The Sounds of Silence

One Square Inch of Silence was published at the end of March 2009 in time for the authors, Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann, to appear at the Earth Day events in New York’s Central Park on April 26th, at the end of their book-launch tour. I was only halfway through the book at that date, reading it over coffee, sitting in the sun by the river in the old Swedish university city of Uppsala during the mid-morning rush-hour of students cycling to classes. In spite of the modest traffic I could enjoy the sounds of river water running, birds singing, and trees soughing in a light breeze on a glorious spring day, in sight of a hillside of blue scillas reaching up towards the castle. It would be hard to find the equivalent relative quiet in an outdoor café in the center of London or New York, or even Cambridge, England, another ancient seat of learning, where the pavements are as congested as the roads and the traffic noise is deafening. The contrast with less densely populated Sweden was thought-provoking. One Square Inch of Silence is a thought-provoking book. It makes you listen to the world with different ears and question the inevitability of the background cacophony you take for granted.

Gordon Hempton describes himself as a Sound Tracker and acoustic ecologist, a term and a vocation he invented for himself. The book recounts a three-month journey in his collectors’-item blue 1960s Volkswagen camper (affectionately referred to throughout the book as the “Vee-Dub”) from his home in Joyce, just west of Seattle in Washington State, to “the other Washington.” En route he recorded the noise levels in cities and in supposedly quiet places in the National Parks and wilderness areas in between. Journey’s end came with a hundred-mile walk from Williamsport, Maryland, along the C & O Canal National Historic Park to Washington. There Hempton and Grossmann had set up a series of meetings to lobby the Director of the National Park Service, the Environmental Protection Agency (about its responsibilities under the Noise Control Act), and one of Hempton’s state senators. Only the senator offered any immediate support, but perhaps consciousness was marginally elevated in the bureaucracies by the meetings. The final act of Hempton’s pilgrimage was a visit with his father to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery, where the noise of jets taking off at one-minute intervals from the adjacent airport drowned out the daily ceremony of the Changing of the Guard: a chance to sound a last note more in sorrow than in anger.

Hempton first got the idea for “One Square Inch of Silence,” the project that gave his book its title, in 1989, when he was awarded a Lindbergh Foundation grant to help preserve the nature sounds of Washington State. He gave up his bicycle messenger job in Seattle to concentrate full-time on the vocation that had preoccupied him since his late twenties: recording the sounds of natural quiet and documenting its apparently inexorable shrinkage. On Earth Day in 2005, he established “One Square Inch of Silence” in the Hoh rainforest in Olympic Park, Washington, despairing of the National Park Service’s will to act decisively without outside pressure. He chose Olympic Park because it was the only remaining National Park in which a diverse natural soundscape is uninterrupted for substantial periods by man-made noise. He put a polished red stone, the gift of an elder of the Quileute tribe, on a log about a three mile hike from the visitor center. He then embarked on a campaign to achieve and preserve one square inch of silence in the place marked by the stone by regularly monitoring man-made intrusions. Hempton posts a record of the intrusions on the OSI website (onesquareinch.org) and sends an audio CD of examples of the sounds of quiet, ending with the intrusion in question, to those responsible for the noise, with a polite request for cooperation in preserving the natural soundscape. Alongside the One Square Inch stone he placed a jar in which walkers are invited to deposit accounts of their experiences of natural quiet, the Jar of Quiet Thoughts. (As the book went to press, Hempton reports, rumblings from the Park Service suggested that the bureaucrats were all set to remove his modest installation, categorizing it as an unlicensed intrusion not justified by any “scientific” purpose.)

Hempton’s co-author, the journalist John Grossmann, has been an ally in the crusade since they met in 1988, when Grossman was researching an article on natural quiet. Their collaboration on this book grew out of a piece Grossman wrote for Delta Airlines’ in-flight magazine about Hempton’s “One Square Inch” experiment. Over the past few years Hempton has developed a network of supporters, some of whom we meet in the course of his journey. He operates as the nucleus of a pressure group and wherever possible tries to secure the cooperation of the individuals and agencies responsible for noise intrusions, notably the Parks Service itself, whose maintenance practices are a chronic source of loud mechanical noise, and, increasingly, the airlines and scenic air tour operators who account for some of the most frequent and persistent man-made intrusions in the quiet spaces of America. One eloquent piece of evidence for the authors’ campaign is an appendix reproducing the Federal Aviation Authority’s map of America with National Parks and Indian Reservations shown, and both low and high altitude flightpaths and Special Use Airspace marked. It is a dense, dark spider’s web of overflights. Another appended piece of persuasion is a CD with very beautiful still photographs from Hempton’s cross-country journey and an audio record of the “natural music” of some of the quiet spaces visited along the way. Hempton makes his living from sales of such recordings for educational, recreational, and therapeutic purposes, as well as occasional work for movies, television, and radio.

Hempton is one of the baby-boomers whose values were shaped by the softer ecological strand of the Sixties counterculture. Solitary hiking and body surfing have marked the liturgical rhythms of his life over many years. One of the characters we meet on the journey had a rougher passage as a traumatized Vietnam vet who regained his sanity only by living with grizzlies in Yellowstone. While one faction of the counterculture made environmental degradation their special cause, the roots of concern for the natural world reach back much further, and Hempton draws on a long tradition of American nature writing, taking in Walden and Huck Finn and, above all, the journals of John Muir. Muir, who is Hempton’s model and inspiration, took a thousand-mile walking tour in 1867 to celebrate regaining his sight, which he had lost in an industrial accident. He continued to walk America’s natural landscape and record its sights and sounds in his journals, meticulously preserving thousands of plant specimens. Hempton is a parallel case, having suddenly developed tinnitus and hearing loss at age fifty and almost as abruptly regaining his hearing, once he gave up the fearsome regime of vitamin supplements and hormones with which so many middle-aged Americans attempt to stave off aging and, perhaps, mortality itself. (Is it only American baby boomers who do this? It is rare in Europe. Could it have something to do with an image I suspect lurks in Hempton’s vision, America as another Eden?)

Peeping out from the journal of a journey are fragments of several other genres of writing: autobiography; a rudimentary natural theology; poetic evocations of nature; case studies in political science and public administration; a handbook for consciousness-raising and political lobbying. Publicity material compares the book to two ur-texts of the Sixties generation, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The comparisons are not absurd. Hempton’s clear intention is to change the American mind as radically as Rachel Carson did. As for Zen, the reader certainly gets drawn into the arcana of maintaining a veteran Volkswagen camper on a trip that tests it to the limit. We also enter the emotional minefield exposed by the flight of Hempton’s sullenly resistant teenage daughter Abby, who had been expected to accompany Dad on the adventure, a sadder echo of Pirsig’s son, who rode pillion on the legendary motorcycle.

As a case study in political science, Hempton’s account is, of course, incomplete, since we only see one side of the campaign, and though the arguments of the Washington bureaucracies are fairly reported, we never get to the rational arguments about competing priorities or to the realpolitik of competing interests that must underlie any serious analysis. However, as a handbook on how to mount a peaceful lobbying campaign, the book is illuminating. Whether Hempton’s strategies are as successful as they are ingenious and simple, is another question.

A species of natural mysticism runs through this book. Hempton never explicates it beyond rapt descriptions of the natural world punctuating the polemic and the technicalities of sound measurement. He takes for granted the supreme value of “natural soundscapes,” the music inherent in landscape traversed by water and wind and the sounds made by animate creatures in their natural habitat. Literal silence can only be artificially engineered and is as likely to drive people mad as to soothe them. For Hempton, the unity of humanity with nature is sacred, and if there is a natural theology here its content is obscure. Hempton records himself as offering silent prayer in the unfinished Washington National Cathedral, which has the same proportions and acoustics as a typical hardwood forest’s “natural cathedral”: “Whether a church organ is playing or the birds are singing, I’m encouraged to let my intuition rise to the surface and balance my strictly rational thoughts. Because it’s more easily communicated, rational thinking is overrated. By contrast, inner wisdom whispers. True listening is worship. The sacred feeling of silence is in us all.”

Compared with another recent book on silence as mystical quest, A Book of Silence by the Catholic feminist writer Sara Maitland, this mysticism is inchoate. Yet it well represents a spirituality-without-faith found in the most secularized parts of the contemporary West. It needs to be taken seriously by those whose faith tradition also nurtures a consciousness that the human stewardship of God’s creation is urgently being called to account.

Bernice Martin is emeritus reader in sociology at the University of London.