White Noise
One of my grandsons has consistently fallen to sleep every night of his life to the ambient sound of the ocean floating out of a little machine near his crib. (Back in my day, we just strapped the baby onto our backs and vacuumed the house … we’ve come a long way baby!) There are even portable “white noise machines” that you can hang from a stroller handle so that your little one can nap while you’re walking the dog. Lady Superior is my own dream machine.
For seven years, I’ve lived on the shore of a humongous white noise machine: Lake Superior. It’s one of the things that drew me here. The sound of waves lapping the shore, or even crashing on the rocks, soothes me. I first heard the sound, and felt it’s comfort, when I went to the ocean as a young child. The sound is nearly identical on the inland sea of Lake Superior. Though there are no tides here, the rhythmic slosh of water from shore to shore is similar. When wind and storms churn the water up to higher levels, it can get quite raucous.
Yesterday, we had an April blizzard that dropped ten inches of very heavy, wet snow. Gale force winds whipped up ten foot swells that pummeled the basalt shoreline. Mother Nature can be a show off and yesterday she was like a gymnast landing a triple-twisting double back tuck.
Though the purpose of a white noise machine is to mask disturbing sounds that may disrupt your sleep, yesterday may have been an exception for the more tender-earred. The white noise became a sleep disrupter for some of my friends who slept in their back bedrooms last night — away from the lake and her late night partying. I like Lady Superior’s voice at every decibel: a gurgle, a slosh, a slap on the rocks, or a crash like breaking glass as the force of waves breaks ice into shards and plates and tosses them into piles on the shore during particularly cold winters.
Maybe I find the sound of white noise comforting because it’s familiar. When I was a small child, I experienced something traumatic — so traumatic that I didn’t remember it until I was forty and psychologically and emotionally able to cope with it. In my childhood recurring dreams, the event was nothing more than “white noise” — the rush of blood in my ears and the pounding of my heart.
When I started writing The Violet Hour Book Club, I was haunted by the theme of memory. Memory is a slippery thing. Our minds are tricky and can protect us from some of our most damaging experiences until we’re ready to confront the truth of them. In my novel, Violet escapes to the North Shore of Lake Superior after her husband’s sudden death. She has a complicated relationship with grief. She understands that there is something that prevents her from feeling the full depth of her despair, but she doesn’t know why. Until she does. And then grief crashes over her like the waves on the shore.
