With apologies to Rachel Carson, spring — in the post-industrial, wired world — is anything but silent.
Count, as I did the evening I flew from San Francisco to Seattle in late February, what Gordon Hempton (with no slight tinge of bitterness) would refer to as “intrusions” into the natural soundscape.
One: City bus accelerating.
Two: Pedestrian’s high heels clicking.
Three: BART train bulleting into Montgomery Street Station.
Four: Engine of an airborne Airbus A320.
Five: Please return your tray tables to the upright position.
Six: Water running from the faucet of my older sister’s Seattle home.
Seven: Click of light switch to off position.
Eight: Distant siren.
The list goes on, of course, endlessly. We, and our machines, speak and scream and bleep and groan our way through each and every ADD day.
And who, you might like to know, is Gordon Hempton?
He is this: 50-ish, give or take. Handsome — tanned and scruffy-chic. Salt and pepper hair, thinning just a bit. 5’8” in green rubber boots. Green/blue eyes wide open, present — observing, it seems, something deep. Quite literally, he is a man who makes his living tracking sound, traveling the world recording dawn choruses of birds and babbling brooks. Living the dream, as he puts it, by listening. His bounty — some thirty years worth of sounds — has found its way onto radio, television, video games. He’s won an Emmy. And with the release of his new book, One Square Inch of Silence: One’s Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World (Free Press), he’ll add author and activist to his resume.
Hempton’s book is part travelogue, part manifesto for the preservation of natural soundscapes, part compulsive chronicling of every decibel within earshot: Frog at thirty feet (55dBA). Chainsaw at thirty-five (75dBA). The rushing Hoh River in Olympic National Park at 300 yards (22dBA). He does this, as the subhead states, for a little piece of quiet amid a world of quite unnatural sound.
Make no mistake, Hempton understands that in the absolute sense, the fight was lost a long time ago. Indeed, exactly nowhere on the landmasses of this planet will you find natural quiet all day, every day. The most egregious culprit is air traffic — commercial jets, military planes, flightseeing tours to some of the world’s more remote spots.
Nonetheless, Hempton argues, this absence of absolute silence should not prevent us from preserving a small specimen. And that is precisely what he’s up to: protecting a single square of silence on the Olympic peninsula for a period of fifteen minutes a day, during daylight hours. Pilgrims in search of a sonic detox are invited to visit his website, onesquareinch.org.
To drum up support for his cause and to listen, again, to the cacophony — natural and not — on offer all across the country, Hempton sputtered coast to coast in his 1964 Volkswagen bus during the spring and summer of 2007, a trip that provides the frame for his book. His route creeps east, including Seattle, Miles City, Provo, Boulder. “It had been nearly a decade since I’d traveled the country, listened to it,” he told me. What he heard was, in a word, louder.
Along the way, he asked people who inhabit very different worlds than his own to describe the sound of their lives. Most people, he says, agreed with him about the importance of preserving natural silence, though they’d never had occasion to think about it as such. And that’s the thing. Sound, it seems, is vision’s un-favored little brother. Sure, people agree, it’s important. But…
It’s the “but” that gets to Hempton. “But,” he might argue, “nothing.” Silence has a deep, profound and unfortunately invisible effect on our bodies, minds and spirits. The fundamental paradox, of course, is that it’s impossible to recognize this without “tuning in” to the world around you. To understand the importance of silence, one must first begin to listen.
While the book’s road-trippy prose is not as dynamic or dreamy as, say, Kerouac or Steinbeck, it communicates its message effectively enough for this reader to want to sojourn to Seattle, east and north past Port Angeles, south beyond Forks and inland to Olympic National Park, a 3.2 mile hike from the parking lot of the Hoh Rainforest’s visitor’s center, in order to experience this storied single inch of space for himself.
The first thing Hempton did was hand me a map of the U.S. that articulates the “problem” better than any verbal explanation could. It looks like a crazed slasher film villain took his weapon to the continent. Cuts abound. The map, Hempton tells me, represents daily flight patterns across the country. If there is a visual equivalent to the violence of noise, that map is it.
As we hiked in, making our way closer to OSI, it became clear that Olympic National Park has, indeed, escaped serious incision. Looking more closely at this part of Washington, the map confirms: It’s pure, unadulterated white space (translation: birds and babbling brooks). By the time we reached the site, we’d been walking in uninterrupted silence for more than two hours.
I’d more or less understood what Hempton meant when, earlier, he’d referred to a sound “decaying.” Still, it wasn’t until I’d passed through the “buttressed” spruce, which marks the unofficial entrance to OSI, and walked the hundred yards or so to a fallen tree upon whose trunk sits a red stone — the very square inch itself — that I apprehended just how privileged I was to be having the experience.
I seated myself on a log a few yards from the stone, and got quiet — really, really quiet. And there it was. Tap, tap, tap. Drops of water falling from high branches onto a hollow log, and then… decay. It’s the perfect word for it. The endgame of an echo. Odd and ancient and, in that moment, mine all mine. I glanced over at Gordon to see if he’d shared the moment with me, but he was gone, eyes closed, listening, most certainly, to something else, something equally unique, and his, his, his.
I’m lucky to have had the moment, I know. And I’m lucky the book landed on my desk and directed me here to teach me the difference between listening for a sound in a place, and listening to the place itself. If you don’t already know the difference, read the book. Travel to the Hoh. Take a long walk, a deep breath or two. Sit down. And listen.