My childhood home stands at the corner of 5th Avenue and McLeod Street in Big Timber, Montana. Big Timber is a small town. First Avenue was also US Highway 10 before the Interstate Highway was built. That meant that all the trucks passing east or west through that part of Montana had to go through our town on a street that was four blocks from our house.

One block from 1st Avenue is Railroad Street, which runs next to the train tracks. There are no longer passenger trains that pass through Big Timber, but when I was a child, two passenger trains were traveling in each direction. Only one train in each direction stopped in our town. The other was an express that stopped only at larger cities. The express trains, however, did drop mail bags and bundles of the Billings Gazette Newspaper without stopping. In addition to the passenger trains, a dozen or more freight trains were passing through town each day. Freight trains regularly left cars with bigger shipments on a siding next to Railroad Street. Our father’s business received farm machinery on rail cars. The cars would be parked next to a loading dock, and we would have 24 hours to unload them before they moved on. Although the passenger trains no longer stop, the number of freight trains has increased recently, with three coal trains in each direction.

Due to the location of our house, we could easily hear the trucks and trains rumbling through town, as well as the train whistles warning of the crossing at McLeod Street. Our bedroom was on the second floor of our house, and we slept with the windows open, except on the coldest winter days. I don’t remember that the noise of the trains and trucks ever made it hard to sleep. I might occasionally wake when I heard a train whistle or when a truck applied its Jake brake at the edge of town, but I’d go right back to sleep. Night noises were just part of living in that place.

There were other night noises. We often heard the coyotes singing in the hills. Occasionally, an airplane would fly low overhead on approach to the airport, though there wasn’t much nighttime activity at our small airport. The fire whistle would sound, summoning volunteers to fight fires or respond to a severe traffic accident. Once in a while, an ambulance would use its siren on its way to the hospital located right behind our house.

I’ve lived in other places where there was more noise. When we lived in Chicago, we lived on 57th Street, which was a corridor for ambulances and fire trucks. When we first moved into the apartment, it seemed to me that sirens were passing by the building all night long, but I quickly adapted and learned to sleep through the noise. We lived in Boise, Idaho, for ten years, with railroad tracks right behind our backyard fence. It wasn’t the main line, just the Amtrak spur to the train depot, which was a few blocks away. So, we only had one train in each direction each day, but both trains came during hours when we were usually sleeping. I would only be woken by train noise when the west-bound train was running late.

The house where we live now is a mile from an oil refinery that runs 24 hours a day. The refinery's processes are relatively quiet, but there is a constant hum emanating from the facility. In addition, the trains that carry crude oil to the refinery and refined products away, as well as the trucks that haul fuel away, have their own distinct sounds. Most of the crude oil arrives by ship on the sea, and we don’t hear the sounds of it being transferred to the pipeline at the shore.

Inside our house, however, there are other sounds. The most prominent sounds are two antique clocks, both of which have loud ticking sounds. They both chime on the hour, and one chimes on the half hour. Our refrigerator is relatively quiet, but it has an ice maker that clatters when it spills ice into the collection tray. Our heating and air conditioning systems have a large fan that makes some noise.

I’ve learned to sleep with a certain level of background noise, and each time we move, the night noises are different from those where we used to live. I’ve adjusted quickly to the new sounds. I’m not the world’s best sleeper, but noise generally isn’t one of the reasons I wake in the night.

I was inspired to write this essay by lying in my bed and listening to the night noises. They are all familiar and comfortable to me. But they might prove to be challenging to someone who wasn’t used to the sounds of our house. The clocks are pretty loud. However, when we have guests, they don’t complain about the sound. I’m pretty sure that our son and daughter-in-law’s home, just down the road from ours, is even quieter. They have 10 acres, so the neighbors are farther away. They don’t have any clocks that make noise. Their primary heat source is a wood stove, so their furnace fan doesn’t run very often.

When our grandchildren were babies, our son and his wife had a white noise machine that they would turn on when putting the baby to sleep. The theory is that because babies are surrounded by the sounds of their mother’s heartbeat and breathing, a certain level of background noise calms them. I think the white noise machine would make it challenging for me to sleep. I doubt that it would be calming. Of course, I have no conscious memory of my transition into the world. My mother told me that I was a sound sleeper when I was tiny.

Children are growing up these days who don’t know the sound of a mechanical clock. For them, TikTok is a social media platform where people watch short videos. However, I do not need the videos. I do, however, sleep better with the tick-tock of the clocks in my house.