Searching for Quiet (Little Green Notebook)
This morning, I stayed in bed for a few extra minutes to listen to the rain on the roof. I’m enchanted by quiet sounds -- the tinkling of an ice cube in a glass of bourbon, the scritch-scritch of a pencil on paper, the squeaking of a saddle when I ride a horse on a trail.
I have always liked sounds. As a child, the thwang of the diving board at the Auburn University Coliseum swimming pool released a slew of endorphins in my brain. When I snorkeled in the Keys, I was so hypnotized by the sound of the parrot fish chomping the coral that I had to be cajoled to get out of the chilly water before hypothermia set in.
I like sounds, especially quiet ones. I’m no fan of loud, though, not a bit. I’m like an old fuddy duddy, asking my loved ones to “turn that down,” movies and music alike. I wear earplugs to concerts, and I can’t tolerate a television being on unless someone is actively watching it.
Lately, the noise pollution around me is out of control. Have you noticed what’s going on at gas stations? Not only are we pummeled by the music blasting from the car next to us competing with the unnecessary country songs wailing from the hidden speakers overhead, but now horrid little screens on the gas pumps have inserted themselves into the fray. As soon as you swipe your credit card, there’s yet another voice in the din telling us just how white our whites can be. It’s a full-on audio assault.
The other night I went to a popular sports restaurant with my girlfriends. We try to get together weekly, and it had been a long while since we’d met at this particular place. I quickly remembered why. It’s too loud. I smiled and nodded at my friends and said, over and over, “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” I think restaurants beleaguer our ears so we’ll eat and drink more, with conversation out of the question.
I get it that an establishment that calls itself a “sports bar” sports televisions every place you lay your weary eyes, but why include background music too?
What on earth is going on with restaurants? I have childhood memories of hearing the server set a fork down by my plate and tingling with its delicate plink, of hushed voices and muted conversations that settled around me like a cloud, of the magic of restaurants where every table was its own tiny world of secrets and whispers and tastes.
I miss quiet restaurants. Perhaps I should pack a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and hike to the floor of the Haleakalā Crater on Maui, Hawaii, noted as the quietist natural place on Earth. Tony Perrottet, writing for Smithsonian Magazine in December 2011, reported surprise at hearing a faint drumming there in the bowels of this ancient volcano, where no birdsong, no wind whistle, no cricket thrum gained entrance. That noise was, he slowly realized, the terrible beating of his tell-tale heart.
Even this quiet oasis is disrupted by anthropogenic noise, a by-product of humanity’s careless quest for whatever peace it is we chase. Tourists seeking quiet have resulted in the sound of aircraft disrupting this noiseless oasis over twenty-five percent of the time.
Perhaps I could make a trip to Minneapolis and visit the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories, Inc. In some inexplicable trick of physics, its loudness measures in negative decibels. Visitors say you can hear the blood swooshing through your veins, your eyelashes batting, your lungs beyond your breath. Without the benefit of acoustic navigation, folks can’t stand up more than half an hour in this soundless room. They say visitors hallucinate, and that the longest anyone has ever been able to stay inside the chamber is forty-five minutes. I wish my mama could try it. She, the self-dubbed Warrior Queen of Quiet, might’ve broken the record.
How did the Orfield Lab scientists make a room so quiet? They built a room suspended in a room within a concrete chamber, with fiberglass wedges adorning all sides. It’s more complicated than that, but still, I beg restaurant architects to take note.
I would like to visit an anechoic chamber myself. I’d also like to go out to eat in a place that isn’t loud, a place without reverberating echoes, without television noise and background music drowning out any chance of conversation.
And as long as we’re dreaming, I’d like a world in which humans are considerate of our action’s effects on nature, where whales don’t compete with ocean liners to be heard, where bighorn rams aren’t on the constant search for room to roam, where spotted salamanders can crawl from their vernal hatching ponds to wet forest floors without fear of being squished by cars, and where humans live up to our ultimate potential, that is, to live in harmony with our own natural world.
Here’s a sweet review of Box Turtles, Hooligans, and Love, Sweet Love. Thank you, Sandy.
How exquisite, also a word that is “quiet” to me. Our aural senses are numbed, and what a history dive this would be, tracing back the encroach of human activity into most of our waking hours. When I take my evening strolls, I am surrounded by trees and soggy ground where frogs purr and owls occasionally message the night. But lately, I am more attuned to the steady whoosh of vehicles from the highway a mile away. It never, ever stops. And only now I am so strangely attuned to it.
Thank you for putting all the words into this universal experience.
I love quiet. Find a nice house outside town... and then 20 years later there is a flight pattern to the airport over your house, kids compete for the noisiest cars, and some of their music makes everything in the house vibrate! But! My son taught me: there is a way to turn off the speaker at the gas station. I think you press the 2nd button from the top on the buttons on the right side. Also, you might like Martha Beck's essay, Finding Silence in a Storm. I enjoyed reading this!