Summer
NPR is asking listeners to submit their “summer sound”. I know exactly what my summer sound is here in Northfield: the damned train. There are two sets of train tracks that run through town. I think the trains mostly ferry grain and materials to the Malt-O-Meal factory. The tracks run through several non-gated crossings and have to blow their 5000-tons-of steel-and-corn-coming through-motherfrackers whistle. The whistle is very, very loud. So loud, in fact, that there’s an urban (rural?) legend that the train conductor’s ex-wife lives in Northfield and he amplifies and extends the whistle’s blow to piss her off.
The trains are loud enough that Eleanor stops what she is doing and helpfully adds “Choo choo!” when one passes through. This happens about 4-8 times a day. It also happens 2-6 times a night. You can only hear the night train when the weather is warm enough to open the windows; humidity also amplifies the sound. Cue my summer sound.
Our first night in our house here was a bit wonderful: Eleanor was sleeping soundly, Daniel was about to start his first real job after 7 years in graduate school, our house was beautiful and the town’s motto was “Cows, Colleges and Contentment” and it smelled like waffles. My sense of idyll lasted exactly until the first train rolled through. Oh. No. ”Don’t worry,” Northfielders assured me, “you get used to it!”.
And maybe I do. Maybe by every September I have 5-6 months’ worth of progressively less interrupted sleep. Maybe by October I would get used to it. But, dear Northfielders, October never comes. Instead, we close the bedroom windows and I have 6 months to get un-used to it.
A small, if loud, price to pay for the glory of summer.
so true (although the sound has finally become white noise) — over the weekend i was camping in a state park up north and a train whistle blew in the middle of the night (askov, mn) and i thought “just like northfield!”