Train Whistle

There was a time not long ago when the sound of a train’s whistle could be heard late at night from my bedroom window. Laying in bed, I would ride its plaintiff cry like a surfer on a wave, catching the break, letting it carry me away to a place I remembered from childhood. When I was eight, my family moved from Winnipeg to Calgary and while my Father drove his car the long distance across the windswept winter-kissed landscape that is the Canadian prairie in March, the rest of us were on a train. It was a magical ride full of non-stop motion, the sound of rails keening and of course, that long, piercing wail that sounds the approach to an uncontrolled crossing. There is a painting in my living room of a train, complete with caboose, mutely journeying a similarly frigid oasis of stiff grassland, smoke from its engine billowing in a sooty black, tilting column. That train is a doppelganger of the one I rode and its whistle would be the same sound I heard on that long-ago journey, a sound of both industry and loneliness plaintively reaching out to whomever might be listening.

The crossing by my house that prompted the train’s warning is now controlled. The arrival of residential developers has dictated this necessity. People must find their rest from the din of modern society, like one horn less would make a difference to the din they create in their own neighbourhoods day and night. When is it quiet where you live? Eleven o’clock at night? Ten o’clock in the morning? Fact is, it’s only quiet once in awhile. Hardly a day goes by without some kind of noise pollution interrupting one’s thoughts. If it’s not a screeching car, it’s a screaming stereo. If not a roaring power saw, a howling dog.

Sometimes, I long for the day when all I might hear is the sound of a train, clickety-clacking down the track, making the earth tremble like some giant, prehistoric animal, piercing the air with its trumpeting lament. But then, life is something more tangible than the intransigent sounds that compose it. No one would forsake the sound of children laughing to hear a trumpeting train anymore than they would the dulcet whispering of a harp or the bright song of a preening robin after a sun shower.

Yet, its air of longing calls to me, an aura of false melancholy from a mindless creation. Like an echo of our dark side, we seem to subconsciously build pent-up primal feelings into the machines that power our world. The whine of a turbo charger, scream of a climbing jet, blaring claxons of emergency vehicles: these sounds seem outlets for our suppressed rage. What machines are constructed with pleasant noises? The blender sounds like a lawnmower in glass, screaming in protestation at some unknown slight. The coffee maker burbles, spits and coughs like a rheumatic old mule. Does your vacuum cleaner purr like a cat? Perhaps your washing machine sounds like a carousel when it spins? How about your phone? Does it play a tinny little ring when someone calls, or a song you think somehow defines you and so everyone should hear it?
Noise can be music or it can be cacophony.

Once upon a time, the train alerted track-crossers of its imminent approach. Now, the train trundles mostly in quiet, a distant rumbling its sole remaining remark. That train whistle? I miss it. It was a predictable cadence, as predictable as the sun rising in the east. It held no surprises, did not accuse nor berate in its tone. Only projected in an immemorial way the wonder and disquietude of human invention.