In Search of one-Square Inch of Silence

In our increasingly noisy world, does quiet have value? Gordon Hempton, a Port Angeles–based sound engineer, believes silence is not only golden but worthy of preservation.

On the western edge of Olympic National Park, big leaf maples tower 100 feet above the forest floor. In the autumn, their platter-size leaves turn bright yellow, then fall. When a puff of wind runs its fingers through a tree, hundreds of leaves drop softly to the ground, jostling one another as they do.

The sound, says Gordon Hempton, reminds him of a crowd clapping at a symphony.

Hempton thinks a lot about sound. He makes his living as a sound engineer and acoustic ecologist, traveling the world to record waves washing up on Cape Cod, babbling brooks in Belize, the echoes in a Hawaiian cave. If you’ve purchased a CD of the sounds of frogs croaking or waterfalls crashing, odds are Hempton created it.

But it isn’t only sound that interests Hempton. At 55, he is a trim man, dressed today in khaki shorts and a matching Patagonia pullover, with the looks and sandy-gray close-cropped hair of the late Paul Newman during his “Sundance” days. Quiet interests him, as well. “Listening to nature really is a soul-transforming experience,” says Hempton. “You hear the planet as it was before all this modern noise, you hear the rhythms of the space you occupy.” But with the scream of jet engines, the roar of traffic, the trilling of cell phone ring tones—the kind of background buzz that nearly everyone endures every day—that kind of quiet is increasingly hard to find. After all, even in the mountains or wilderness areas or national parks, noise from a jet airliner at 20,000 feet, or a low-level single-engine plane carrying tourists—“flightseers,” as Hempton calls them—is apt to intrude.

So on a sunny morning, Hempton, who lives just outside Port Angeles, hikes up the Hoh River Trail, which winds through the famous Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park before entering the deep wilderness. He’s there to visit his pet project: a small stone placed on a mossy log about 100 yards from the trail, three miles from the Hoh Visitor Center. Here, on April 22, 2005 (Earth Day), Hempton declared One Square Inch of Silence, the culmination of a project he started some two decades ago.

The concept, he says, is simple. Noise travels many miles. But quiet—or, more precisely, the absence of human-created sound—can travel as well. “It goes both ways,” he says. “That 1 square inch has the potential to have an impact over 1,000 square miles.” Hempton’s belief is that by creating a tiny spot dedicated to the freedom from civilization’s everyday noise, its lack of noise will gradually push back the cacophony from jets, from thundering RVs, from even the rattle of a power generator that travels for a good two miles up the trail from the Hoh River parking lot.

And noise pollution is becoming a major issue in the national parks. Battles over noise from tourist planes flying over the Grand Canyon have gone on for years. Yellowstone is swarmed with droning snow machines during the winter. The National Park Service itself creates plenty of noise, whether the rumble of laundry trucks or the jackhammer racket from road construction. “Recently I was camped at Canyonlands National Park and woke up in the middle of the night with legal aircraft noise from high commercial jetliners that would not be allowed under the Seattle noise ordinance in a residential area,” says Hempton.

Hempton chose for his One Square Inch of Silence a place that he says has perhaps the least human-caused noise of any place in the national parks system. It’s also quiet in its own right, with little wind or river sound, and that makes it easier for him to hear offenders.

Hempton’s One Square Inch carries no legal weight itself. His hope is that by creating awareness of noise issues he can essentially shame noise-makers into changing their behavior. He’s also trying to change the park service’s approach, which he says has been based on “noise management” rather than preservation of quiet. “So the wrong questions are being asked,” he says. “And we still have noise on the increase, and quiet is vanishing.”

So far, Olympic National Park is behind his idea—no small feat given that National Park Service officials tend to think their own ideas about the parks are the best ones, period. “I thought it was a cool idea when I heard about it, but I needed to know more to make sure I knew it was a cool idea,” says William Laitner, the former Olympic National Park superintendent, who retired in January 2008, but was on watch when Hempton hatched his idea. “Gordon took me out to the spot, and we talked about it and realized we were in sync—we both like natural quiet.”

Hempton (who, ironically, is really quite chatty) has taken the actual stone that marks One Square Inch on a national tour, stopping in cities and towns across the nation to talk about the value of quiet. He ended the 2007 trip in Washington, D.C., where he pitched the idea of quiet to Washington state Senator Maria Cantwell. Next month, a book about his project, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Save Silence in a Noisy World, which he co-wrote with journalist John Grossman, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press.

After passing one of the big leaf maples whose applause he enjoys, Hempton stops. He pulls from his shoulder satchel a device the size of a telephone—a hand-held sound meter. “Normally this measures sound,” he says in a whispered baritone (once on the trail, nearly everything he says is whispered). “But here, I use it to measure quiet. If we’re absolutely quiet, we get 28 decibels. That is about the level in an empty Benaroya Hall. But we’re still getting some noise from the visitor center, where there’s a generator.” Straining, one can barely hear its faint drone. Otherwise one would have thought this place perfectly quiet.

As he walks, Hempton relates a stream of sound-related anecdotes. The Hoh River, for instance, is bordered with giant Sitka spruce trees, their silver-gray branches drooping low. Sitka spruce is a popular material for guitars and pianos. Occasionally, the river undermines a spruce and washes it downstream, where it may fetch up on the Pacific beaches to the west. “The bases of the trees often are so big you can walk inside,” Hempton, says, sotto voce. “And the sound of the surf plays inside like a huge acoustic guitar. It’s an incredible sound.”

Or: The forested hills along the Hoh can capture the sound of the river, add their own coloration to it, then echo it up and down the valley. The result: a concerto of the forest. “You can hear this very early in the morning, when your eardrums are most relaxed,” says Hempton. “John Muir writes about hearing this in Yosemite.”

Hempton thinks Olympic National Park, a 1,442-square-mile park created in 1938 that is one of the country’s least-developed national parks, is its own kind of Yosemite—a “listener’s Yosemite,” as opposed to a mountaineer’s one. “We have a really diverse natural soundscape here,” he says, “everything from alpine meadows and natural amphitheaters to the temperate rainforest and down to the wilderness seashore. And to have the accessibility of a national park like this near a huge metropolitan population [Seattle] is practically unheard of.”

Plus, it’s an almost unpolluted soundscape. “In most of our national parks, noise-free intervals—if they occur at all—can be measured in minutes,” he says. “But here they can be measured in hours. That’s really exceptional.”

Then Hempton stops and looks up. The drone of a private plane penetrates the tree canopy. Hempton whips out his sound meter, which reads 47 decibels—the level of small room fan’s whir. “Flightseer,” he says, taking note of the time. Later he’ll used Web-based flight-tracking tools to try to figure out the guilty party. That’s difficult to do for private planes, but easy for commercial jets, most of which are gaining altitude after leaving Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as they prepare to cross the Pacific.

Once he figures out the identity of the offender, he’ll fire off a note to the airline, hoping for a change in behavior. “You can write an airline a letter that says, ‘It’s 24 decibels at this one location, and that quiet is a protected resource. That’s very specific, and a reasonable request.” He is trying to get airlines to agree to avoid flying over his quiet place. Alaska Airlines has agreed to avoid flying maintenance flights over the area—but notes that it must must follow flight paths established by the FAA for all passenger flights. Truth be told, airlines have bigger problems these days than a guy with a sound mic and an attitude. Airliners do still fly over the park.

Hempton’s Square Inch of Silence project dates back to 1989, when he received a grant from the Lindbergh Foundation to recapture natural sounds in Washington state—what Washington sounded like before civilization. He studied maps of public lands under consideration for wilderness preservation, figuring they would indicate the places where natural sounds alone were most likely to be found. What struck him, however, was that while wild areas were evaluated for solitude, scenery, hiking and other values, quiet was not a priority. From a strictly professional standpoint, if not an aesthetic one, that seemed to Hempton to be a bad thing.

The report Hempton wrote for the Lindbergh Foundation outlined the concept of One Square Inch and how it might apply to public lands. Over the years, he says, he tried to interest the National Park Service and other agencies in taking steps to encourage quiet in the wild, with little success.

Then Hempton had something of an epiphany: In the fall of 2003, he went deaf. “I woke up in the middle of the night and heard this strange thumping sound—a supertanker coming up the Strait of Juan de Fuca,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘My gosh, that sounds strangely close.’ I went back to sleep, but noticed the next morning I wasn’t hearing as well.” Over the next three weeks Hempton lost nearly all of his hearing acuity due to an inner-ear problem. He recovered, but decided it was time to quit talking about creating more quiet and actually do something about it. So on Earth Day 2005, he carried a small, rectangular stone up the Hoh River Trail, an area he had determined was among the Northwest’s most naturally silent, until he couldn’t detect the buzz of the visitor center generator or any other human-caused sound. Then he found a spot where an elk path and a forked tree with roots like an octopus created a recognizable place, stepped 100 yards off the trail, and placed the stone on a log. One Square Inch was created.

Hempton concedes there’s nothing particularly magical about the exact site of One Square Inch. He chose it because it was a reasonably short hike, had some distinctive landmarks and was indeed quiet. There’s nothing secret about it, either—GPS aficionados will find it at 47° 51.959N, 123° 52.221W, 678 feet above sea level. Anyone who chooses to figure out where it is (look for the spruce with the big split in the trunk) is welcome to visit, and can even leave a note in a “Jar of Quiet Thoughts” Hempton left there.

A little more than three miles up the trail, Hempton comes to the place. He lays down the rules—no talking within the silent area; one can read the notes people leave in the jar. (The quiet actually is profound, the comments in the jar less so.) Taking pictures using a Canon 35mm camera with a loud shutter is OK—Hempton knows the value of publicity.

He walks through the fork in the tree (“It creates a ceremonial gateway,” he says, getting a bit portentous), and steps over some fallen trees and shrubs to get to the spot. He points out the stone atop a waist-high log. Then he sets up a tripod with a pair of Sennheiser MKH-20 microphones, dons headphones, and listens for…well, nothing, or at least nothing that doesn’t belong there. The sun filters through the forest canopy, dappling the mossy floor and occasionally falling across Hempton’s face. He stands, eyes not quite focusing on some distant point, waving his hand absently as a swarm of the park’s infamous mosquitoes buzz him.

In part he’s just listening to any noise he thinks is improper. But mainly his interest is in hearing as little as possible. And in fact, aside from the bugs, the place is quiet as a tomb. There isn’t even any birdsong. With the headphones on, the rushing sound of the Hoh River, perhaps a quarter-mile away and almost inaudible to the naked ear, booms like an interstate. The headphones also allow Hempton to easily pick up any noise intrusions—aircraft, in almost all cases. Today, there is none during our 45 minutes spent there.

Hempton hopes that One Square Inch can lead to declaring most of Olympic National Park a no-fly zone for civil purposes. “That would make it the first acoustic reserve in the world,” he says. After that, perhaps other parks would do what they could to preserve quiet. Even the Grand Canyon, heavily overflown by sightseeing planes, could be much quieter if flight operators would merely agree to fly during the windier parts of the day, when natural silence already is degraded by natural sounds.

Hempton’s quest for quiet may be quixotic. Today, it seems hardly anybody wants quiet—the iPod has made portable noise a mandatory accessory, not to mention all the other stuff in the world that makes a racket. But to listen to quiet, Hempton says, is to perhaps tune in to something that has been forgotten by human beings. He says that human ears would seemingly be ideally tuned to the sound of the human voice, because no doubt it was language that helped propel humans down their current evolutionary path.

But in fact, he says, our peak auditory acuity falls outside the sound spectrum of speech. “Why doesn’t that maximum sensitivity coincide with human speech?” he asks, while hiking back to his car. “What does it coincide with? Nobody knows.” Possibly, he says, birdsong—showing nomadic humans the way to water. Or the buzz of a bug that could carry a fatal disease. Or even the breathy whoosh! of an enemy arrow.

True, audiologists don’t necessarily agree with Hempton that our ears are adapted to best hear something other than a yakking cubicle-mate. But people certainly have forgotten what it means to listen. “Listening is taught out of most of us when we go to school,” Hempton says. “We’re told to listen only to the teacher, which is exactly the opposite of listening naturally and taking in everything.”

Hempton hopes to change that. And to ensure that when we choose to listen, there is something to be heard. Even if that something is…nothing.


Hear Like a Deer
To really hear, use your animal instincts
Gordon Hempton says he’s learned from deer how to find ideal listening places, as they rely on their ears more than their eyes to detect danger. “They listen in 360 degrees,” he says.

So how do you listen like a deer? Here’s his advice:

• Wear quiet clothing—wool or cotton; no noisy synthetics such as nylon.
• Place yourself near a tree or some other object that might reflect sound toward you.
• Create an irregular shape with your body—don’t sit with arms or legs in a straight line. That way you’ll look more like the natural landscape, and other creatures may come nearer.
• Stick some foam ear plugs into your ears before you start to listen. Once you take them out, you’ll be more open to hearing softer sounds.
• Move your head slightly on occasion. Deer can rotate their ears, but you have to rotate your head. Even moving an inch or two can change how and what you hear, Hempton says.
• Go into the woods alone.
• Or go with a friend who agrees to play along.