Noise

People expect South America, really all Latin countries to involve more noise. It's a right assumption in my experience. Even the middle of nowhere has louder birds and bugs, let alone the hustle of motorcycles and cars and trucks and people and music and cars with PA's that drive slowly all over town advertising, or god forbid living within hearing distance of a club or popular bar or place with televisions during an especially pride inducing soccer match.

I tend to vacillate between an appreciation of the cultural differences and a solid annoyance at the disruption. Some days it fills my ears happily, all this noise of life. Other times I put on my headphones and think about the nothing that one hears in the woods of the Olympic mountains. In any case, along with the birds here, there are also dogs. A pack right next door and a pack across the street. One might assume they live to antagonize one another. Or that they are engaged in a futile game of Red Rover. Futile because they live only behind gates. Gates easy enough to see through and be seen through but impossible to exit through. When the next door neighbor dogs bark, no one ever ever ever yells to them to be quiet, no matter the hour. The tiniest sound and they bark for roughly 5-10 minutes. Not to be left out, this usually involves the across-the-street dogs to chime in. Well so I sometimes scratch my head and wonder where the humans are in all this mess. Where are the irate and sleepy neighbors through these debacles? Are they desensitized to it all? Or have they lived with the futility all this time and just don't think about it. That sort of thinking leads me to feel all out of place, a foreigner in a land where people's ears and patience are superior to mine. Then something great happened.

It's 'round eight last night and the dogs are going for it like usual. Then I hear a loud boom which nearly knocked the book right out of my hand. It came with quite a flash too, so I run to the window and see the across-the-street neighbor standing in front of his house lighting M80s and side-arming them under the gate of the next-door-neighbor's house where the dogs are. The second and third little bombs were right on target, sliding under the gate before going off. His daughter was next to him, she might as well have been jumping and clapping since she seemed so happy to watch. After the blasts, the street was silent. The shirtless across-the-street neighbor went back into his house and all in all I felt a little less out of place.