Sounds of a Midsommar Night

My neighborhood of Newton Highlands lies about 11 miles WSW of Boston and about the same distance from Logan Airport, which no longer is among the nation's busiest but still serves about 40 million passengers per year.  My house lies only about a quarter mile south of Route 9, a major, divided highway or thoroughfare that runs east-west and used to be the main route to the interior before the Massachusetts Turnpike was built. Just beyond the highway to the north is the village of Newton Highlands, which features a church belfry that rings the hour, night and day, synthetically as far as I can tell.

In midsummer in the dead of night there is much that I can tell about my surroundings without opening my eyes, as long as the bedroom windows are open.  By the grace of God my hearing remains in sound service.

For no particular reason I want to take an inventory of what I hear, ranking the sounds from most comfortable and welcome to least so:

• The crickets.  They only make their appearance from early to mid-July.  They make a loud and throbbing hum from nightfall to just before dawn.  They inspire an aura of "oneness with nature" that is milder than, but akin to, what one may feel when experimenting with hallucinogens in a peaceful natural setting.  They would make a great backdrop to meditation.
• The rain, when it is raining.  As I said before, it mimics the sound of sustained applause to a remarkable degree.
• The thunder, before and during violent rainstorms. (Thunder, not to quibble, does not "only happen when it's raining.") Often it can be heard, faintly, more than a half hour before a front reaches the neighborhood.  It reaches a peak that may be very brief or may last for a considerable time, depending on the strength of the storm.
• Our artificial church bell tolling the hour on the other side of Route 9.
• The whistles of freight trains as they make their way along the main east-west track that parallels the turnpike, about three miles north of my home.  They inspire in me an echo of the Folsom Prison Blues.
• The steady ambient noise of cars on Route 9.  It generally reduces to near nothing in the depth of the night, and picks up again about 5AM.  But its volume is highly dependent on the direction of the wind.  It is strongest when there is a north wind.  (This is also true of the perceived volume of the church bell.)
• Helicopters passing low overhead.  Sometimes they are difficult to distinguish from cars, but the question is clarified in favor of a helicopter if the amplitude of the sound remains steady, but for the Doppler effect.
• Motorcycles on the thoroughfare.  They may be single, or worse, two of them may be racing.  They make their presence known from a long way off, and also for a long time after they pass nearest by.
• Commercial jet aircraft.  Their volume too is dependent on the wind.  The prevailing wind in the summertime is from the southwest.  Airplanes always take off and land into the wind.  Therefore, in summer, aircraft take off from Logan Airport most often on one of two parallel runways, labeled 22L and 22R, meaning in universal aviation lingo that the plane's direction on the runway is 220 degs, or SSW.  Since my bed lies SSW of Logan, one would think that departing aircraft would be low over my head routinely in the summer.  But it seems that it is not so.  I surmise that in the prevailing conditions they climb out quickly and have begun vectoring away from 220 degs by the time they get to my neighborhood.  So the planes that are loudest in the night, I further surmise, are those on an approach to Logan for a landing into a north or northeast wind, on the same runways I specified but in the opposite direction, which is to say on the runways labeled 4L and 4R (40 degs on the compass).
• Hordes of dirt bikes ridden on Route 9 by delinquents from the near reaches of the inner city, intent on disturbing everyone "just because they can."  These appear on rare occasions only, I'm happy to say.

And so, the quietest and most peaceful nights in my home are those when the wind is blowing gently from the south or southwest; the nights most sonically "industrial" and disturbing of the peace are those when the wind comes roughly from the north.