This thread is about my fear. Whether this fear is irrational or natural, I’d like you people to decide.
The situation is this: I’ve lived really close to a local municipal airport for a large portion of my life, since childhood. These planes are the small ones, cesnas and pipers, some jets, but still, the noise they make is like God took a buzzsaw and sliced the sky in half. These plane engines start up the ruckus from 8 in the morning and last until late in the evening. It seems that they are taking off, one after another, almost every minute.
You might think I’d get used to the noise, that it might fade into the background, but it never has for me and I’m constantly made aware of them circling my house.
And here’s why: In 1997 a plane crashed in a neighborhood on the opposite side of the airport, less than a mile from where I live. My initial reaction was fear, although a minor fear, but I worked it up in my mind, because I wanted to write a fiction story about repeated plane crashes, based on the very fear of it.
But in reality, planes did start to crash in various neighborhoods over the next few years. In fact, there were 8 plane crashes in a span of the following 7 years. I paid very close to these incidents in the newspapers. People who lived in the neighborhoods surrounding the airport all expressed a fear to the reporters, and investigations were done due to the excessive number of crashes, but nothing ever changed, the airport was never shut down, and the investigations never revealed anything to the public.
It got to the point that when driving home, if I saw smoke coming up over the distant trees, I knew what it was. A plane crash. This particular crash made me feel like nostradamas, because I once asked this girl who lived closer to the airport than me if she ever had the same fear. She said no. Months later a plane crashed directly across from her house.
Many of these pilots are training to fly, with no experience. Some of these planes are experimental planes, meaning they were built by scratch by some amateur. When the engines buzz over my house, I always listen for a failing engine. This causes great anxiety given how often I hear them. Day after day. Year after year.
What I want to know is, am I making a big deal out of this? I know what many of you will say: “Why cant you just move way?” Well, I cant because of money reasons, but I assure you, I would move the second I got a chance. This issue is really important to me, because the noise pollution has caused me to have a conflict with my immediate environment and it truly stresses me out. I’m always thinking a plane is going to crash into my house. I understand the odds of that, but the fact that I almost predicted these crashes freaks me out even more.
To top it off, when I go into stores in my neighborhood, they all have birds-eye view photos of their little establishment. A neighbor who knew one of the dead pilots was quoted in the paper as saying the pilot “was a good man, very down to earth.” Down to fucking earth!
It clearly doesn’t bother others the way it bothers me.
I’d love to read as much feedback as you people will give me.
