Quiet, Please

I first learned of Gordon Hempton’s nature recordings in grad school. My boyfriend had an eclectic record collection, and we listened to Dawn Chorus while studying for our comprehensive exams. I even recorded my own dawn chorus in New Zealand while doing my PhD research.

Now I live on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Acoustic ecologists have raised concerns about how the sounds of war machines, such as the U.S. Navy’s Growler aircraft, could impact human and nonhuman life on and near the peninsula, which is regarded as one of the world’s quietest places.

My husband, our eight-year-old daughter, and I recently went on a backpacking trip in the Olympic National Park, and we took along the August 2023 issue of The Sun. Leslee Goodman’s interview with Hempton gave us plenty to talk about. My daughter was confounded by Hempton’s distinction between the natural world and the human world. She is strongly opposed to thinking about humans as separate from the natural environment. To her we are just another animal.

In his introduction to Leslee Goodman’s interview with Gordon Hempton, Finn Cohen writes, “Sometimes silence is where the loudest truths can be heard.” That line spoke to me before I even read the conversation that followed.

Leslee Goodman’s interview with Gordon Hempton on the value of silence [“Quiet Please,” The Dog-Eared Page, August 2023] brought to mind an experience I had in the Canyonlands of Utah in October 1989: I was hiking alone in the Upheaval Dome, a ten-kilometer-wide crater or salt dome. Somewhere in the middle I noted there was no noise: no machines; no voices; no sounds from wind, water, birds, or bugs. Nothing. I tried to be as quiet as possible. Slowly I became aware of a low vibration that I can only think was the hum of the earth. I felt — still do feel — inadequate to express the power of that sensation. I doubt I’ll get to experience such a thing again as our world gets noisier, so I treasure the gift.

The articles on silence in your August 2023 issue remind me how much I enjoy removing my hearing aids.

Over the past year, while going through a divorce, I’ve struggled to read anything that wasn’t about dealing with grief, healing from abuse, or getting out of a marriage, but Leslee Goodman’s interview with Gordon Hempton kept me reading. My ex-husband was addicted to noise, technology, and distraction, and I’ve been craving and cultivating quiet so I can hear again. This interview rings like a bell in my soul.

Leslee Goodman’s interview with Gordon Hempton on silence reminded me of a quote by the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”