Descending the steep grade, my ears and head began to fill up with cotton, from the rapid change in altitude, and the all too familiar sound of waves softly crashing on the cotton beach, began to roar in my head. When I got to the bottom of the hill I pulled into Bill and Joe Bob’s Travel Center, the sign near the off ramp promising that Bill and Joe Bob really do have it all, “IF WE DON’T HAVE IT, YOU DON’T NEED IT!”, the sign read in huge block letters.
Pulling up to a front parking spot I could hear the music piped out to the fueling islands, and despite the roar in my head being near deafening, the tinny sounding “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen” seemed to permeate the air, birthing an image in my head of car hops and greased hair, being eerily reminiscent of the old TV show “Happy Days”.
Stepping down out of my “cowboy truck”, something was very out of place that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, like stepping through a worm hole, only I didn’t go anywhere. People were busy gassing up at most of the twenty-four pumps and at the one nearest me, a young pretty lady in jeans, sweater and high heels, was having some difficulty getting the modern gas pump to work right. She was clumsily putting the gas nozzle into her car’s gas tank, banging it against the metal filler tube and trying to get the tangled hose to cooperate.
Now the thing that I couldn’t quite put my finger on before had suddenly become blaringly quite obvious. All that movement, banging around and clumsiness, and there was not even the slightest little sound. It was completely silent except for the music coming from the gas islands speakers, which was now playing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. Instinctively, I stuck my fingers in my ears and wiggled them around hoping vainly to un-pop my pressure clogged head, still not a sound. I began to gawk at the young lady pumping the gas, not because she was so pretty, but somehow thinking that if I stared harder I could hear what she was doing. She scowled back at me, and interpreting my befuddled stare as a leer, she flipped me the bird. I jerked my head so hard and so fast the other way that I might have pulled a muscle in my neck.
My attention swung towards the other side of the gas island with other young ladies, old balding men, bikers and cowboys all fiddling with the pumps trying to get their cars, trucks and motorcycles filled with gas, oil checked and windshields cleaned for the next leg of their trip. The islands were alive with people but still not a sound except for the piped in music. In addition to this weirdness, it seemed as if the normal speed and motion of every movement had been turned down one click, not quite slow-motion but enough to be very strange indeed. Perhaps it was merely the absence of the normal sounds that caused this slowing effect. Anyways, it was still very creepy.
I scanned once again across the islands straining and hoping to hear just one sound amidst the bee-hive like activity, and everything was still eerily silent. The piped in music had now switched songs to Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’”. My mind was telling me I could hear because I was seeing, but there still was no sound except the oldies playing through the speakers on the gas islands.
I tried to shake off the oddity of this scene, and explain it away by blaming it on my plugged up ears. As I opened the door to walk into “The Store That Has Everything”, a trucker looking guy who was just exiting passed me and he was wearing a ball cap embroidered on the front with the words “Make It Loud!.” He was eagerly tearing into a plastic package with a new cell phone holder that looked like Gumby, but the sound of the tearing plastic was conspicuously absent. I held open the door as I let an elderly couple go in ahead of me, and as if the outside scene wasn’t strange enough, what I found as I walked through the door completely baffled me.
Inside the store, all of the sounds that I expected to be there came rushing into my confused and deprived senses. Everything was absolutely as you would expect it to be. The room was filled with a huge variety of wide-ranging sounds. Cash registers were ticking, soda machines were slushily dispensing and workers at the counters were shouting orders back to the kitchen. Believe it or not, the “We Have Everything” store had a Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Subway and even a Popeye’s Chicken. I guess they did have everything. I could hear every little sound as crisp and clear as you would expect.
I very noisily purchased a 64 ounce diet Coke and a Five Dollar Foot Long Subway sandwich, extra jalapenos, and I relished every clink of the ice and crunch of the paper.
Quickly forgetting the creepy soundless incident outside, I browsed through the five-dollar trinkets just to see how carelessly five dollars could be squandered and for what. Making my way out through the doors, Sub in hand and noisily sucking Diet Coke through a bendable straw, I stepped through the door to the outside and was snapped back into that same creepily muted environment.
Abruptly, the silence was broken by the rough and awkward cranking of a large diesel engine springing to life. The cab of the large tractor was unevenly vibrating from the running engine and sooty black smoke was pouring from the twin stacks at the back of the cab as the driver warmed the engine. The gears ground together trying to mesh, and then finding their place with a solid crunch, the truck moved forward with a lurch. The large truck and 53’ trailer, emblazoned with its colorful and catchy ad for “Noise Cancelling Headphones” passed in front of me headed for the highway. The rig obscured the gas island scene in front of me like the curtain at a theater.
The instant the truck passed, the curtain opened on the same hectic scene as before, and suddenly, as if a huge volume of air violently rushed into an empty space, there was a well-defined and sharp POP! The sound of gas nozzles clanking back into their holders, and engines revving came in to fill the empty space. Kids were crying for sugar and trinkets, parents were yelling back and people were talking and singing along with the song by Simon and Garfunkel
“The Sound of Silence”
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
No comments:
Post a Comment