Precious Silence

The ambiance at the park close to my home in Cochrane is comprised of still water, still air, still leaves, and in the space all around—silence. Even the ducks in lower Mitford Pond where I stand are not moving.

Since we moved to Cochrane in 2011, silence is a change from Calgary that we’ve enjoyed. During the past year there have been changes. Construction has been underway on Highway 1A and Highway 22, both of which come through town. During the day, the background noise is becoming similar to what we lived with in our home near downtown Calgary.

In Calgary there was a constant background rumble that I could hear morning, afternoon, and night, with peaks during rush hours. We lived close to the Foothills Hospital so there was the sporadic noise from emergency vehicle sirens as well as the occasional Stars Air Ambulance helicopter flying low overhead. The cacophony was, in one way or another, constant.

Up until a couple of years ago, I could stand outside my home in Cochrane any time of the day and hear…nothing, except birds and once in a while a train coming through town.

The evenings are still like that. Even early mornings on the weekend are just as quiet.

When I encounter such silence my thoughts slip back to August 1996 when one of my sons and I were camping up at Floe Lake in the Kananaskis National Park. We were asleep in our tent one night after a rigorous hiking day into the lake. In the middle of the night, I woke up then quietly crawled out of our tent. There was no moon, but the sky was brilliant with stars, including the Milky Way Galaxy, stretching from horizon to horizon. It took some doing to get my son up and out of his warm sleeping bag, but the two of us sat on a rock and stared at that beautiful sky. The air was cold and still. There wasn’t a sound to be heard. That was the most complete silence I had experienced in some time.

I’ve not experienced that extreme silence in Cochrane, but there have been times when it was close.

What will happen in the future is unknown, although with the population growth in Cochrane I’m certain the noise here will increase. Still, I’m happy with what we’ve had since we moved here.

Esoterica

I was stopped at a red light on a nearby highway, waiting my turn. The car that pulled up beside me in the other lane looked relatively new. It had that new car shine and was well looked after. When the light changed to green it shot away from the intersection with a roar of the engine and exhaust. Right behind it was a Harley motorcycle with a similar unmuffled roar. They were across the intersection before I got my transmission in gear, and almost out of sight by the time I got across the intersection.

Clearly there was some kind of macho thing going on between the driver of the car and the motorcyclist. It was then that I had a bit of an epiphany about something that might be marketable in the future.

If you’ve stood beside one of the new EVs, such as a Tesla, you’ll know that when they leave an intersection they’re like a stealth vehicle…very quiet. My epiphany was that, even though the cars might change, macho guys won’t. So why not design a box of electronics that will detect acceleration and blast out an accelerating hot rod sound via a couple of good size speakers? I’ll hate it, but if it meets a need of certain folk could there be some money in it?

Just a derisory thought, but I couldn’t help wondering.