That’s the refrain that we hear from people who move out of the city to small communities in the countryside. Well, they won’t find exactly that here in West Cornwall. On weekday mornings they will awaken at 6:30 A.M. to the sound of the blaring horn of the train that seems to find it necessary to haul demolition materials from wherever to wherever, defying any of us who live here to sleep through it. Oh, we might have been awakened in the middle of the night by the loud siren call, not once but twice, for the volunteer emergency rescue team, many of whom can’t hear it from where they live, and all of whom have cellphones and “beepers” at their bedside to call them to duty. The noisy Canada geese, who no longer migrate, will make certain you don’t oversleep. If it happens to be a sunny weekend day, the Harley motorcycles will roar through the area, revving their engines, especially through the covered bridge. (They love Connecticut because for some unknown reason there is no helmet requirement law.) At noon, we have the blare, (not once, buy twice) of the mid-day “whistle”, apparently a leftover from colonial times, to call the farmers in from the fields for lunch. Pity the person walkingthrough the village when that deafening siren goes off. Cover your ears. Maybe all day and night to find that quiet of the countryside.
—Charles Cilona
(Mr. Cilona has lived just across the covered bridge on what is often referred to as the “west bank” of the Housatonic river in a house he bought in 1971. He and his partner Guy Birster own and operate the popular (and often noisy) restaurant RSVP in West Cornwall, now in its 23rd year.)
