| 3:18p |
Hobbitry; living underground, part 3
Privacy and Quiet
Two things we do have with this underground house are privacy and quiet.
Originally, the front of the house had a tiny enclosed entry and a small concrete stoop, but then George replaced those with a room-size (and above-ground) enclosed porch. Much of the year it's either too hot or too cold on that porch to use it comfortably as an additional room, even with all its windows wide open, but during the years when we sold miniature trees it was a great place to grow plants, and it has added dramatically to our privacy. It makes the actual intersection between the underground living area and the outside world a whole room away. As for quiet: If the porch is closed and the front door -- a heavy steel door -- is closed, the only outside noises we can hear are the really loud and really close ones. We only hear traffic up and down the drive when there's something very wrong with the vehicle that's going by. We hear helicopters if they're flying low, and if a group of airplanes goes over flying low in formation we hear that, but ordinary air traffic is silent. People talking outside, neighbors having parties with loud music, birds carrying on, bears going by whuffling, cattle lowing and bellowing, kids setting off firecrackers around the Fourth of July, people shooting skeet or doing target practice, people cutting hay or cutting firewood, whatever ..... when the house is closed, we don't hear a thing. That feature has made it possible for us to use our place as a very good recording studio for both audiotapes and videotapes. And after all the years we spent in California in crowded mobile home parks and crowded subdivisions, the privacy and the quiet have been bliss.
However, in the interests of full disclosure, I do have to mention the Mystery Noises. They are of two kinds: Type 1 -- only temporarily a mystery, and fixable; Type 2 -- permanently a mystery, and, so far as I know, not fixable.
An example of Type 1 was a noise that went on for a couple of months before George figured out what it was, and it was awesome. The closest thing I can think of to compare it to is a very low bass note on a giant pipe organ. That noise would happen -- with no warning, and no pattern, and out of nowhere -- BONGGGGGG!!! -- and the whole house would vibrate and hum all around us. It wouldn't happen for days, and then it would happen half a dozen times in a single day; it happened at all hours of the day and night, and it was baffling. George finally discovered that it was coming from our well, where a metal pipe goes down almost two hundred feet into the aquifer. Somehow -- perhaps from earth tremors -- that pipe was occasionally hitting against the sides of its shaft, and the result was that Type 1 noise. The solution was stabilizing the pipe so that it couldn't move around like that any longer, and George did that. End of problem.
The Type 2 noises, which often go on for hours at a time, are an entirely different matter. George -- whose ears are damaged by years spent working on jet engines in the military -- can't ever hear them; in the daytime, when there are ordinary household noises, I can't hear them either. But at night they bothered me. One is exactly like the sound you hear if you're staying in a motel and there are big trucks parked in a lot nearby and running their engines all night. Another reminds me of the noise I used to hear when I lived in a house on an Air Force base and they would test airplane engines for long period of time. Another sounds like the roar of traffic on a highway. And then there's one that just sounds like somebody sitting outside the house in a pickup with the engine on idle. They're not loud noises -- they always sound as if they were far off in the distance, and sometimes they're almost more vibration than noise -- but they're persistent.
When I first heard those noises I spent a lot of time trying to find their sources. I would go to different parts of the house and listen; in some of the rooms you can hear them, in others you can't. I would go outside and listen; once in a very rare while, you can hear one of them outside, very faintly; most of the time, you can't. They remain a mystery, however, and the way I've dealt with them (because otherwise, especially because they keep stopping and starting, they would keep me awake at night) is by running a Sharper Image sound machine beside my bed. Usually I play the thunderstorm track; sometimes, for variety, I do the surf one. Problem -- but not the mystery -- solved.
My guess -- only a guess -- is that those Type 2 noises are infrastructure racket, from underground pipes and cables and motors and whatnots, with the sound being carried for long distances through the stone all around us, and perhaps through the well from the acquifer. [We know that aquifer goes a long way; the morning after the big earthquake in Mexico City, the water from our well was jet black.] I don't think these noises are examples of the equally mysterious underground "hums" that you read about now and then which have plagued people in above-ground houses in various parts of the country, because they're too variable. And I assume we wouldn't have them at all if our house were, like most underground houses, surrounded only by earth. But three sides of our place are surrounded by solid rock, and that makes the house a kind of giant resonating chamber. |