was that he'd had a heart attack on his bike in front of OUs Bizzell Library.
What caused it? Did he keel over while shaking his fist at the chimes in the nearby student union bell tower? Did he overhear one loud cellphone conversation too many and pop a corpuscle? Were too many backpack zippers zipped? Too many squirrels chittering? Too many singers singing? I'll never know, and it goes without saying that it's none of my business.
Understanding that it very possibly had nothing to do with his noise fight at all, I have nevertheless been pondering Mike Fisher's death as a cautionary tale (not for you; for me. Rest assured that any hint of parable or sermon is self-directed; I'll start preaching to you when I get my own act together. . .)
None of us is without Mike Fisher elements. The recent replacement of the railroad trestle in my neck of the woods was a dramatic upheaval, and brought out the peccadilloes and pet peeves of many of us here. Some of us were concerned about noise levels of the pile drivers and other construction equipment, some about the traffic disruption, some about the increase of traffic on nearby streets, and so on. The St Anthony Park listserv was creaking under the weight of the daily entries about these myriad issues. Legitimate concerns all, and those voicing them were beyond reproach.
For my part, for the sake of my mental and physical health, I decided straight away that I wasn't going to let any of this trestle business get to me. I live closer to it than anyone, and I knew that the Mike Fisher in me could have a field day with this. I knew how loud the pile driving would be, because I lived here when a transitway bridge was built right next to the trestle, but I reminded myself that the whole project had an end date and that the railroad people were in a bigger hurry than I for this project to be finished. I knew I had no say in this matter, and that, to keep my head from exploding, I needed to adopt a Zen attitude and a yoga posture.
The issue that did creep into my Pet Peeve Zone, though, was one about which I had been active and vocal for years (so I guess that more than creeping in, it just got fatter). The location is a pedestrian/bike underpass on Raymond Avenue, the street which goes under the trestle, and the issue is how bicyclists routinely ignore the “Walk Your Bike” signs posted there. There is a narrowing of the walkway at a blind turn, with a stone wall on one side and a low railing and the street on the other.
Skid marks on the sidewalk from both approaches offer mute testimony of the inherent danger here. I have put up handmade signs asking bicyclists not to treat pedestrians the way some drivers treat bicyclists, I have made numerous entries on the listserv, I have asked cyclists I encounter in the underpass to walk their bikes and I have generally bent the ear of anyone who would listen, all to little avail. I've discovered that trying to change bicyclists' habits is about as hard as changing those of any other group.
And yet I persist. Why? Well, usually, like Mike, we just can't help ourselves, but sometimes we do actually succeed in our campaigns; sometimes the squeaky wheel does get the grease. Sometimes one person can make a difference. When I was a child, highways and streets were strewn with litter. First Lady Lady Bird Johnson started an anti-littering campaign which actually effected change in our national view of littering which continues to this day.
And some campaigns are more quickly and easily won than others: It took one phone call to the city fellow in charge of street marking to get the center stripes extended to better define the middle of Raymond as it curves to go under the trestle. (Of course, I was dealing with one guy there, not a diffuse group.)
But this bike thing is fraught with personal emotional risk: Once I invest time and angst in the issue, and “go public” with it, I begin to wonder why people aren't coming around wholesale to my way of seeing the issue: How can they not? I've put up signs, I've confront people and posted admonitions on the listserv and still they persist. In other words, I take it personally.
This is, of course, a foolish and egocentric conceit: the thought that people are breezing under the Raymond Avenue trestle on their bikes in the perverse hope that I am watching and shortening my life via apoplexia is bizarre and paranoid and, I'd like to think, not worthy of my intellectual capabilities, and yet, there it is.
So the pragmatist in me jousts with the idealist. Nothing new there. The bike issue is something with which I have to deal. Others grappled with noise and traffic issues, which, for whatever reasons of personal makeup, were a cakewalk for me.
And it was tempting at times to feel that I had self-control superior to that of some of my neighbors, until I would see a cyclist riding under the trestle. Riding on MY sidewalk under MY trestle! Then would come Adam the troll, attempting to collect from the miscreants a toll of remorse and contrition.
My cautionary tale of Mike Fisher, then, ends with a Dickensian tableau of friends and neighbors standing around my ashes tsking and commenting in hushed tones on how very much the bikers bothered me and wondering if that was what made my skull pop like a gravy-filled balloon (while, to complete the scene, my children, in the finest ragpicker tradition, paw through my stuff amid an uninterrupted string of uncomplimentary anecdotes).
The answer, probably, is embedded in the old saw “in all things moderation”. I will attempt not to lose friends and make enemies, and I will attempt not to become the grumpy old man who people will come to call “the 'walk your bike' guy”—the guy whom you cross the street to avoid.
I will watch for (or perhaps create) opportunities to post better signage, or a wider pathway, or some such, and I will, in the meantime, take a chill pill and thus, I hope, will I live a longer life.
His primary weapons were verbal invective and diatribe, and it soon became apparent to all that he was willing to except his own noise from his campaign, so that the upshot was that Mike Fisher was against all noise except that which he himself was making. The cruel irony is that, in addition to being a fecund polemicizer, he was a fiddler—a mediocre fiddler, hard on the ears and bitter to the temperament. (I know it's not nice to speak ill of the deceased; please know that this assessment is a charitable one).
At any rate, I got thinking about Mike's life, and how it must have been wearing on him to be fighting an unwinnable fight like world noise, and then I got to thinking about Mike's death, and how it might have come about. What I had heard was that he'd had a heart attack on his bike in front of OUs Bizzell Library.
What caused it? Did he keel over while shaking his fist at the chimes in the nearby student union bell tower? Did he overhear one loud cellphone conversation too many and pop a corpuscle? Were too many backpack zippers zipped? Too many squirrels chittering? Too many singers singing? I'll never know, and it goes without saying that it's none of my business.
Understanding that it very possibly had nothing to do with his noise fight at all, I have nevertheless been pondering Mike Fisher's death as a cautionary tale (not for you; for me. Rest assured that any hint of parable or sermon is self-directed; I'll start preaching to you when I get my own act together. . .)
None of us is without Mike Fisher elements. The recent replacement of the railroad trestle in my neck of the woods was a dramatic upheaval, and brought out the peccadilloes and pet peeves of many of us here. Some of us were concerned about noise levels of the pile drivers and other construction equipment, some about the traffic disruption, some about the increase of traffic on nearby streets, and so on. The St Anthony Park listserv was creaking under the weight of the daily entries about these myriad issues. Legitimate concerns all, and those voicing them were beyond reproach.
For my part, for the sake of my mental and physical health, I decided straight away that I wasn't going to let any of this trestle business get to me. I live closer to it than anyone, and I knew that the Mike Fisher in me could have a field day with this. I knew how loud the pile driving would be, because I lived here when a transitway bridge was built right next to the trestle, but I reminded myself that the whole project had an end date and that the railroad people were in a bigger hurry than I for this project to be finished. I knew I had no say in this matter, and that, to keep my head from exploding, I needed to adopt a Zen attitude and a yoga posture.
The issue that did creep into my Pet Peeve Zone, though, was one about which I had been active and vocal for years (so I guess that more than creeping in, it just got fatter). The location is a pedestrian/bike underpass on Raymond Avenue, the street which goes under the trestle, and the issue is how bicyclists routinely ignore the “Walk Your Bike” signs posted there. There is a narrowing of the walkway at a blind turn, with a stone wall on one side and a low railing and the street on the other.
Skid marks on the sidewalk from both approaches offer mute testimony of the inherent danger here. I have put up handmade signs asking bicyclists not to treat pedestrians the way some drivers treat bicyclists, I have made numerous entries on the listserv, I have asked cyclists I encounter in the underpass to walk their bikes and I have generally bent the ear of anyone who would listen, all to little avail. I've discovered that trying to change bicyclists' habits is about as hard as changing those of any other group.
And yet I persist. Why? Well, usually, like Mike, we just can't help ourselves, but sometimes we do actually succeed in our campaigns; sometimes the squeaky wheel does get the grease. Sometimes one person can make a difference. When I was a child, highways and streets were strewn with litter. First Lady Lady Bird Johnson started an anti-littering campaign which actually effected change in our national view of littering which continues to this day.
And some campaigns are more quickly and easily won than others: It took one phone call to the city fellow in charge of street marking to get the center stripes extended to better define the middle of Raymond as it curves to go under the trestle. (Of course, I was dealing with one guy there, not a diffuse group.)
But this bike thing is fraught with personal emotional risk: Once I invest time and angst in the issue, and “go public” with it, I begin to wonder why people aren't coming around wholesale to my way of seeing the issue: How can they not? I've put up signs, I've confront people and posted admonitions on the listserv and still they persist. In other words, I take it personally.
This is, of course, a foolish and egocentric conceit: the thought that people are breezing under the Raymond Avenue trestle on their bikes in the perverse hope that I am watching and shortening my life via apoplexia is bizarre and paranoid and, I'd like to think, not worthy of my intellectual capabilities, and yet, there it is.
So the pragmatist in me jousts with the idealist. Nothing new there. The bike issue is something with which I have to deal. Others grappled with noise and traffic issues, which, for whatever reasons of personal makeup, were a cakewalk for me.
And it was tempting at times to feel that I had self-control superior to that of some of my neighbors, until I would see a cyclist riding under the trestle. Riding on MY sidewalk under MY trestle! Then would come Adam the troll, attempting to collect from the miscreants a toll of remorse and contrition.
My cautionary tale of Mike Fisher, then, ends with a Dickensian tableau of friends and neighbors standing around my ashes tsking and commenting in hushed tones on how very much the bikers bothered me and wondering if that was what made my skull pop like a gravy-filled balloon (while, to complete the scene, my children, in the finest ragpicker tradition, paw through my stuff amid an uninterrupted string of uncomplimentary anecdotes).
The answer, probably, is embedded in the old saw “in all things moderation”. I will attempt not to lose friends and make enemies, and I will attempt not to become the grumpy old man who people will come to call “the 'walk your bike' guy”—the guy whom you cross the street to avoid.
I will watch for (or perhaps create) opportunities to post better signage, or a wider pathway, or some such, and I will, in the meantime, take a chill pill and thus, I hope, will I live a longer life.
