A little over a year ago, a 40-foot sperm whale took a wrong turn (it happens to the best of us) and ended up splashing around the shallow Firth of Forth waters near Edinburgh, Scotland.

How he got in remains a matter of discussion, but how he wouldn’t get out is a whale of a tale indeed.

At its narrowest, before it merges with the North Sea, the Firth of Forth is crossed by the Firth of Forth bridge. Autos and trains traverse this structure 24-7. Most travelers notice only the shimmering Scottish waters and beckoning highlands.

The sperm whale, however, noticed that the closer he swam to the bridge — and the closer he swam to the silent wide open sea of whale freedom — the noisier his world became.

So he wouldn’t swim under the bridge. He would rather beach himself and bloat into a rotting mess of seagull kibble.

All those trains and cars made the waves under the bridge louder than a gaggle of freshmen girlies buying lipstick at Target.

Who’s going to argue with a 40-foot sperm whale? Who cares if nine out of 10 college students don’t know where a whale’s ears are? If the whale says it’s loud, then dammit, it’s loud.

A little over a month ago, I settled into an apartment roughly a shadow away from the double Union Pacific railroad tracks, and roughly two shadows away from where the tracks cross North Dakota Avenue.

I soon learned the goods and bads of my apartment. Dishwasher, good. Central air, good. Train whistles at 3 a.m., bad.

I’ll get used to it, I told myself. It will just be background noise after a few months. Look at all the other people who live around here. They deal with it somehow. And I can lay pennies on the track whenever I want to, since it’s spitting distance from my couch.

Psychologists call this denial.

My television must think I’m absolutely insane, since I have to turn it ALL THE WAY UP when a train passes, and then just as quickly back down to normal hearing levels. I’ve done this three or four times per show. Once a train was passing through an entire “Seinfeld” episode. I have a lead finger on the volume control. That’s something no one needs.

No one needs noise pollution. Humans feel pain at 120 decibels. I haven’t trooped out to the tracks with a decibel meter lately (on my list of priorities, it’s below using an eraser to scrub the stains from the toilet), but my educated guess would be that the average train whistle is 119 decibels.

Noise pollution, like second-hand smoke, is one of those pesky silent killers. No kidding — there are higher levels of suicide and violence in noisy areas.

There was even a study done on the reading abilities of children who went to school near a railroad crossing and those who learned elsewhere. The result? The kids who had to deal with the distraction of the railroad lagged significantly in skills. Give that excuse to your professors sometime.

I could see the bright side of this, the so-called light through the slats of the boxcars. I could be learning all about the Doppler Effect and making up wild and crazy story problems.

If the train traveling west at 50 mph leaves Ames at 4 a.m., and Jen went to sleep at midnight, at what point will the train pass by her apartment? How loud and how often must the engineer blow the horn in order to wake Jen from deep sleep, assuming she sleeps 20 yards from the tracks? How soon will Jen be able to hear the train, even subconsciously, as she dreams of quiet places?

And for extra credit, if a second train is approaching Ames, what time will it have to leave Boone in order to blow its horn at the same time and place as the first train? Feel free to use calculators.

In the meantime, I’ll be dancing gleefully because there is a God, and she must have lived near train tracks. Thanks to the Ames City Council, the Union Pacific engineers will no longer have to blare their presence to the sleeping residents.

By the end of this month, funky “automated horn systems” will replace the standard, bone-jarring, brain-mushing, life-sucking whistles.

These horn systems will, in theory, focus the warning sound down the road, not all over creation. I’ll be the first to tell you if it works. And the first to tell you if it doesn’t.

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Jen Hirt is a graduate student in English from Valley City, Ohio.