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The Four-Lane Alarm Clock [1]
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Date: 2023-05-07
My wife and I don’t keep an alarm clock. The highway serves that purpose.
If you live next to an urban highway, you know what I’m talking about. Our home sits at the edge of town next to a four-lane state highway, right where it transitions into a surface street. You get used to the road noise, but it’s always there. Well, almost always.
And it changes with the hours of the day. During commute hours, the traffic roars like lions. Mid-day and later evening traffic brings the even rushing sound of river water With an occasional basso solo from heavy trucks, or a thud or crash from shifting loads as the trucks slow for the intersection.
And so business and commerce and social life flow by or 23 hours a day. But there is that other hour, when the all the trucks have headed back to the barn, and the bars have closed and the nite owls have returned to their roosts.
The quiet descends quickly and makes a space between days. The first heavy trucks have yet to launch on their missions; the commuter still slumber, even the earliest. It happens at 3 am, almost like clockwork: the hour of silence. Or near enough.
I know it intimately. I’ve never slept well. When I’m awake around three, I like to count the seconds between passing cars. Thirty seconds is average; sometimes, no car passes for a minute or two.
I enjoy the peace, though I do wonder what put those few drivers behind the wheel: they have their reasons, and they may be important, or at least important to them. Peace for me is not peace for them.
At four — almost like clockwork — the earliest commuters hit the highway, and traffic noise slowly begins to build.
Heavy trucks full of gravel or lumber or cargo growl by through the darkness, full of cargo to deposit at job sites or retail stores for a new day of work and business.
About five, the commute starts in earnest — we’re at the far edge of a major metropolitan area. It grows louder and louder until about 6:30, when it hits zenith and stays there for two or three hours.
After 30 years in this housee, we can tell time by the traffic noise alone: 5:15 AM sounds a lot different than 5:45, and 6:15 is different than either. Who needs alarm clocks?
Except on Sunday mornings. Sundays are different.
Now, 30 years ago traffic wasn’t so heavy. The hour of silence lasted more like 90 minutes. Cars might pass only every five minutes But even these days, Sunday morning is quiet. There is no real commute. Our weekday-and-Saturdays “alarm clock” doesn’t work.
I’m writing this around 7 am today (Sunday) and cars still only pass every 30 seconds. I hear few large trucks.
People routinely work on the Day of Rest, of course, more than ever before. It should be renamed the Day of Less Restlessness. That’s more accurate. And it’s still something for people to have more rest, though some may stay in motion.
But why must they stay in motion? You might say, well, the stores need to be open because how can I do my shopping? I work all week, and so does my spouse. I need to be there, employees need to be there, deliveries must be made.
Yes, true; but all the stores need to be open because both of you have to work, and full time. That wasn’t true 50 years ago. But it is now.
There’s no day of rest because so many of you have to somebody else’s business five whole days a week, and spend hours traveling to it. Then you cram all your own personal business into two days. And of course other people have to work so you can do that business.
I will say that the highways quieted during COVID, even in the middle of day. So many commuters had to work at home; and it could be hell if there were young children to raise.
But many did enjoy setting their own schedules instead of spending two hours a day to be somewhere distant at a set time. And they were productive, while leading more flexible, freer lives.
But now their corporate masters are dragging them back to the office. For what? For middle-management to justify its own existence? Or is it about ultimate control, on some level that I can’t fathom early on a Sunday morning sitting here in my pajamas.
We don’t need that kind of control. It’s not for our benefit, that’s for sure. I’m old, but I’d like to be here in 20 years. And if I am, I’d like to hear Sunday morning traffic when I wake up: every morning of the week.
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