Please give us peace:

TRAIN WHISTLE

We here in the sewer raccoon district, where the 40 daily and nightly diesel trains roll past with horns blasting SEEMINGLY AT OUR VERY DOORSTEPS with unrepentent - some say sadistic - leanings on their air levers - blasting us from our beds and tilting us even from our wakened prone positions..................... have come up with a non-violent almost Gandhian solution.

The idea came to us on Wednesday when we visited the Kohler art museum in Sheboygan WI. Stepping into the gift shop there - even at our age still interested - we spied the old time train whistle toy. Anyone can buy these for 7 bucks. These whistles have three distinct but simultaneous tones, giving that beautiful train sound of the disappeared steam engines. (This is not a new idea. We used to have one of these years ago. Our daughter who played with it, now a graduate with a music minor from Lawrence, advises that in her perfect pitchdom she can sometimes discern 9 different tones in a "monotone" diesel horn. We cannot.]

It is unlikely that one person could with his sole breath blow one of these at the passing and blaring trains and make any difference. BUT..............if everybody got them and blew them simultaneously at our daily and nightly invaders, whole armies of dissident citizens gathered at the railroad crossings together, choirs of whistle-blowers blowing as one, at Maple St, Broadway, Hartwell & Arcadian, Main St. and etc., I dare say it would make these engineers sense something was afoot. No pitchforks, no hoes, no ax-handles would be needed to scare them. Let the people rule, and in peace!

Mayors and aldermen and train commitee adjudicators, even the guy who forgot to file the quiet zone papers on time, would have to take note. It would make more of an impression than all the phone calls to city hall, letters to the editor and all the gutless, unsigned Sound-Offs.

DARE TO BE WHISTLE-BLOWERS!

Oh yes, one other thing:

How about those very few people who say we are whiners complaining about the horns? Could it be that they are deaf? Hiding behind deafness, a bona fide ailment, to make inaudible cap-pistol statements?

And to the train defenders who say it's our own fault and stupidity to live so close to the tracks, the raccoon districters say -

When we built these houses or obtained them, most of us, years ago, the railroad was a romantic and peripheral blessing. These too-frequent trains, gathering in importance in the freight energy crunch, seem to have moved in much closer to our rattling stoops.

In the meantime, while this easement and return to silence is awaited, whenever a trail blows I don't call the mayor, poor guy, or even my alderman, or the cops. I simply sit up bolt upright and exclaim to my wife, Mrs. Raccoon: "What in the F---- was That?"

In that way I do not allow myself to get used to these things. People may be counting on that. I know what the noise was, but even in the dead of night we can always use a good laugh, albeit a rueful one.