Crescendo of noise from I-285 shortens morning quiet time

I’ve lived a mile and a half outside I-285 in DeKalb County since 1997. Mine is a typical suburban neighborhood like others developed in Atlanta during the late ’60s and early ’70s. Most of the homes are well-built brick ranches; the tree-shaded lots are large, and except for morning and evening rush hours, traffic through the neighborhood is light, especially now that we have speed bumps.

At dawn I enjoy watching and listening as the familiar rhythms of daily life are once again set in motion. Like other suburban neighborhoods developed 30 and 40 years ago, the area in and around Northlake Mall, Embry Hills and Tucker is changing. Most of the change has been good. In 10 short years my home doubled in value, or at least it had until the bottom dropped out of the real estate market. Most local public schools still provide students with good if not spectacular educations, and the crime rate, while rising, is still low.

What troubles me, however, is that even though I live well outside I-285, I can now clearly hear cars and trucks traveling that route when I retrieve the morning paper at 6 a.m. That is not change for the better.

The Perimeter, as it was then most often called, opened to fanfare in 1969. Gov. Lester Maddox rode the hood of a car through an inaugural banner draped across the interstate in downtown Atlanta. Although initially developed as a bypass of Atlanta for trucks traveling north and south on I-75 and I-85, it has since come to represent a line of demarcation between urban Atlanta and its far-flung suburbs. What I-285 also becomes every day for hundreds of thousands of motorists is a raging traffic inferno.

Some might argue that rising real estate prices more than compensate for the incessant drone of vehicles racing along I-285, a drone that clearly doesn’t bother everyone.

New homes with price tags approaching $800,000 have been built within a few yards of I-285, and they’re selling. But the economics of increasingly profitable development doesn’t tell the whole story, and it never will.

The 19th-century New England iconoclast, Henry David Thoreau, is best known for retreating to a small cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. For two years and two months he kept a detailed record of his Spartan existence, which he later wrote about in “Walden, or, Life in the Woods.” Thoreau’s rationale for retreating to Walden Pond was quite simple. “I went to the woods,” he wrote, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Urban and suburban spaces have many dimensions, not the least of which involve the quality of life enjoyed, or not enjoyed, by the people occupying those spaces. We tend to divide our daily lives between home and office. Most would probably admit that the time they spend at the office often encroaches on time that would be better spent at home with family and friends. In response, many of us have devised elaborate weekend schemes to compensate for this imbalance in our lives. We rush to a Braves or Falcons game, or walk ourselves weary at a local arts festival, or do both on the same weekend, sometimes on the same day. Come Monday morning, it is no surprise that we often feel even wearier than we did the previous Friday afternoon.

When I rise before dawn I do so for a reason. In that predictable hour, I can better appreciate the rhythms of life that continue to matter despite the daily stresses and scheduling conflicts so common to modern urban living. For a few minutes, I can watch the day unfold as it has since time began. I can mark my place in the scheme of things and contemplate ways that I might make my place more meaningful, both for myself and for others.

Until a few years ago, I could do that without the incessant drone of cars and trucks on I-285 providing an unnecessary background accompaniment.

I don’t advocate retreating to a pond in the woods like Henry David Thoreau did. I recognize that I am a part of this sprawling city, and there’s no escaping that fact. I just wish that at 6 a.m., I could still greet the brand-new day in the calm, predictable stillness that I once so enjoyed.

Rick Diguette has lived in DeKalb County for over 20 years. He teaches English at Georgia Perimeter College.