As I write these words, not fifteen feet away, a Sawzall is chewing through a gnarly cast iron pipe.
The house is literally shaking. The cacophony covers the spectrum from stadium-leveling heavy metal bass notes, through the ear-numbing mid-range familiar to lawn-tractor operators, all the way up to ultrasonic highs that pierce human teeth like slivers of ice.
In this hundred-year-old structure, cutting through inches of cast iron is only one of the many deafening steps in a plumbing rough-in, which includes using a hole saw on rock-hard oak joists; hammer-drilling into ceramic block; and, my personal favorite, jackhammering a concrete subfloor.
Big deal, you say. Soul-shattering noise is what you get for improving an old house. Just think of the beautiful bathroom that awaits at the end of all of the misery.
True enough. I just wish the beautiful bathroom weren’t going to be in my neighbor’s house.
If this were Landisburg, and our neighbor was wielding a Sawzall, I’d simply say, “More power to you!” and wish him well. I might even offer to pitch in. Perry County may be short on traffic lights, but one thing it has in spades is open space, which means that my renovation is mine, and my neighbor’s is his.
As opposed to, say, living in an attached house in Baltimore, where your neighbor’s renovations might as well be yours, given all the noise and disruption.
This isn’t to say that we don’t feel the presence of neighbors on St. Peter’s Church Road. Ironically, because there’s so little man-made noise up at the Creek, we’ve become hypersensitive to it. Often, we can tell who’s driving by, or what’s happening a quarter of a mile away, without even bothering to get out of bed. Which makes for romantic pillow talk, on the order of, “There’s Jesse’s milk truck,” and, “Buddie’s out on his new tractor.”
But back to Baltimore — where, by the way, the work on the other side of the wall has shifted from pipe demolition to joist drilling. How do I know this? Because about ten years ago, we renovated an identical bathroom in our house. I did a lot of the work myself, and experienced all of these marvelous constructions sounds first-hand, which is why I know them all so intimately. The concrete floor had to come out (jackhammer). The rotten cast iron waste stack had to come out (Sawzall). The joists had to be drilled for the new water supplies and a PVC waste line (hole saw). The ceramic block walls had to be fitted with shimmed sleepers for drywall and tile backer board (hammerdrill, followed by the squeal of Tapcon screws).
Our attached neighbor at the time, a sweet and learned old gentleman, was incredibly patient about the work. True, he was retired, so the disruption didn’t interfere with his livelihood. But he was home all day, and no doubt experienced our home improvement as the demolition of his peace and quiet.
In the past few weeks, as political brinksmanship over the debt ceiling has showcased our noisily dysfunctional government, I’ve been chewing on a pet theory.
It’s a truism that wide open spaces are often red on the political map, and densely populated places blue. But why?
Maybe it’s because more space between neighbors means the freedom not to suffer your neighbor’s Sawzall, or at least to tune it out more easily, which creates a corresponding freedom not to worry about the noise you make with your own Sawzall.
Whereas being forced to hear your neighbor’s Sawzall on the other side of a thin partition wall, while infuriating and distracting to the point of insanity, is a palpable reminder of the misery you no doubt inflicted when you were wielding your own Sawzall.
Open-space people don’t need anyone telling them when they can and can’t use their Sawzall; whereas partition-wall people are well aware of the consequences of an overzealous neighbor Sawzalling through the night.
In the other words, the closer we live to one another, the more we’re forced into an awareness of the impact our decisions have on our neighbors, and vice versa.
This is a terrific argument for making government as local as possible, to accommodate the different needs of wide-open-spacers and partition-wallers. And for many aspects of our shared American lives, that works.
Unfortunately, to resolve huge, abstract issues like the national debt, the open-spacers and partition-wallers find – to their mutual horror — that they’re all trying to renovate the same antiquated bathroom.
That’s a lot of Sawzalls. Way too much noise for thoughtful conversation. So much noise, in fact, that getting anything done is just about impossible.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 04 August 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
