It is aptly named; it is indeed a ravine with a creek, upon which there was once an old mill. It is thus also whence Edmonton's resident mosquito population emanates. I spent most of my relaxing stroll swinging, swatting, and fleeing from twisting proto-swarms of airborne parasites, emerging out the other end of the trail blood supply intact but pressure thereof decidedly elevated.
But worse than this—and completely inescapable—was, from the rolling gardens of the Muttart Conservatory all the way down into the bottom of the ravine, from across the Saskatchewan River, the non-stop Edmonton marathon. Not the runners—the tannoy. The public address system. The loudspeaker announcing garbled sounds to the surrounding two mile radius.
These things are an abomination! I've written before about them ruining the Islamic call to prayer in Turkey.
From the downtown high ground of the marathon route, ineluctable, incomprehensible, echoic quivering blather radiated in every direction, including across the river parkland and into the ravine. Amplified babbling, glossolalised over distance by interference patterns rendering anything that was ever intelligible a warbly vocal spaghetti, piping up time and again upon yet another crossing of the line by a runner a mile away to interrupt that otherwise empty silence and awful peace of humming insects and occasional tweeting songbirds in the quiet summer air. BLWAPPA CLOWPAPARAP ARAPAP.
Umpire Tannoy, why do we need to do this? The people who care about what you're saying are all gathered at the same spot—where you are. Hearing it beyond the immediate visibility of the finish line is pointless.
Why can't we reinstate the unamplified speaking trumpet? The 1930s Hollywood megaphone through which the director would command "action!" on his set? It needs no batteries and reaches everyone who needs to know and no one else.
Amplified sound is a modern bane. In the 2020s, it's the handheld Bluetooth speaker. In the 1980s, it was the ghetto blaster. It has been de rigeur in nightclubs from the 1970s until today to crank the volume to ten, to maximise the noise. Bigger is better, right? Music at the volume of jet aircraft.
It's a societal obsession with technology and its ever unfulfilled empty promise to "improve" our lives. The pursuit of it obscures the problem trying to be solved. We are enslaved by our own devices.
How horrified Early Man swatting mosquitoes in a ravine would be, looking up from their hunting and gathering, to see what their world had become. Modernity has much to answer for in robbing the world of peace and quiet.
