When push comes to shove, death has a lot more clout than noise. : Quiet Times in Topanga

We have this routine at home. My wife says, “Did you hear that?” and I say, “Did I hear what?” “That noise.” “What noise?” “You never hear anything.” “What?”

For years she has claimed that my hearing is less than acute, a contention which, of course, I vigorously deny.

God simply provides for the lesser of his creatures a method by which we can reject what we do not choose to accept.

When someone, for instance, assaults my prose in a rattling display of vitriol, I wait quietly until he is finished and say, “Huh?” Huh especially drives them crazy.

Today, however, I am willing to accept that perhaps there is something going on I really haven’t been hearing. For instance, commercial jetliners roaring over Topanga Canyon.

I have been reading stories in which so-called “neighborhood activists” have complained that the jet noise over the mountain community is driving everyone crazy.

They have gone so far as to take their complaints to the Federal Aviation Administration, which, for a brief while, considered ordering the planes to fly higher.

Unfortunately, however, this could have resulted in airliners colliding over Malibu, a condition at least as equally unpleasant, so the FAA junked the plan.

When push comes to shove, death has a lot more clout than noise.

After reading the latest piece, it occurred to me that I have lived in the Canyon for 15 years and can’t remember even hearing a jet.

I have heard dogs barking, owls hooting, rattlesnakes rattling and neighborhood activists howling in the distance, but I have not heard so much as a DC-Anything overhead.

My wife says she is also not bothered by jet noise, although she is bothered by my snoring, an annoyance which, thank God, is not under public scrutiny.

I also spoke with several friends in Topanga, most of whom were similarly undisturbed by high-bypass-ratio turbofans throbbing in the clouds.

Colin Penno, who is editor of the sprightly Topanga Messenger, suggests that the jet roar is only in the head of the beholder and not a communitywide problem.

He is more bothered, he says, by loud helicopters, roaring motorcycles and people he doesn’t like saying practically anything at all.

I think that among those he dislikes are the activists who complain about the jet noise in the first place.

Except for them, the Canyon is a peaceful corner of the world, which is why many of us are there in the first place. We have learned to accept occasional disruptions in the quiet day as the price of prevailing serenity.

Like Colin Penno, I am more bothered by noisy political assaults on controversial community activities than I am by jet engines at full throttle.

The Elysium Fields Nudist Camp comes to mind. Considerably more noise has been made for the last decade or so by those trying to close the camp than has ever been made by commercial jetliners, but the activists don’t seem especially troubled by that.

The nudists themselves are quiet people, lying in the sun with their inhibitions hanging out. They don’t even talk very much. I guess when you’re stark naked there isn’t too much more you have to say.

But the enemies of the camp are not so quiet.

Charges of degeneracy in the mountains, shouted by those born in blue pin-striped suits, have reached screeching levels in the Canyon and no one has demanded that the prudes alter their routes to fly over Episcopal Churches instead.

OK, so there are noisy places in the world. Singles bars and Irish weddings and places where cats are tortured come to mind.

One can also understand why a community activist might object to an NFL stadium across the street or to a rocket-testing lab around the corner.

But jets flying overhead at 10,000 feet? Man, as my son used to say, get off my case.

One of the so-called activists claims to have a 35-second tape of jet noises as proof of his claim that they are a nuisance.

I tried, as they say, to replicate his tape of the disturbance with my Sanyo TRC 2500 Executive Talk-Book recorder issued by The Los Angeles By God Times.

I turned the recorder on and left it on the back deck for 90 minutes.

When I listened to it later, I heard garbage men shouting in Spanish, kids fighting over whose turn it was to get the good branch on an oak tree, a distant electric saw, someone playing a piano and a kind of snooshing sound I later identified as a dog sniffing at the recorder. Thank God that’s all he did.

If there were jets thundering overhead, they did not fly over my deck, but chose instead to fly over the homes of various neighborhood activists who sit around waiting for life to upset and annoy them.

Perhaps the activists, if they are truly bothered, ought to find a place of ultimate quiet where jets do not fly overhead.

Bush City, Kan., might be nice.