Postscript: 2018

We haven't been back to Little Canada, to our old neighborhood since we moved in 2015. Last Monday, after spending a day with friends and family, we decided to take a "tour" of the place we lived for 18 years; the longest period of calling a place home in our lives. A lot had changed, a lot stayed the same, and some of it was unrecognizable. Passing by our lake, via 35E at rush hour was startling. Traffic is almost exponentially greater, noisier, and dirtier. Clearly, either the increased lane-count has attracted commuters who once took a different route or development north of St. Paul is really ramping up. I have no idea when Google took the photo [below], but I can guarantee it was not on a Monday at 3PM.

The biggest reason we bought our home on Lake Shore Avenue was the lake; Savage Lake. We liked the yard and the privacy. I loved the giant garage. Elvy loved the weird layout of the house and the potential of the basement for workspace for her art. We both loved the idea of having a home with a lake in the backyard. I realize that Minnesotans discount bodies of water like Savage Lake as if they are just holes in which to dump sewage, but the rest of the country (especially west) has a different perspective on precious water resources. Not different enough to stop pissing, shitting, and wasting their water, but at least slightly more cognizant than Minnesota where we have so much water we delude ourselves into thinking it is endless. If you look at the past entries in this blog, you'll see that we spent almost as much time in our backyard enjoying our "lake" as we did inside hiding from winter. Before we moved to Little Canada, I had never thrown a party in my life. Because of Savage Lake, we had a wedding reception, annual Little Canada Days fireworks parties, sledding parties, a college graduation bash, and dozens of get-togethers in our backyard that always included some aspect of being on the lake in boats, skis, snowshoes, sleds, or just sandals or winter boots. We hiked the lake in the winter, boated it in the summer, and enjoyed it every day we lived in Little Canada. In the end, it was the thing we both knew we would miss the most about our old home. It still is.

When we lived in the Cities, we regularly compared our industrial noise neighborhood to friends' homes and our daughter's home in Dinkytown. Other essays in this blog talk about the unhealthy expansion of noise in our old backyard and I won't beat that horse more more in this essay, but if you are fooling yourself into believing that you can live with 85dBA-and-above-noise on a constant basis you already need medical assistance.  Today, there are four lanes (two in each direction) on 35E that didn't exist when we left the Cities. If traffic expands to fill the available space, as it usually does, that probably means the noise level in my old backyard has risen by 3-8dBASPL.

NOTE: You may not be familiar with the usual verbiage used in discussing noise levels. "dBASPL" means deci (1/10) Bells (a measure of acoustic loudness) A (A-weighted to approximate the sensitivity of human hearing to sound at various loudness levels) and SPL (sound pressure level, a necessary addition because decibels are used for a variety of energy measurements from electrical to light to touch and so on). Forgetting the weighting aspect for a moment, the threshold of human hearing is 0dBSPL and the generally accepted threshold of pain is around 120dBSPL. The aspect of this specification I want to point out here is the A-weighting. Our hearing mechanism is fairly insensitive to low and high frequency sounds at low volume. A-weighting is intended to compensate for human hearing nonlinearity for sounds below 55dB (unweighted). So, anytime you see a specification like "90dBA" you should understand the "A" is being abused for some reason. The reason, in the case of sound barriers, is that low frequencies pass through most of the barriers constructed today as if that barrier is insignificant. So, using A-weighting allows the person doing the testing to discount the irritation factor of loud low frequency sounds artificially. Also, most of the loudest vehicle noises are low frequency sounds. The appropriate weighting system to use at the noise levels presented in the Savage Lake neighborhood would be C-weighting, but that would expose the ineffectiveness of the noise barrier and the health hazard residents are exposed to. 

There are lots of technical articles written about noise barriers, but "Building the Wall" probably does as good a job as any at explaining how poorly those structures work for the majority of the neighborhoods they are supposed to help. This classic and simplified description of where that 3dB of noise reduction comes from should be startlingly and discouragingly illustrative of how useless those expensive walls are at any practical distance. Flexible barriers do absorb a little noise energy, but not enough to produce much noise reduction in practical terms. The 6dB justification MNDOT and lobbyists use to justify these installations is purely political and economic. The real argument is "would you rather look at traffic or a wall?" It's not my backyard now, so I can't answer that question. I do know that at least one of our neighbors moved away a year after we left, partially because the noise became intolerable for them.

When we lived in the Cities, we would often visit friends homes or our daughter's home in Minneapolis and enjoy the relative quiet of other parts of the urban environment. Today, even the quietest of those places seems almost intolerably noise to us and, I imagine, our old backyard would be deafening; and I'm not exaggerating. Exposure to noise levels of 85dBSPL and above is a known health hazard. So, while we miss the lake we loved and the neighborhood that was our home, losing almost 30dBCSPL of noise from our backyard was a necessary sacrifice. The reason I decided to add this comment to the long-neglected and nearly-abandoned Savage Lake Blog is that the only reason this human abuse happens is that people believe there is nothing they can do about it. That is not true, but humans/citizens will have to become involved in their local, state, and federal government to fix it. Trump and the Trumpanzees imagine they can turn back the clock to the 1950's and everything will revert to the "good old days." Good luck with that, dummies. Change and the future will happen, regardless of how often Fox News tells you it won't. The country can change for the better or worse, but it will never go back to what we imagined it was 60 years ago.