I’m always interested to hear people from small towns complain about the noise they’re forced to endure in these raucous times.

Some get so angry about the sensory assault they’re compelled to write letters to the editor to gripe about the newest auditory affliction.

In the little Down East town of Danforth, for instance, the local teen-agers used to think the coolest way to pass an evening was to spin their tires until they shredded or blew up. It took a noise ordinance to put the brakes on that irritating form of recreation.

In Camden awhile back, it was the nighttime clatter of skateboarders jumping curbs downtown and drunken revelers hanging out in the waterfront park while serenading the populace with their jarring boom boxes.

If it’s not honking horns or mindless yowling that shatter the tranquility of a small-town summer night, it’s the growl of four-wheelers in rural hamlets or the pesky whine of Jet Skis drowning out the loons on local lakes. This is definitely not the way Maine life should be, the townspeople argue, and they’re right.

I sympathize. No one appreciates being kept awake at night by a idling car’s bass-boosted stereo as it resonates through the body like a concussion bomb. But before anyone decides to sell that house in town and seek the solace of the Allagash wilderness, let me assure them that the noise that bedevils them can’t hold a decibel meter to the din we Bangor residents live with all summer.

As your average Bangor west-sider might say, “When it comes to noise, folks, you ain’t heard nothing yet.”

Bangor’s west side, you see, is home to most of the fine civic amenities that serve eastern Maine. We’ve got it all right in our back yards: a commercial airport and military base, a state fairgrounds, a civic center, an auditorium, a track for harness racing and an auto-racing track not far away.

Put all of those ingredients together on a stifling summer evening, add the kind of sound-hugging cloud cover we’ve suffered for the last three weeks, spice it up with the herd of crotch-rocket motorcycles on Main Street and the snarling truck traffic from I-95, and you’ve got a noise to rival Hong Kong at rush hour.

Here in Bangor, we all get to spend our summer evenings at the horse track without ever leaving our porches or living rooms. We not only hear the annoying bugler announce the beginning of every race, we know each horse that’s running and which one’s leading in the backstretch.

Do you like heavy-metal music played at ear-splitting volume long into the night? Me neither. But unlike small-town folks, we Bangor residents get to hear Guns N’ Roses shrieking from the midway during all 10 days and nights of the Bangor State Fair. So we don’t get bored, they sometimes unleash Metallica on us unsuspecting residents.

Quite often the sounds of the fair are drowned out by the Air National Guard’s massive KC-135 refueling tankers, which regularly practice takeoffs and landings for days at a stretch on the runway at the edge of our neighborhood. They can halt a backyard conversation fast, let me tell you, although not nearly as effectively as a C-5A as it strains into the sky. Those babies will make your windows shake, your dishes rattle, and your dog dash for cover under the porch steps. And you golfers out there haven’t experienced the “yips” until you’ve tried putting for a birdie at Bangor Muni as a C-5A blocks out the sun.

With July Fourth coming, though, my patriotism forbids me from even mentioning the fighter jets streaking in formation over the city.

To round out our typical west-side summer evening, let’s throw in the drone of race cars going round and round and round the track at Speedway 95. While we’re at it, how about adding one of those delightful, down-home, truck-pulling events they hold over at Bass Park? There are no words to adequately describe that peculiar sound as it dances across our rooftops; it’s as if every carpenter in Maine were running a power saw through a loudspeaker in 20-second bursts.

I’m not complaining, mind you. Bangor may seem like a loud little city during the summer, a place that assaults its inhabitants with a truly industrial-strength noise. But civilization is not always peaceful; sometimes it’s downright deafening, too. Besides, we west-siders don’t have to suffer those irritating sounds that irk the residents of smaller towns. We have them, of course — the horns, the sirens, the boom boxes and squealing tires — we just can’t hear them over the racket.