It’s a noisy world out there

Lying in my sleeping bag in New Mexico State Parks’ breathtakingly beautiful Cottonwood Campground last Friday night, I could hear the San Juan River gently murmuring a few hundred feet away, dry cottonwood leaves rustling in the breeze, a guy strumming his guitar a few campsites down — and in the background a noise I couldn’t put my finger on.

The steady sound didn’t seem connected to the traffic across the river on N.M. 64, nor from aircraft. It wasn’t late-arriving campers driving monster trucks and towing even bigger trailers — as soon as they found a parking space, their noise stopped.

In the clear light of morning, however, the source of the muffled but relentless “whop-whop-whop-whop-whop” was obvious: natural gas compressor stations. Unmanned and low-profile, the compressors work around the clock collecting and pumping a steady stream of clean-burning natural gas down the pipeline that links with thousands of American homes, including mine in Albuquerque.

Compressor stations and a state park campground seemed a bad pairing to me, and I wondered whether the Bush administration might have had something to do with it. The campground is surrounded by land administered by the Bureau of Land Management, which has come under fire in recent years for allowing oil and gas development with little regard for its effect on other members of the public.

But it turns out all those natural gas pipelines, access roads and noisy compressor stations were there before the campground was built, said Doris Goode, the senior superintendent of Navajo Lake State Park. “We moved into it,” she said of the industrial zone, rather than the other way around.

There are at least half a dozen compressors around the campground, including one located adjacent to a day-use area, Goode said. The machinery has been muffled and the compressor sites fenced to reduce their impact on campground visitors, but the noise is still obvious — and more noticeable yet when the wind is blowing certain directions, she said.

The compressor noise seemed louder and more obtrusive on my second night in the campground. That was before I knew which came first, the compressors or the campground, and as I lay in my tent, it didn’t seem right to allow the sounds of industry to horn in on the solitude of a park.

Americans don’t like to suffer, or even to go without all the comforts available to us and our credit cards. We want to have our cake and eat it, too. We want big cars and good mileage, low taxes and lots of government services, freedom from the fears of terrorism without having to take off our shoes in the airport. Last weekend, I just wanted a beautiful camp site that also was quiet.

But as is becoming increasingly obvious, we don’t get it all. We don’t get endless credit, or zero-percent down on a house. We don’t get cheap oil without sacrificing American lives. We don’t get to drive all we want and still eliminate global warming. I thought one of the best questions asked during the presidential debates in October was one neither Barack Obama nor John McCain answered particularly well: What will you ask Americans to sacrifice to get our country back on track?

I wish both candidates had said they want Americans to get over our sense of entitlement. To acknowledge that sacrifice is OK. That the vast majority of us are better off than the vast majority of the world’s 6.7 billion residents, and that we’ll survive just fine if every American has to give up something precious for the common good.

As I lay in my sleeping bag trying to nod off, I thought Cottonwood Campground would be so much closer to perfect if there were no natural gas compressors humming, just the burbling river and rustling leaves. Eventually, however, I realized how glad I would be to get home Sunday to a warm house and a hot shower. I nestled a little deeper into my bag, and soon all the sounds melted away.