Endangered Silence

One of my favorite memories from childhood was hurricane Opal. I remember the day before she came distinctly. We got out of school early. The October sky was sunny and cloudless and the air was calm: a perfect day to play. I went to a store with my mom to buy hurricane supplies. That night, all our family from the Auburn area came over to our house because we were the only ones with a basement. The wind and rain came, and the power went off, so we lit candles and talked for a while. The sound of wind and trees could be heard outside and our two beagles were snoring in the tool room, happy to be inside. After most of us went to sleep, my dad and my uncle were awake, occasionally opening the back door to look at what was going on outside. I looked out there from a distance, seeing lightning, hearing the howling of wind and cracking of limbs. There was no distant glow of street lights, only the occasional illumination of lightning bolts.

The next morning it had all passed and our yard was a mess. Green leaves and twigs were everywhere. Some trees had fallen over in our yard, one of them had broken our wooden fence, but our house was undamaged. We drove to our cousin's house but we couldn't even drive on their street, so we parked a block away. The neighbors said a tornado went down the street. There were dozens of trees crisscrossing the road. I had fund crawling around them.

It took us a week to get power back. Over the next few days, some of my most vivid memories of childhood were formed. The skies cleared up, and at night there was a full moon. Because there was no electricity, the moon seemed as bright as the sun. Us children ran around in the streets and played. We hid in the shadows of trees; we came home to candle-lit houses; it was as if my whole neighborhood traveled back in time.

I am somewhat of a Luddite. I dislike too many electric things, too much mechanical noise, and too much light at night. I dislike television. I am considering not getting a new computer when this one dies. I wish I didn't have a cell phone. I want to sell my car.

I read an article from Newsweek about the extinction of silence in America, which I found interesting. It's a shame things like this are associated with hippies. It loses credibility that way.

Silence is something you assume you will always be able to find if you need it. All you have to do is drive far enough in the right direction, trek through quiet fields or woods, or dive into the sea's belly. For true silence is not noiselessness. As audio ecologist Gordon Hempton defines it, silence is "the complete absence of all audible mechanical vibrations, leaving only the sounds of nature at her most natural. Silence is the presence of everything, undisturbed."

 

And silence, Hempton believes, is rapidly disappearing, even in the most remote places. He says there are fewer than a dozen places of silence—areas "where natural silence reigns over many square miles"—remaining in America, and none in Europe. In his book, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World, written with John Grossman, Hempton argues that silence—a precious, underrated commodity—is facing extinction. Over the past three decades Hempton has circled the earth three times, recording sound on every continent except Antarctica: butterfly wings fluttering, coyotes singing, snow melting, waterfalls crashing, traffic clanging, birds singing. His work has been used in film soundtracks, videogames, and museums.
He has also trekked through both remote and urban landscapes, measuring decibels and rude interruptions to the noises of nature. In 1983 he found 21 places in Washington state with noise-free intervals of 15 minutes or more. By 2007 there were three. (One of them is Olympic National Park, which he is trying to save, and he will not reveal the names of the others, arguing that they are protected by their anonymity.) Whom can we blame? People, and planes. Hempton claims that, during daytime, the average noise-free interval in wilderness areas has shrunk to less than five minutes. Think of the snowmobiles roaring through Yellowstone, helicopters flying over Hawaii volcanoes, and air tours over the Grand Canyon. It is air traffic that Hempton seems to resent the most: in his book, he travels across the United States in a 1964 VW bus, recording sound as he goes, from Washington state to Washington, D.C., where he meets with politicians and officials to press his case for the preservation of natural silence.

Read the whole article here