Having overseen the closure of his Adirondack camp (as the old guard refers to vacation properties up there) after Airbnb leaf-peeper rental season, E has returned to his ancestral home here in the north county.
He says he enjoys “slumming it down here” with us, though he makes clear this has not so much to do with our occasional company so much as with the nearly distraction-free convenience of Northern Westchester life. Up in the mountains, there is always some project—brush to clear, pipes to lay, logs to split, fields to mow—to supervise. Cloistered down here on his childhood home’s half-acre, by contrast, “There’s nothing but changing the central A/C filter every month in the summer, getting out of the way of the cleaning people, and collecting the mail from the porch three times a week. Which is all it seems to come nowadays.”
Fully retired and uninvolved with any volunteer, sporting or spiritual organizations, he is afforded the time and seclusion to sow, reap and refine great entrepreneurial thoughts, and to research and develop their capitalistic application.
This week, he tells us, he has arrived at his best yet—“a real game changer, the Jean-Claude Van Damme of killer apps”—and has invited us to his firepit for a game of Beat the Pitcher, a quasi-social contest the NWRC developed years ago, mothered by the uniquely exurban exigency of combatting dilettantepreneuria and its frequent co-affliction, slow-talking.
The rules are simple. You are held captive by the dilettantrepreneur till they get to their Universal Selling Proposition until and unless you, or another of the audience—within three guesses—manages to deduce it first.
At the beginning of the game, and then at each of the first two unsuccessful guesses, the would-be inventor is required to provide a two-ounce pour from a brand-new bottle of some sort of brown wine1. If a member of the listening committee manages to succinctly articulate the elevator pitch within three tries, the bottle and its contents becomes the guesser’s property, and can be shared or taken home as the winner pleases.
And, if nobody manages to beat the pitcher within three guesses, the dilettantrepreneur is then under no obligation to either hurry their presentation to its conclusion, or to provide further libation.
After receiving assurance that this evening’s pour is not maple-flavored, we take a seat, receive our first dram, and the game begins.
“What is the chief reason people from metro areas take their vacation out in the country?” he asks.
We suggest experiencing nature.
“Yes, and . . . ?”
We suggest getting away from regular routines, the daily grind.
“And?”
We suggest access to outdoor activities.
“Okay. What is true of the country in all these ways—what characteristic of the country lock-steps with each of these motivations and also, all on its own, motivates.”
We suggest low population density.
“For Gladwell’s sake,” he says, “And what comes with low population density!?”
We are not quite certain decreased risk of monkeypox is what he’s about and hold this guess in reserve.
“Quiet!” he says. “Quiet is what people crave.”
We confess we frequently hunger for it.
“Did you know one-in-three Americans lives in areas the EPA considers to have dangerously unhealthy noise levels?”
We confess we did not.
“Intrusive noise has been linked to neuronal oxidative stress, a precursor to hypertension and depression and all the cascading sequela chains—sleeplessness, lethargy, indifference, social aggression, autoimmune disorders, even cancer—that attend it. Intrusive ambient noise now causes more health issues in this country than industrial pollution and insect-borne pathogens combined!
“There are in fact a host of unenforced federal laws—including an entire environmental act to address noise pollution. And yet we seem powerless to do anything about it. Unnecessarily loud helicopters and construction equipment maraud through residential areas daily. We allow the manufacture of home entertainment sound-systems that can split a human eardrum at a hundred meters, and our roadways are eight times louder than they otherwise would be because millions of disenfranchised males illegally hack the mufflers of their trucks, WRXs and motorized bicycles.”
We ask if he means motorcycles. His next-door neighbor’s motorcycle is a 131 cubic-inch Screamin Eagle and we frequently worry E will go Rene Boucher on the fellow.
“Don’t let those bearded babies get away with semantic amelioration! What they are riding—fetishizing, really—are motorized bicycles! Bi is two, cycle is wheel. And riding an overloud, overpowered gas-powered bike is the antithesis of manliness—it’s nothing but uncorrected middle grade acquisitiveness run amok! To anybody sane, the Harley Davidson brand conveys adult-minded rebellion no more than Huffy or Schwinn! And amping up your little machine’s engine noise is tantamount to putting playing cards in the spokes of your wheels. Only it’s illegal. And far more obnoxious. Which is of course, as Murray Schafer notes in his trailblazing soundscape research, is precisely why they do it: Mean ol’ mommy dint pay me ‘nuff attenshun so I’m a gwanna go out ‘n’ gwet it now, boy-o!
“I AM INCEL— HEAR ME ROAR! B-B-B-B-B-B-VRRRRRROOOOM!”
We try to nod appreciatively at his caricature but are distracted by the whiskey, which—while not maple-flavored—has some tongue-curling aluminum after-notes.
“Their hobbyist trade groups like to quip, ‘Loud pipes save lives!’ but the more apt phrase would be, ‘Loud pipes, no wives!’
“And those Nimitz-class Dodge Rams are the same. Did you know only one-in-ten American pickup trucks—a vehicle-type designed for commercial purposes—is actually used for commerce? And that the average hourly load carried is fifty-seven pounds2—about the weight of a fat man’s Costco run?
“But I digress. Of a typical evening at the camp, I’ll be sitting on the porch listening to the occasional crow, the wind whispering through the tops of the yoops—"
We ask what yoops are.
“Eastern White Pines. EWPs. And you’ll hear other sounds of nature, sure. A jay might squawk its little blue ass off. A red squirrel will go bonkers at a passing blacksnake. A red-bellied woodpecker will jackhammer a diseased hemlock. Geese will pass overhead like so many pin-headed squeeze toys.
“It’s all fine. Curiosity-provoking at most, and a relaxing background soundtrack for those of us with experience outdoors. Our ancestors did away with the passenger pigeons that used to break the limbs off the trees up on Croton’s Mount Airy3 and, though wolves are coming back, we do not yet have packs of them baying at the moon. That might possibly disturb my quality of life. I’m not crazy about the idea of having wild dogs in our yards. (Though I suppose it might somewhat suppress the deer.) No, there’s really only one wildlife noise that gets to me, at least personally.”
We ask him the exception.
“Racoons raping each other at three in the morning.”
We consider asking if this is precise to three a.m. but let it go.
“But at least it’s seasonal and doesn’t go on for more than a night or two.”
Having finished our first pour, we decide to spend our first guess and ask if his latest innovation is a wildlife sex-drive-reducing mechanism. Meat-flavored biscuits laced with saltpeter, perhaps.
“I am making the point that noise is in the ear of the beholder. I briefly worked4 with an uptown Manhattan kid—we’re talking Park Avenue residence, Horace Mann high, NYU for college, Columbia for grad school—who moved to North Salem in his thirties and nearly went mad from the noise of the spring peepers! Can you believe that? He moved in and—mind you, this was the 80s before air-conditioning was prevalent and we went to bed with the windows open like hippies—he couldn’t sleep a wink!
“But it’s no surprise. I mean some city people actually like the sound of that horrid ice-cream truck.”
We nod sympathetically.
“Hell, some of the newbs around here profess to enjoy the sound of our neighbors’ Steely Dan cover band.”
We cradle-smother another tangent-encouraging question.
“The point I’m making is that what so often chafes our tympana is not the volume but the nature of the noise. The tree frogs may actually be loud as passing helicopters, or as the gas-powered mowers going in the neighbor’s yard, but which more annoys? For me—and for most sane people—it’s the anthropogenic ones that most abrade.
“Up in the Adirondacks, it’s the tooth-rattling chainsaws and the ground-shaking woodchippers. The jetskis and the snowmobiles ripping two-stroke fart-streams across our wild spaces. The executive helicopters, bladetips snapping sound-barrier shockwaves down upon us. It’s Bernie’s goddamn F-35s tearing apart the sky above the state park and setting off ten-minute bell-choirs in my ears.
“And, down here? Yard crews, simpleton Harley-riders, the ceaseless groan of 9A, idiot volunteer fire departments retrieving their lunch order with a 30-ton diesel truck.
“It's just like with chemicals. We are bathed in pollens and insect pheromones every day but it’s the Roundup and the fluorocarbons that most alarm us, am I right? Sure, there are natural pollutants and poisons—we have plants and mushrooms in our yards and parks that will kill a person dead—but it’s the artificial ones that get us calling the E.P.A., right?”
We have a flash of inspiration and, thinking his elevator pitch is approaching the lobby—and now with our second pour, despite its metallic afterbite, almost gone—we make another guess: headphones that allow natural sounds through but block the human-made ones.
“No.”
We slump in our chairs as he refills our glass.
“I mean, noise-canceling technology did occur to me, of course. But the big ah-ha finally came last month when I came across a piece in The Atlantic.
We tamp down the impulse to corroborate this. E is quite possibly the most voracious book-reader (of non-fiction, at least) we know, but he is picky about periodicals. He gets The Journal and The Daily News but he scorns many of what he refers to as medium- and high-brow journals. A recent joke he’s been telling: “Why did The New Yorker reader cross the road? Because the magazine’s iPhone app said there was an organic farm-to-table restaurant, a hyper-seasonal menu, sidewalk dining, and Tesla charging stations over there.”
But, as our luck—and his self-regard—would have it, he addresses this apparent shibboleth.
“Not having had the requisite surgeries (lobotomy, posteriorly inserted yardstick), I don’t subscribe to The Atlantic. But I was Googling about noise complaints, it came up and—not realizing it to be clickbait—I fell for it. It’s a clever enough piece in thhis regard—it leans into classicism, cancel-ism, and white privilege and leaves the reader once again suspecting the existence of an elite cabal that uses manners and civility to help extract its profit and power. As Enureticus Balbus put it over two thousand years ago, docile sheep are more easily fleeced than restive ones.
“But, prone as I am to anti-establishment conspiracies, the piece did not impart the righteous anarchistic glow one expects from good long-form reportage.
“The writer’s line was basically, ‘Fuck you, Boomers (even though I suspect she’s a Boomer valet5)—I don’t care if you paid for my Ivy League education and that you are on the board of this magazine that’s paying me right now—don’t you tell me what to do. My click-friendly cultural agenda is my click-friendly cultural agenda and I’m not going to let you imperialize it, or me, any longer!’
“And we all nod and applaud and say, ‘You go, middle-aged, privileged writer with a mostly non-European-sounding name working for the second-most-likely publication to be found in arm’s-reach of an Upper East Side bidet! Stick it to The Man and bleach all the darkness from that propaganda gig of yours till it gleams like a pre-Anthropocene ice cap! You go right on and crank the bass on those Bluetooth speakers till your neighbors come knocking and you keep on writing insanely loud prose till we not only don’t complain about the party you did not invite us to attend, but we cheer you on!’
“Interestingly, when I first came across the piece, it was called “Let Brooklyn Be Loud” but (thanks to A/B testing, no doubt) the advertorial staff has subsequently renamed it, “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?”
“But do we think any corporate board members actually give a rat’s left nut about Brooklyn’s noise issues? You know where successful MBAs live in Brooklyn? Yeah, Park Slope and the upper floors of all those new highrises facing the Manhattan skyline. They do not inhabit the loud parts, my friend. And most especially not lower-floor apartments with barred windows looking out at the dumpster corral. Nor the ones next to the BQE. Nor the ones across from the Amazon truck depot.
“You know who lives those places? Yeah, the plebs. They’re the ones who suffer all the neuronal oxidative stress. They’re the ones woken by truck-backing tones and dropped dumpsters and Harley-riding incels heading to their fishing boats and jet-skis out on the Island. They’re the ones who break down and drop out of school and don’t win Ivy League scholarships and whose families fracture and succumb to pernicious self-medication.
“So, here’s this career-minded, social-media-attuned writer who has—just like the rest of us—fallen for the idea that there’s nothing to be done about noise, and that anti-noise efforts are not just futile, but socially oppressive and morally repugnant.
“And, so the Status Quo wins another little battle to keep things just as they are, vouchsafing another legitimate reason to noise-pollute the Brooklyn (and all other inner-city) masses without a trace of guilt.
“But dare we ask ourselves who the real victors are here? Is it a resurgence of the PMD6? Is it the righteousness-addicted readers of The Atlantic who now know to be quiet on the subject of asking for quiet? Because that’s just rude and colonializing?”
Not seeing a halfway decent guess anywhere along our mind’s fog-shrouded horizon, we shrug and nearly finish our third, and hopefully final, pour.
“But then the writer did something unintentionally interesting. In delivering a cursory and tendentious summary of the history—the obviously unsuccessful history—of anti-noise efforts, she used the example of the old Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, a group founded by a female doctor all the way back in 1906. Which our comrade at The Atlantic, despite not presenting us a mote of compelling evidence, has concluded was a seminal institution in a pervasive gentrification conspiracy. This organization to protect poor urban residents from sleep-depriving, stress-inducing, immunologically pernicious noise was, in the writer’s estimate, an act of crass economic and cultural selfishness by property owners.
We contemplate our nearly empty highball and nod weakly.
“All that to say, that’s where my eureka moment happened. I mean, if all she was saying holds true, then what about what’s going on up here the white-flight suburbs? Is there any region in the entire world where noise is as common a flashpoint as in our own?”
We ask for some clarification.
“You’ve ridden a Metro North commuter train during peak hours. You know the grief one gets for breaking that silence, do you not? We’re talking zero-tolerance for anything extraneous—laptop chimes, soft conversation, even overloud headphones.”
We nod and—knowing if we fail in our next guess, we’ll have lost the game—try to think if he might have come up with some quiet commuting social media application.
“And what are they packed with? Are they not filled with our very most productive, best-trained, oath-forged capitalist paladins? The executives and managers who work so long and hard, are so overheated by 60, 70, 80, 90 hours in their frenetic boiler-rooms they—like overstimulated, nap-addicted kindergarteners—require quiet-time to cool their brains and claw back a fart’s-worth of sanity?
“And what two things are common to all these economic warriors?”
We hypothesize not a single one of them was a philosophy major and that they wear shirts with buttons.
“A, they have money. And, B, they have property. You don’t work that hard and ride the train twice a day, 300 days a year—all the way past North White Plains, Stamford and Tarrytown—because you’re day-tripping. No—you’re busy renting or paying down mortgage debt out here in the suburbs.
“Which therefore means you are tied to a piece of property in a direct, care-filled manner—you are vested in the quality of your property. You have foregone the convenience of an apartment in the city or of a cheek-by-jowl semi-detached dwelling in the down-county sprawl, one of those places with the If-You-Lived-Here-You’d-Be-Home-by-Now signs facing the thruway.
“The hub of our economic model is property ownership, right? For most people, the single biggest investment of their lives is their home. And what greater disaster than moving your family into a home only to discover the next-door neighbor is a—fill-in-the-blank—Steely Dan blaster, sax player, parrot breeder?
“You see, we merely need to tie our self-preserving, essentially human need for peace and quiet to the mighty engine of real estate sales and—voila!”
After making clear our next question is rhetorical and not a last guess, we ask if he means to advertise the quietness of the suburbs to white collar professionals. Which would seem to be an exercise in redundancy.
He wags his finger.
“Here’s a hint—as is often the case—great, timely ideas will, given the chance, bubble up like geysers in more than one place!”
An image of property-enclosing plastic bubbles comes to us—like those inflatable tennis court domes only bigger, and made of clear, not white, plastic—and we blurt it aloud.
He slaps his knee, laughs, and shakes his Gandalfian head.
We put our empty glass on the table and steel ourselves for his reveal, and the abundant exposition that will precede it.
“Don’t look so glum!” he says. “It’s true best sort of pitcher doesn’t have to pour, but I enjoy being a host too much.” He tops off our glass anyhow.
“I was sure you’d get it tonight—in fact, somebody did beat me to it—it’s out on the street already!”
Like many area dilettantepreneurs, E has a history of ground-breaking ideas that were beaten to development—and capitalization—by others. He dreamed of combining iPods with cell phones before the iPhone. He had the idea of encrypted cloud technology before the advent of server farms. He thought up a subterranean Briarcliff-Peekskill Parkway before the Boring Company filed its first patent.
We make a commiserative noise and wonder if this means we can leave after this drink.
“Ah, but that’s not the end of it.”
Taking care to filter any traces of disappointment, we express our surprise.
“You see, I’ve developed a system to generate a noise-score for every acre in our country! Google of course has it all mapped by satellite and passing camera-van but nobody has done a good sonic map!
“And is that not intriguing? Before you buy a piece of land, before you rent an Airbnb, before you make a reservation at a restaurant with patio dining, you can check to see how loud it is!”
We nod and sip. It does seem like an interesting idea. And, as always, far past his means and abilities to implement.
“But then I learned that Realtor.com has developed just such a thing—a noise-map that lets you look at any property and determine whether it’s loud or quiet.
“Because what good is that view of the Hudson if you’re forty yards from 9A? What pleasure can you derive from that Kensico farmhouse if the wind’s easterly and jet traffic is lining up over your front lawn? How many people are going to enjoy your Chappaqua pool party if you’re facing the valley that contains the Campfire Club’s skeet range? How many of us see a house on a Sunday afternoon and love it and then take ownership of it on a Friday some months hence only and discover the next-door neighbors had been on vacation but they’re back now and are partially retired bagpipers and chainsaw sculptors—you know, the ones who makes those bears out of tree stumps?
“So yes, naturally, I was crestfallen. Once again, beaten to the punch.”
We observe he does not seem actually crestfallen, and point out that he has just used the pluperfect tense.
“Yes—would you believe it!? They murked it up! They saw the brilliance of the idea—its immense leveragability for both agents and buyers, its overall capitalistic stickiness—but they used a lazy data-scrape! They fell for a typical programmatic shortcut—they used easy data versus quality data! They generated their map simply from business and transit proximity. Property A is a hundred yards from the thruway and so you bet your ass it scores in the red. And, yes indeed, 684 and the Taconic mostly glow scarlet and are shaded with yellow for hundreds of yards to either side. And so they correctly depict the downtowns of Ossining and Mt. Kisco as scarlet hell-holes. But take a close look and you’ll see much of the area around—and even in—Westchester Airport is light blue! Which can be explained only by their Purchase and Greenwich agents suppressing he data, or by their not even adhering to their own overly-simple protocol.”
We ask if his protocol is not so simple.
“I meant simple in the way a D-student is simple. My protocol is simple; but it conforms to the real world! This,” he says presenting us with what we take to be a high-tech cigar-lighter, “is an over-the-counter audio recording device—runs more than 24 hours on a single charge. I’m making a weather-proof enclosure and tuning the collection methodology right now. Any listed property will get an official score once a minimum sample has been collected. All in all, it will take one one-thousandth the budget and labor force of Google Street View.”
We refrain from pointing out that, even with the Airbnb income from his Adirondack camp, he also has less than one one-thousandth Google’s budget and labor force.
“You leave one of these babies for three random days, one of which is either a Saturday or Sunday (people are home weekends), when the average temperature is above 60 and below 85 (because the windows are most apt to be open and the A/C not running) and let it record a full day. Then, with machine learning—”
We ask him what that means.
“A.I. You teach it what the sounds are and then let it go to the races. The set-up work’s already been done by a group at SONYC. I figure I can cut them in for a small percent, or just create my own lab to do it if they get greedy.”
We ask him to describe the financial aspects. How precisely does he mean to make money from all this?
“Well, if Realtor.com doesn’t care to fix their slipshod methodology, I’m thinking of a number of different real estate partners. Which do you like best?
“The ZPI—the Zillow Peacefulness Index?
“ODAR. The Open Door Aural Report?
“Or how about the Houlihan Laurence Quietude Quotient?
“The Sotheby’s Silence Score?
“The Coldwell Banker Non-Disturbance Distribution?”
We keep our features locked in a David Muir mask of journalistic dispassion, merely commenting that he seems very confident.
“And why wouldn’t I be? I have here a system that will not only tell you whether you live in a loud area, but the very precise nature—or, pardon the pun, non-nature—of any noise. From lawnmowers to motorized bicycles to backing-up delivery trucks to barking dogs (dogs are absolutely artificial noise)—here, look at this wave-form analysis I’ve done—
“You see, we will measure for duration and the results will be tabulated and scored. And then I will generate a proprietary sonic score.
“At my address, with my bedroom window open, or sitting on the porch, I can expect to hear each year 16 annual hours of thunderstorms, 18 hours of car alarms, 22 hours of neighbors fighting, 33 hours of train horns, 46 hours of emergency responder sirens, 47 hours of ice-cream truck music, 73 hours of neighbor parties, 184 hours of spring peepers, 190 of passing skateboards, 280 of delivery trucks, 304 hours of vocalizing human children, 313 hours of cicadas, 407 of barking dogs, 664 of crickets, 730 hours of gas-powered yard-equipment, 1,030 hours of overflying aircraft, 1,094 of various bird noises, and 8,760 hours (that’s 24 hours times 365 days) of highway noise of which about one fifth (1,700 hours) of which you will especially be noticing illegally under-muffled motorcycles, cars, and trucks.”
We ask how long it took to compile this information.
“It’s always time-consuming at the beginning,” he says, dodging the question. “At least here in the beta phase. And I’ve got a few more tests to get through. But once the machine-learning is hooked up, it will be a 15-minute collection-and-analysis, end-to-end, times five calendar-scattered samples per property. When we launch, I expect to have it to under thirty minutes of minimum-wage salary time per property in order to generate a report that real estate agents, buyers, and sellers can exploit for thousands upon thousands of dollars for each transaction.”
We nod appreciatively, place our empty glass on the table, and stand up.
“Oh, no—here, help me finish the bottle. I bought a case of the stuff. It’s got a nice tang, don’t you think?”
We thank him for the generous offer but we have a deadline tomorrow and regretfully insist that we have to get going.
He makes a half-hearted effort to stand up. “Well, I suppose I’ve had too much whiskey to code tonight . . . perhaps I’ll take a little nap right here.”
We ask him if his Harley-driving neighbor won’t wake him up.
He demonstrably turns off his hearing aids and gives us a smiling thumbs-up.
“NO WORRIES THERE! ONE OF THE GREAT BENEFITS OF AGE!” he shouts even though we’re still six feet away.
We consider asking if he has read Revolutionary Road, the great novel set just over in Ossining but—though it might be possible under the new ultra-high-output LED streetlights whose light pollution he has complained about incessantly since they were put in three years ago—we suspect he cannot read lips.
any sort of whiskey or dark rum
It has become common in these parts to substitute “Gladwell” for “God” in expressions that standardly contained the latter. Much as famed lecture speaker has done with the title of his own newsletter: “Oh, MG.”
Northshield, Jane, History of Croton on Hudson 1976 The Croton-on-Hudson Historical Society
E, now in his seventies, was a member of the full-time workforce for fewer than five years so, when he says “briefly,” it’s fair to suspect this was indeed a fleeting acquaintance.
E refers to Generation X-ers as Boomer valets.
For years, E has claimed there is a cabal of Powell Memo Disciples.