Noise!!!

It’s hard to say which noise will force you out of bed in the morning but it’s safe to say that sound will get you before sun.  And everyone who has come to visit me in my site has made roughly the same pre-dawn assessment: it’s really goddamn loud here in the morning.

             The ancient diesel engine on the bus to San Carlos starts rumbling around 5am.  Within 30 minutes it has left its parking spot a half block from my house and starts bellowing to inform the town of its presence.  The sound of the horn is so loud and horrible that in an instant it can turn my dream into a nightmare.  Every time it wakes me up I plot my revenge.  I envision sneaking over there in middle of the night, dressed in all black, to sabotage the thing by removing and destroying whatever part can’t easily be replaced.  I imagine myself being an anonymous town hero.  But for now the racket continues.  And just in case I pretend to ignore it with a pillow over my head or fingers stuffed in my ears, it takes advantage of the prevailing winds and fills my house with thick smoke.  I’m still not used to it all.  I wonder if anyone is.  I’ve taken this bus to San Carlos on occasion.  During the two hour trip the driver blares his evil horn outside of literally every single house we pass along the way.  There is no discrimination between homes already teeming with life and those that are still obviously closed up from the previous night.  Sometimes people are waiting on the side of the road, clearly signaling for the bus to pull over, and he honks at them, too.  But this affords me the opportunity to practice all the swear words I’ve learned in Spanish because as we bounce along I like to imagine all the things that the people in the houses must be saying about us as we make sure they really don’t want to come with to San Carlos.

            But I’m probably not used to this wakeup call because it’s usually not the bus that gets me.  Birds, aside from doing other useful things such as shitting on my drying laundry and eating my herbs before I get to, serve as particularly effective alarm clocks.  They announce the coming of the sun by screaming at each other from the limbs of the avocado and mango trees out back.  The sound of a few birds chirping can be pleasant and relaxing music; but if you mix too many species in too small a space it ends up sounding more like a cramped pet store than a harmony of wildlife.  And because they are competing for physical space as well as aural space, many of them make their way onto the zinc roof of my house.  They awkwardly hop around on the corrugated metal, scratching and clawing away with their talons and beaks.  They have about as much grace and coordination as a small toddler trying to walk across a moon-jump.  The whole scene gives me the impression that they’re just out there trying to annoy each other, or me.  But in the end I can’t really complain because I suppose it’s actually me who is on their turf.

            As early as the birds start, this generally isn’t the first time I’m woken up during the night.  The birds’ pre-dawn anthem seems like it should be the job of the roosters that strut around nearly every patio in town.  But the roosters here, for whatever reason, tend to be overzealous in their work and announce the coming of the new day around 2 or 3am, long before anyone really cares.  One starts, the rest follow, and by the time actual dawn rolls around they’re just too exhausted to do the job right.

            But the sounds about town aren’t restricted to the early hours of the day.  The Evangelicals screech and cackle their way through the evening hours the same way the birds do through the morning hours.  After giving a quick listen, one can surmise that they’re all attempting to make more or less identical noises and are doing so for the same reasons, but the similarities end there.  The solos are potent enough to rouse a strong headache but when done in unison the final product will make even the most devout individual question their God’s existence.  The birds I give a pass because they’re birds, but these are humans we’re talking about and they ought to know better.  I don’t know much about The Bible but I would guess there’s something in there about not making God angry.

            The Catholics don’t allow the Evangelicals to be the only religious noisemakers in town.  Better equipped vocally and with a stronger following, they take to the streets to belt it out.  Sometimes they parade around at 5pm on a Tuesday, sometimes it’s 4am on Saturday, sometimes it’s noon on a Thursday.  There’s no real pattern to it.  I guess they just go when they’re feeling particularly pious.  And, interestingly enough, the Catholic Church here in Nicaragua has more firepower than a small army.  Not only do their parades feature loud singing and giant painted statues of religious figures with lifelike hair, they also come with explosives.  Extremely powerful bottle rockets are the standard, but they also fire blanks out of crude metal contraptions that sort of resemble potato guns.  There’s no beautiful fireworks display, it’s just really loud explosions.

            The sounds of the day certainly don’t end there.  I could go on and on about how my ears are constantly bombarded throughout the day and night.  There’s so much more I could mention, like how I’d be breaking no social norms by blasting music out my windows at 3am.  I know this because my neighbors often do it.  They fire up the stereo, play a song or two, and then give it a rest until morning.  Or how during the fiestas patronales a huge mass of people take to the streets from 4am until 6am every day of the week, cheering, drinking, lighting off fireworks, playing music, and dancing.  They do it to ward off the evil spirits and bring good luck for the coming day.  I suppose if you’re woken up by fireworks outside your window at 4:30am while nursing a hangover there’s really no place to go but up.  So the system works.  And on top of all this you have the street vendors.  People walk up and down the streets yelling to each house to drum up business.  Generally each product is at least slightly different and everyone has his or her own style when it comes to the sales pitch.  I can usually tell what’s coming from two blocks away not because I can hear the words coming out of their mouths but because I can hear the pitch and tone of their individual calls.  I always know who’s coming long before they get here.  And there’s so much more I left out.  And sometimes, even though it’s all going on, I can’t hear any of it because the rain is hitting the roof with such ferocity.

I obviously think about this a lot, and I complain about it in a nearly equal amount.  But all this is a testament to how closely intertwined everything is here.  I can’t help but continually ask myself if I’ll miss it a year from now.  I wonder if the transition between such opposing lifestyles will be a difficult one.   Here I live in an environment where the private life is essentially non-existent.  Everyone’s life is public information and there is no hiding.  Everyone’s story is heard and told, no matter how mundane it may be.  This opposed to a place where isolation really knows no bounds.  In America you can be as removed from society as you please.  At times I wonder if I’ll find the extreme stillness there to be as distracting as the extreme intensity here.  Time will tell.  I’ve never been much of a believer in reverse culture shock but attitudes can certainly change.  I have one year done and one year to go; I’m as far from my past as I am from my future.