Excellent question! Really enjoyed all the responses!

I have to agree with the general consensus here. I hate noise too!

I work in a copy center for a very large school district, located in the high school. We have a high speed copier for all the district work, and a smaller walk-up copier for the staff here to use. They are in constant use usually, and then there is the folder, cutter. . . you get the picture. X-(

When I drive home (almost an hour commute each way) I don't even play the radio. I live at least 2 miles from any business or major roadway, but do live on a very busy country road. There is definately plenty of loud traffic (milk trucks, dump trucks, pick-ups, cycles, semi tractors w/trailers and the like).

It's OK though, because up until a year ago I went to sleep in an apartment, my bedroom sharing a wall with a single father with two children he claimed suffered from ADD and some kind of defiance disorder. There was plenty of screaming and kicking and banging and the like. Although I could hear he wasn't being abusive, plenty of our neighbors thought he was and called the P alot. He must have thought it was me though, because he would talk to me alot about how things were going. Poor guy. . .WAIT! Poor me!! :O

Now, thanks to my middle son :x for seeing the For Rent sign, I can hear the roosters and beef cows from the farm across the road, and the breeze blowing through my new strawberry and raspberry patches and the leaves and stems growing in my garden.

Life is much better, and for all of you waiting to find the perfect place, I hope it happens soon for all of you. Life is short, and should be enjoyed and peaceful - at least at home!

I just love these emoticons! They are so much cuter than I am!!

BrownGorker

After readding all the great responses I didn't think I'd have much of an answer to that question, but then I realized at night I hear nothing at all, there is no noise, which amazes me, and maybe once a month an owl sends out a low, breathy Whoooooo, which at first sounds like a soft wind in the screen until I realize it's repeating in too short an interval to be the wind. In the spring the frogs throb at night, then suddenly go quiet as if they sense a trespasser in their midst, then start up again. If the fog comes in just right and the tide is high in the Pacific there is a boom! (silence) boom! as the waves hit the cliffs and the sound bounces up and back into the valley. Then as the sun starts to come up the birds wake up, busy, bossy, demanding, echo locating with each other in their triangular patterns around their territories.The red winged blackbird has got to be the best of them, but I never can put consonants to their syllables!

Love the Delta! Used to rent houseboats (which you probably dread hearing) and spent many lazy floating days among the reeds there!

Buffalogal, how do you go through Iowa from Michigan to South Dakota? May be on to something here, could create a tourist attraction with cow farts. Took me a long time when we first moved out here to figure out what that noise was. They were next to my fence one day when I heard it. Couldn't stop laughing. They used to come to the fence for all the junk I'd throw out of my garden. They esp. love hollyhocks. The neighbor has since moved them farther back cause they broke through my board fence one day. Luckily I was home! We are planning on going to South Dakota also sometime in June.

Wow Sweetpea, what visuals I get with your descriptions! I love camping along the pacific coast, have a favorite camping spot near Morro Bay which is mighty pretty. And that booming of the waves is incredible...to visit for me. I get spooked at the idea of living right on the beach, but the water is soooo mesmerizing. And the sounds of the Elephant Seals, and the gulls, and walking carefully in tidepool areas...and finding hundreds of little red or purple crabs, and tiny tidepool fish, enchanting...

What part of the coast do you call home? I also used to live further north, and visited the Mendocino and Sonoma county coasts, more rugged and remote...

Enjoy your peace and quiet John, and be glad so many people enjoy the city, or they'd all move to the quiet places and take the noises with them! This place I am now living is in a small community, mostly retired people, so they generate very little noise...no radios, no boomboxes, few screaming kids. When I was visiting this place a year ago, prior to purchase, I'd sit on the back porch for an hour, listening to the birds and the river (the river is 1/4 mile away). The quiet astounded me for being in a town. And it's still quiet.

And I am thankful for the quiet, as noise really makes me moody. My dH used to play the radio whenever he was home, and it drove me nuts. Finally I got him to not have it on. My daughter loves quiet too (and she is almost a teen!). My son loves the noise. Booms, explosions, machines, computer games, the noisier the better!

I live in a big tourist area...fishing, hiking, camping, boating (reservoir just down the river a mile), end of wild and scenic river, rafting, kayaking on the river...so we get thousands of tourists every holiday, and most weekends in the summer it's busy. Those people come with boomboxes, (I love camping, but dislike boomboxes in the woods!) alcohol, speeding vehicles on the mountain roads, and try to bring their city lifestyle with them...sad that they can't enjoy the beauty and peacefulness to it's fullness. They also leave tons of litter each holiday! :O The locals get to clean up, but the locals LOVE the $$$ the tourists spend here!
Without the tourists, this town wouldn't be as nice as it is, wouldn't have nice restaurants and a few quaint hotels (nice wooden ones, with rustic atmosphere).
Fortunately, come September, the tourists are gone, and it's a quiet, clean, peaceful mountain town again.

Your quiet and solitude are a passing thing, as is life. Two hundred years from now, people as a whole will either figure out that quiet and green and space are vitally important, and start revamping communities to reflect that, or not. If every city were to disappear, and people were to spread out upon the face of the earth, each with a plot of land, the really wild places would be gone. To me, it's a good thing for people to be condensed in cities...good for me so I can be in a more wild place...(This town I'm in is surrounded by public lands, millions of acres of wild, public lands).

Some of us have figured out that silence is a wonderful thing...silence of human generated sound. Let the birds chirp, and sing and squawk! Let the rivers run wild and roar! Let the coyotes howl! Let the neighbors sleep!

Mulchy, I'm not far from San Francisco (have to work to support my gardening habit). Yes, the beach is a fabulous place, although I'm a few miles from it, and it is windy all the time, so it's not easy living right at the beach. Sounds like you're in the Sierra foothills? I love the little towns along Hwy. 49 and I've gone on a couple of winery tours there, nice way to get into the backroads. My parents had a place in Mariposa for 34 years, that whole mountain range is really gorgeous. you get those great warm nights, so good for gardening...don't get any of those here!!

Mumsey~
First you go south till you hit the Michigan State Line, hang a right and head northwest toward Iowa City, IA, then you continue on to Souix Falls, SD then finally to Mt. Rushmore. Yahooooo!!!! A real honest to goodness family vacation, with 2 kids in the back seat drawing lines on the seat between each other saying "Stay on your OWN side, you pea brain". I wanted to rent a van, but no....hubby (aka the man who does not find non-stop-yakky elementary school kids amusing) says our Mercury Sable will be just fine and for $800.00 he can just buy a BIG bottle of Motrin and a set of ear plugs. Someone pleeeeease say a prayer for us.....we are gonna need it! Poor Daddy - just hasn't built up his tolerance to blab blab blab blab blab. 22 hrs. in the car oughta improve it, don't you think????
PS ~ Do they make clear ducktape? Those highway patrol officers can spot that gray stuff over a kid's mouth a mile away. And can you tell me where the first bar is when I cross the Iowa State Line???

Sweetpea! What????? Not much of an answer???? You are living my DREAM!!! I would love to live by the ocean - heck, even a house on Lake Michigan would make me happy. There is something about water and waves breaking that bring you right back to earth, keeping you grounded in what's important. Lucky you....and thanks for the cyber tour of your backyard!!! If you aren't already a writer, you sure should be!!! I am impressed!

Right now I hear a cacaphony of birds outside rooting under my leaf mulch & at my feeders, trying to chase away competitors. & in the next room, the constant drone of a TV no one is watching that my teenage stepdaughter turned on to nap to. It is very quiet in the rural area where I live, & the loudest sounds come from lawnmowers & chipper/shredders. Birds & bees are my biggest conversationalists when I'm in the garden. My hubby & I are both quiet people who enjoy 'companionable silence' together more than chit-chat.

Oddly enough, I love the sound of distant traffic rumbling by, but thirty feet away is a little too close. That comes from when I was a kid and we used to go to a friend's house in Biloxi (on the Gulf Coast) every summer.

It was a great place: big screen porch with hammocks, woods in the rear, grape arbor, rose gardens, and across the highway from the beach with our own pier. It was paradise for a child. It was set back enough from the highway that the traffic sound was dulled but still present. There was no air conditioning, so we left the windows open at night and were lulled to sleep by the muffled sound of traffic on the highway. I still love that sound.

Now, I have realized my dream of moving to the country (moved just last year) so we hear owls, and frogs, dogs, sometimes coyotes. I love those too. (Alright, I don't like the coyotes -- they sound spooky and I'm always worried about them eating my cats and melons.)

Barbara in Abita Springs, just north of New Orleans, in zone 8

where in the coastal mountains are you? i lived in paso robles when i was stationed @camp bob. loved it, bought 10 acres to build a house in a few yrs. i loved it, so quiet & peacful. as my new house w/b, yard is so big i can't hear the neighbors.

my family just sold 160 acres (been in family for over 100 yrs... pay inheritance taxes) in honeydew on the mendecino cape.

mt. rushmore was a real disappointment wehn we went tehre. be sure to go to crazy horse! now there's something i could get into!

The Loons