Living in Skinner’s Box

What follows is a tale of just desserts, where the protagonist (namely me), makes a life altering decision on what began as mere whim, partly out of greed, partly out of boredom, and partly on the innocent notion that the world really is all flowers and jellybeans, and that everything is bound to turn out fine in the end. So prepare yourself, my dear reader, to feast on a healthy portion of schadenfreude.

About three weeks ago, Melissa and I moved from our old home, a small, 1920’s-era bungalow in Portage Park on the Northwest side of Chicago, into a two-story Tudor house of similar vintage in the suburb of Villa Park.

The move was rather impetuous. While we’d talked about buying a bigger home for the past couple of years, it was an amorphous plan, filled with vague dreams about dark, quiet skies and sitting by the fireplace, of having enough space so I could play music while at the same time Melissa and Milo enjoyed the peace of an early bed in another part of the house.

While we liked our home in Portage Park, and we liked our neighbors, the house is essentially a subdivided box with a kitchen and breakfast nook attached at the end. The three bedrooms, living room, and dining area all occupy the same sonic space. I could be working on the computer in my office, located in a small back bedroom, and hear Milo’s every peep in the front bedroom, even with his door closed.

Any talk about moving, however, had been just that. When faced with a specific opportunity, we’d demure. This summer, our friend Beth noted that her mom was looking to sell their 1920’s Queen Anne in Villa Park. At the time, we knew almost nothing about the town, and while the price was a little steep for us, Beth said that her mom might be willing to negotiate, and so we drove out there one Friday afternoon, more on a summer joy ride than with any serious intent.

We really liked Beth’s mom’s place. It had charm, the town seemed sweet, and her house was next to the Prairie Path, an old rail right-of-way that had been converted into a 50-mile long bike path from the inner suburbs out into farm country. However, Melissa’s dad, who’s done most of the major work on our house in Portage Park over the past several years, noted that Beth’s mom’s house was in need of significant repair (and, at least in my mind, essentially implying that he’s getting too old to be bailing out his clueless son-in-law every time some new “emergency” cropped up). So, much like the condo in Palm Springs and the farm house in Wisconsin that we considered earlier, we held off.

However, mostly out of curiosity, we decided to go on a few more Villa Park house tours. We are so stupid-innocent-crazy about these things that we found three more houses that next week we wanted to put an offer on. The first one was a little out of our price range and ended up being sold to another buyer before we could make a move. The second was on a fairly busy street, so we were able to walk away from the property without making an offer. But on one of these house tours, we found a place where it was harder to walk away. It had pretty much everything we wanted: a large, beautiful backyard that was fully fenced; a large deck for hanging out and having barbeques during the summer; three upstairs bedrooms; a living area on the first floor with four rooms, a fireplace, and a lot of old school charm; and a finished basement that could serve as both an office and music studio for me. The house had new windows, a new roof, a remodeled bathroom on the first floor, and had been very well maintained. And the asking price was significantly less than the other options we had been considering. Melissa and I toured the house twice, three times if you count the inspection. We looked out on the sunny backyard and imagined spending many a tranquil afternoon out there with our son and our dog.

In one of the disclosure statements, the old owners had checked the “Yes” box when asked if there were noise issues associated with the house. Our realtor said that the box was checked due to occasional noise from the airplanes flying in to O’Hare, about seven miles away. I peppered her with questions about this, as our realtor lives just a block away from the house, but she didn’t seem to think that the aircraft noise was a big deal. Besides, we had been in Villa Park several times over the previous few weeks and never noticed any airplanes. At the walkthrough, the day before we were closing on the sale, there were some planes flying overhead, but I kind of shrugged it off. After all, the property was about the same distance away from O’Hare as our old place in Portage Park. How bad could it be?

Since we’ve moved in, I’ve found out how bad. It turns out that on days when the wind is blowing in from Lake Michigan, Villa Park is directly on the path for the planes heading towards the 4R landing strip, which is tilted at a SW-NE angle. During the balmy August days when we’d visited the house, the wind had been blowing from the west, but in the three weeks since we’ve moved, the wind has been blowing from the northeast a lot, including virtually the entire week after we first moved in.

Which means that a significant percentage of the nation’s air traffic has been flying over our house. And I mean RIGHT over our house. Well, I guess that’s not strictly true. I’ve triangulated it on my dog walks. From best I can tell, the bull’s eye of their trajectory is about four houses to the north of us. With GPS, they are pretty exact in following this path, although there is the odd straggler that may drift 50 feet in one direction or the other, with the bell curve of flights running from somewhere right above our house to somewhere about 150 feet to the north. These flights start at around 6AM, with an interval of five minutes or so, and then increase in frequency, to the point where they are running about every 150 seconds during much of the day, before tapering off in the evening and then typically stopping for good somewhere between 9:00-9:30 PM.

I can be a bit neurotic about lights, noises and other distractions around my home. As soon as we moved in, I was semi-consciously looking for something that would bother me. Could it be the traffic on Villa Avenue, a block away? No, it’s really not that bad, except during the afternoon rush when folks are trying to avoid the traffic on Kingery Highway about a half-mile further down the road. What about the traffic on Kingery? Hmm. No, it’s only audible late at night, and then as nothing more than very low, white noise. Actually, during those first couple of evenings, the first seed for my ire was a bright light that one of our neighbors kept on all night above his side door and which shined right in most of our windows, including into two of the upstairs bedrooms and three of the rooms on the main floor.

“Do you see how bright that light is?” I kept asking Melissa. “I think it’s going to drive me crazy.”

Well, now that the planes have begun their relentless descent, I’m certainly not worried about the neighbor’s nightlight anymore. I guess in this one way, the fact we are on a flight path towards one of the world’s busiest airports has done me a favor, in that it’s given me a legitimate target to focus my neurotic obsession. I am like an animal who just paid a lot of money to live in his own Skinner’s Box, getting a steady series of little psychological shocks every time I notice another plane is roaring over our home.

I’ve always known that Chicago is a place with a mostly man-made topography. Other than Lake Michigan, a few rivers, and a series of very small permutations separating the higher land from what are essentially the drained remains of frozen swamp, the rest of our landmarks have all been shaped or created by people. This is true not just of the buildings and the urban grid that contain us, but even the forest preserves and a lot of city parks were originally lowlands and other difficult places that the early pioneers decided to leave alone and which then got forever defined as open spaces by our city planners.

But the reaction of most suburbanites living around O’Hare takes this to a level I had heretofore never known. The planes flying in to O’Hare are our Old Faithful, an external clockwork in the sky that all of us living below can keep time to.

“About twenty more seconds, and we should get another plane,” I find myself noting. This is a thought process that might eventually drive me totally batty if it doesn’t somehow extinguish itself. Which, at least according to most of my new neighbors, it will. Besides, we’ve been given assurances by folks from Park Ridge to Addison that next year the 4R runway will be moved as part of the O’Hare reconfiguration, and that Villa Park will no longer be directly under the flight path. It seems that almost everyone who lives in these ’burbs knows the fine details about the airport master plan. O’Hare is like a relentless and unmerciful god, a Sumerian deity raining jet noise and diesel fumes down on a different set of victims, depending on the vicissitudes of the Chicago aviation commission and the Midwestern winds.

Like the hitters at Wrigley Field, I’ll be hoping that the wind will be blowing out all year, as those balmy southwest winds will not just be lifting baseballs out of the ballpark but will keep all the planes coming in off the lake and away from my new home.