Fighting Noise with Noise

L.A. has some serious noise pollution. There are sirens—ambulances, police cars, fire trucks. The Good Year blimp motors slowly, high above us at least every other day (sometimes at night, one whole side of the blimp is lit up with moving advertisements). We are 15 minutes south of LAX, so we hear jets. We are two minutes to the beach, so we hear the Coast Guard helicopters as they patrol the shore.

We have an alley that happens to go downhill, so we hear skateboarders rolling by. There is also a big metal drain in the alley directly behind our place. Every time a car drives by, we hear the metal drain go up and down, unevenly, as the tires run over it.
We can basically touch our neighbors’ house on either side, which means, we can hear when they’re playing Lenny Kravitz. We can hear when they get home, leave, or simply are home.

And we are fortunate to live across from the one guy on the street who is remodeling—rebuilding—his house (and will be for the next eight months we’re told). So, every morning at 8am sharp, the pounding begins, mixed in with some cement trucks churning, lumber being dropped, drills ZZZzzzzzing, and Mexican music blaring over the lunch hour.

So, when my neighbor asked if I wouldn’t mind keeping an eye out for the air horn he ordered, I thought, really? You want more noise around here?

Our neighbor on the east side has taken kindly to us. First to B, now to me. He helps himself into our alley gate without knocking and comes right up to our open, sliding glass doors with his L.A. Lakers hat on and yells into the house… “hello?” I’ll come out from the kitchen, he’ll take a step inside, and ask if it’s OK to have a seat as he’s taking a seat at the kitchen table. Ok, I think…I guess I’ll take a seat at the kitchen table too. It’s such a departure from the oh-so-proper Minnesota way of doing things that you can’t help but smile a little. It’s slightly endearing. One of the recent times he did this, he asked if I wouldn’t mind moving his paper each morning from the front sidewalk to his front doorstep. Needing to help his girlfriend who is sick, he will be gone Monday through Thursday for the next six weeks. Sure thing, I said. No problem. I asked if there was anything else I could do? He said, well, actually yes. He just ordered an air horn because…

The neighbors on his east side have three dogs and did I know that Hermosa Beach has a city ordinance that you’re only allowed to have two dogs so he’s considering filing a complaint but he’s a nice guy and doesn’t want to do that so he’s already warned the neighbor that if she doesn’t get her three dogs to stop yipping practically in his windows he will do just that, call the city, but right now his next step is to try a air horn which he will kindly blow in the yippy dogs’ faces when they bark. That should stop them.

So, would I mind keeping an eye out for it and if it happens to be delivered while he’s away, bring the box in and protect it until he returns.

Are you tracking this? One neighbor’s dog starts barking probably because it heard the metal drain, the blimp, the Coast Guard, a siren, a skaterboarder, or a hammer, and then another neighbor blows his air horn at the barking, so then, I wonder, what do we do to combat the air horn? What should we order to add to the linked cacophony? …actually B can do a pretty mean loon call.