Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | National Parks

The listener's Yosemite: if Yosemite National Park signifies our country's most iconic natural landscape, then Olympic National Park may represent its quietest place--but for how much longer?

Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

True listening is worship. So said German philosopher Martin Heidegger. My own personal cathedral lies about three miles up the Hoh Valley trail in Olympic National Park, one of the few truly quiet places remaining in America. My quiet sanctuary is marked by a small reddish stone atop a chest-high, moss-covered log, which led me to call it One Square Inch of Silence. I'm headed there today, in uncertain early February weather, with my friend, Nick Parry, and his wife, Sally, so that they can experience what may be quiet's last stand and so that I can measure the impact of an apparent increase in jet traffic overhead.

In 1994 I made my home near Olympic National Park so that I could better pursue a career as a nature sound-recording artist. Since then, I've circled the globe, recording on every continent but Antarctica, seeking the pristine sounds of nature--only to find the planet's sacred soundtrack increasingly drowned out by the harsh mechanical sounds of man. Many have bemoaned the tragic loss of wondrous night skies to the creeping blur of light pollution. But right under our very ears, we've been losing a natural treasure every bit as spiritually uplifting. And losing it just as fast, if not faster. When I started recording in my home state of Washington 25 years ago, I soon hiked to nearly two dozen locations where I could reliably record the unspoiled sounds of nature--wild trout breaking the surface of a mountain lake to feed on the evening hatch of insects or the clear ringing morning song of western meadowlarks from grass-covered hillsides--for at least 15 minutes without an intrusion like the brrrrr of a chain saw, the whine of an off-road vehicle, the crackle of power lines, or the roar of a jet passing overhead. That's become my gold standard: 15 minutes of natural silence. Sadly, the list of quiet havens in my home state has shrunk to three.

Nationwide, it's no better. By my extensive travels and sound safaris, I'd guess that about only a dozen places remain in our vast country where a quiet-seeker can reliably hear nature unencumbered by noise for a quarter-hour during daylight hours. Most people doubt me when I say this, and often mention a recent "quiet" experience. Surely those experiences are quieter than the person's normal city or suburban or even country environs, but they likely do not offer the total escape from modern noise, the total immersion in nature that grizzly tracker and author Doug Peacock calls "the closest way to really get in touch with ... your innermost humanity--that's how we evolved, listening and smelling in ways that aren't imaginable today. We're the same species. The human mind, our intelligence, our consciousness, it all evolved from a habitat, whose remnants here in this country we call wilderness." Peacock told me this...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!