The Quietest Place on Earth

Take this as a given: when I run the universe, there will be no leaf blowers. No megaphones, no karaoke. No hidden loudspeakers on elevators.

No motorized scooters. No alarms of any kind unless they play Vivaldi. The car will not beep at me when I lock it. Restaurants will be staffed with enforcement officers, corks and duct tape at the ready for people using mobile phones.

And as for that deeply nasty sound I heard when the heart doctors ran an echocardiograph on me, the sound that said the clock of my life just blew a spring?

Nobody has to hear that again. Nobody. Ever.

Real estate agents call my neighborhood a “quiet suburb,” yet I run fans and air cleaners to drown out the helicopters flying overhead at 2 AM, the endless stream of traffic. This house was on a dead-end street when I bought it. Not any more. Now a car passes roughly every four seconds, and at least one of six has the stereo so loud I can hear it inside the house.

My heart stutters each time this happens.

The Grinch was seriously understating the problem when he said, “Oh, the noise. Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise.”

Enough. While I still have a heartbeat at all, I’m going to go find the quietest place in the world.

***

The last time I can remember being in a truly quiet place was more than four years ago. My wife and I were on the Rainhaven, a borrowed houseboat, anchored near Southeast Alaska’s Anan Bear Reserve. We spent the days watching bears gorge themselves on spawning salmon, ripping silver fish open in the shadow of Sitka spruce that made the sky look needle green. The last tourists headed back to town about 4, and after that, we had the world to ourselves.

Listening to the lap of very small waves against the hull, we lit candles and played Scrabble, barely speaking because we did not want to disturb this stillness of water and forest.

Now and then, the exhale of a passing harbor porpoise would sound like a gasp of amazement.

***

After that, I knew my ears weren’t supposed to be permanently ringing, so I started to look for quiet places, tried to find ways to cut noise from my life.

Then the annoyingly cheerful and entirely unexpected voice of a doctor saying, “How long have you had a bad heart?” and the rattle of my new pill bottles transformed an interest into a driving obsession, a desperate need.

Here’s a frightening fact: for a couple hundred bucks, you can easily buy a sound system with amplification more powerful than the Beatles used when they played Shea Stadium.

But it’s not just us, in this age of machines and electronics, who feel as if we’re being bludgeoned to death by unwanted sound, our only protection to turn our iPods up louder.

Up to, say, my great-great-grandfather, the odds are none of my ancestors ever heard a sound louder than a church bell. And still they would have complained about noise. “The uproar of mankind is intolerable, and sleep is no longer possible,” reads Gilgamesh, written more than four thousand years ago. One of the first nose abatement laws was passed in 44 BC, when Julius Cesar forbade wheeled carts to move in Rome after dark.

Julius would have known exactly what to do with the guy who likes to drive his motorcycle past my house in the middle of the night.

But, let’s be honest here, the guy on the bike probably likes the sound his engine makes, the way I like the pathetic “roo-roo” sound my dog makes each time she proves barking is not in her skill set. Noise is a matter of opinion because sound is such a mutable thing. It radiates through both time and space, changing with the tiniest details, from your mood to how you’re sitting, what direction you’re looking, how you brushed your hair that day.

There must be an objective starting point in a search for silence.

“What’s quiet?” I ask my cousin David, who studied acoustic engineering. I figure he probably learned that on the first day of class.

But nothing’s ever simple on my Mom’s side of the family.

“There probably is no technical definition of quiet,” David says. “There’s only ‘signal’— the part of communications that you’re trying to recognize—and ‘noise,’ the undesirable information that you’re trying to eliminate. Quiet could be defined as the absence of both.”

After a long geek-speak digression, full of noise and very little signal—“sound intensity is a measurement of sound power per unit area”—David says that “it gets ugly trying to talk about sound. Signal and noise can be present at sub and super-audible frequencies, so don’t forget electromagnetic ‘noise,’ too. In these wireless days you can’t get away from electromagnetic energy.”

So my whole project is doomed. I’ll never get away from noise.

But then I remember that the last time cousin David and I saw each other, he had hair down to his waist and was working on Led Zeppelin guitar lines.

Maybe I need a different expert.

Or maybe I’m asking the wrong questions.

Through a long chain of events that include a bad meal in New York and an express-mailed Tickle Me Elmo doll, I get a chance to talk to Vic Gladstone, chief staff officer for audiology at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

“Look,” I say, “at age 42, my heart beats at 20% efficiency while it races like a freight train, and they just stuffed a combination pacemaker-defib into me. I think it’s all because of noise, because every time I’m around anything loud, my heart trips like a bad stunt man. What’s going on?”

“Noise is a stressor,” he says. Of course it can increase heart rate, and there are studies that show the increase can be chronic.

And if that weren’t enough fun, “It can raise blood pressure,” Vic says, “cause anxiety, sleeplessness, fatigue, loss of vigilance—which can lower productivity.”

Forget my heart; I can’t even remember the last time I slept through a night, and my blood pressure has skyrocketed over the past few years. “And it’s not that I’m lazy,” I tell my wife that evening. “It’s that all this noise has lessened my ability to get any work done.”

She gives me that look that all husbands know, the indulgent look, but she’s also the first one out to complain when parties across the street get too loud.

With other studies showing that noise can cause learning disabilities, and even hearing loss in utero, there is a backlash against constant noise, but it’s small, and, ironically, quiet. The One Square Inch project in Olympic National Park seeks to preserve the tiniest measure of perfect, non-human-sound influenced space. April 28 is International Noise Awareness Day. The Noise Pollution Clearinghouse runs things like the “Quiet Lawns Project,” while the Right to Quiet Society has a “Noiseletter.”

“The whole notion of quiet is a discovery process to learn what quiet really is,” Gordon Hempton, a natural sounds recording artist, tells me. “And one thing that’s certain is that quiet used to be as common as clean air and pure water, and it was part of the everyday environment of our ancestors, and today it’s extremely scarce.”

I do what I always do when I’m looking for anything: I get as far from the familiar as possible.

I fly to Jordan, and am one of the last people out of the pink ruins of Petra. The canyons are backlit and darkening fast as we slowly climb to the top of the amphitheatre, simply because we can. Across from us, testing out the two-millennia-old acoustics, a man sings an Arabic song, and the last cameleers, bellowing louder than their protesting beasts, herd the animals out for the night. My companion’s whirring camera catches it all. The next day, in the Wadi Rum desert, I juggle rocks and a Bedouin shows me magic tricks in return, making his kafiyeh disappear between his fingers. From several miles away, we hear the approaching sound of tourists in Jeeps.

“Man has turned his back on silence,” said the artist Jean Arp. “Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life.”

***

To be honest, it only takes about an hour of research to find some of the world’s quietest places. The most convenient spots for me are a couple box canyons off the Grand Canyon, which have been measured down to 2-3 dBA; that’s so quiet my own breath would be three or four times louder than the place itself.

Simple enough, right? I can get in the car and be at the Canyon in a few hours. Except when I check with sound expert Bernie Krause, he explains that these places are “so quiet that it would literally drive a person to a state of madness if they stayed longer than a few minutes.” It turns out you end up listening to the flow of your own blood, “and that sound, alone, is a bit overwhelming.”

Frankly, the last thing I want to do is listen to my blood move around, because I’ll just be waiting for it to stop.

Maybe what I really want, then, is not absolute silence, but what the poet Rilke called “the uninterrupted message that emerges from silence.”

I want the world to sound like it did when it was all new and shiny.

So I start checking with friends. Throw at dart at a world map, and I probably know somebody who’s been to that point.

Antarctica? Never got away from the sound of the ship’s engines. Mongolia? Yes, very quiet, wind in the grass, but once the fermented mare’s milk comes out, things get pretty raucous.

How about the Hebrides, or St. Helena, or Namibia, where the desert hits the ocean? My wife pushes for backcountry Iceland, where the midnight sun seeps through volcanic steam, and the wind sounds like the voices of elves in the haunted landscape, but I think she’s only looking for an excuse to go back to her favorite spot on the planet.

Besides, all the suggestions raise another issue: these places seem like cheating. Of course, get far enough into the middle of nowhere, it’s probably pretty quiet. I don’t remember Siberia being terribly noisy when I was there.

And another thing: I have days when I can barely walk fifty yards without needing to sit down. In a few months, I’ll be fine, but right now, the hopeful peace sign I have tattooed on the back of my neck does not seem to be radiating into the rest of my life.

So what I really want is the quietest place I can get to without mounting a major expedition, the quietest place a sane person might want to go to anyway. It doesn’t need to be a place my doctors approve of—they glare relentlessly when they hear my travel plans—but it does have to be a place where, upon arrival, I’m not hypothermic, bleeding, or otherwise suffering wildly simply because I went there.

Over the past year or so, thinking my exhaustion was simply stress and that I needed somewhere to relax, I had been quite a number of places that should have been very quiet, but weren’t. The forests of New Zealand, where the trees looked like fat clumps of tall broccoli, echoed with hikers and helicopters. On a logging road in the middle of Vancouver Island, I stopped to sit by a stream, and within minutes another car pulled up and a couple people jumped out to see what was going on. New Mexico rattled with reservation casinos and military equipment.

In Europe, the Queen’s vacation estate in Balmoral, Scotland, suffered traffic noise worse than my house. Walking along an estuary in rural Ireland, peering into an empty bat house, I heard boats, cars, planes, the clink of glasses from a nearby hotel. Prague’s Charles Bridge at sunset was like seeing the world for the first time, but I was with the wrong person, and there was a steady drone of tourists commenting on how peaceful the bridge would be, if only there weren’t so many tourists.

The closest I could find to quiet was late night Venice. The boats had stopped in the Grand Canal, and I heard only a woman walking, the click-clack of her high heels the lone sound Venice contained at 3 AM. But sunrise was coming fast, and with it, the touts, the buskers, the guys selling counterfeit handbags, the snapping of a million shutters each time a gondolier passed by, howling his songs.

“Don’t you think most people just associate quiet with death?” my friend Rachel asks me, talking about her trip to the Australian outback. “When you’re in a really quiet place, don’t you get uncomfortable and start thinking about stuff until you jump up again, because you can’t take how quiet it is?”

And there’s part two of the equation, part of what doomed me on the Charles Bridge. We can be in the quietest place in the world, but if our minds are noisy, we might as well be standing in the middle of a steelworks.

Buddhists call this the Monkey Mind. As soon as we try to quiet ourselves, that inane chatter starts up like a Tarzan jungle soundtrack in our heads. Did I pay the bills, do my socks match, did I leave the gas on, is that girl over there flirting or does she have something in her eye? It’s almost impossible to get our minds to shut up.

Right before my surprise trip to the hospital, I spend several weeks in the arctic. Not the snow and ice and polar bears arctic, but the tundra and berry bushes with berries bigger than the bush arctic.

High latitudes always make me very happy.

In Canada’s Vuntut National Park, 160 kilometers above the arctic circle, there is not even a sign of another person anywhere, as I step around fallen caribou antlers and watch a lone moose cross the autumn red valley below me. The wind is still, the mosquitoes haven’t found me yet, and a rainbow runs around the corners of half a dozen clouds.

And I stand and wonder if the helicopter is going to take me back south on time.

Monkey mind.

So how do we shut up the monkey mind, I ask Zen master John Daido Loori.

“Virtually every creature on the face of the earth knows how to simply shut up and be still,” he says. “The cat in front of a fireplace, the wolf in its den, even a hummingbird knows how to stop its activity and be still, but somehow we seem to have lost the ability to do this.”

Twenty years of sporadic meditation practice, and I’m not even up to hummingbird.

About the only time my brain ever really quiets is when I’m drifting off, curled around the woman I love, my world consisting of little more than her warmth, the soft rise and fall of her chest as she sleeps.

Okay, then. So all I have to do is find a place that sounds like her breathing.

No problem, right?

“Silence,” wrote the composer John Cage—most famous for his piece “4’33”,” which is four and a half minutes of no one playing anything—“is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.”

I stare at maps, talk to the experts. I get desperate, and I come very close to giving up and resigning myself to spending my probably short and stressed out life wearing noise-canceling headphones.

And then, quite by accident, I think I find what I’m after: a place where the locals whistled to each other when Columbus made his last stop before he got utterly and completely lost.

***

But this is not good, not good at all. Dark is coming on fast, and I’m surrounded by noise.

Faced with too much civilization, a house on a street with constant traffic, a ringing in my ears that never, ever goes away, and an unexpected diagnosis of a bad heart—nothing clarifies need like the metronome of life going off rhythm—I went looking for the quietest place on earth.

I thought this would be it.

And now it’s looking like maybe I was wrong.

I’ve endured eleven hours on one plane, then four more hours in another, surrounded by Brits headed for timeshares nowhere near as close to the beach as the advertisements promised. I’ve spent a day at the container port, understanding why my well-traveled friends laughed when I told them where I was going.

An hour on a ferry, the ticket sold to me by a woman with a smile so beautiful it set my heart racing in a fairly enjoyable way for once.

But dammit, even on La Gomera, a couple hundred miles off the northwest coast of Africa, a part of the Canary Islands well away from the pasty vacationers roasting like slowly turning hot dogs in the sunshine of Tenerife and Grand Canaria, it’s still noisy.

Two things brought me here. First, the discovery that no airplanes except for tiny interisland hoppers flew over the outer Canaries—flightpaths cover nearly our entire globe like the stitching design for a particularly ugly blanket and a passing plane can contaminate hundreds of acres with noise. Second, that La Gomera had a traditional whistling language audible from two miles away.

Any place where you can hear a whistle from two miles away has to be pretty quiet, right?

But La Gomera’s port, San Sebastian, is just another small town, full of bar noise and TVs tuned to news showing a freak storm coming close. Half a dozen horns go off every time I try to cross the narrow streets, as cars prowl for parking spaces like chummed sharks.

Oh, no, this will not do at all.

The triphammer of my heart making me pretty sure I’m about to find out exactly what the defibrillator they implanted in my chest last month feels like when it goes off, I check the map, jump into my rental car. I’ll have to come back through pitch dark past goats who think it’s a ideal time to snuggle up to traffic, but I don’t think I have a choice.

And soon, my efforts are rewarded. The road drops through fields of banana plants waving in the ocean breeze coming off Playa Santiago, where I arrive just in time to watch a couple fishermen unload half the ocean from their blue and white rowboat, but no fish at all.

Black crabs scuttle on black rocks. Gulls chase each other. At the outdoor cafe, my hamburger is actual ham and no burger, and dogs wait patiently for scraps.

The loudest sound comes from a pair of old men arguing happily with each other.

Okay.

I whisper to myself, “Almost.”

***

La Gomera is not the end of the world, but it is just one island over, at least according to Ptolemy’s second-century geography. For centuries, though, La Gomera was the final stop at the map’s edge. Columbus prayed here, right before he became famous for suffering from serious geographical confusion. Throughout the age of exploration, a call at La Gomera was necessary to fill up on giant casks of malavasia, the local sweet white wine.

Today the thirteen islands of the Canaries are a part of Spain that seem to have little to do with Spain proper, except for language and lead-footed driving habits. The islands—there are no canaries here, by the way, except in cages; the name comes from the Latin canis, dog—are in a nearly perfect situation. “They get the EU benefits,” says Heikki Lappalainenn, a transplanted Finn. “But they’re far enough away they can also ignore all the EU rules.”

To make a 3-D map of La Gomera, first, crumple a piece of paper into a ball. Now, tease the center into a high point. That’s it. The island is nearly circular and only about 20 kilometers across, but to get anywhere requires a considerable amount of driving narrow switchbacks. Dizzyingly, the roads lead from the desert lowlands, full of fat palm trees and cactus that look like they were designed by the Muppets, to the cloud forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site, at the island’s peak, and then back down to the water.

This tormented geography made the indigenous whistling language, silbo, a necessity. When Columbus brought his ship to port here, word passed across the tops of the valleys, from one official whistling station to another, and the whole island knew what was going on in minutes.

Silbo is a substitutive language: there are only six notes, each standing in for a set of vowels or consonants, which means each whistle is simply a phonetic approximation of a word. Modern communications pushed silbo to the brink of extinction, but it was an intrinsic part of the Gomerans self-identity, so in 1999, it became a compulsory subject in local schools.

“It’s like the mobile phone of the old days,” says Lino Rodriguez Martin, the island’s main teacher. He sticks a knuckle into his mouth and puts the kids through their paces, whistling instructions to them. The students sound like a flock of birds that not only whistle, but also giggle, and the class is clearly the high point of the day. A school official tells me the kids use silbo all the time outside school, to call friends, to play. “It’s a game, but a useful one.”

And to me that means, no matter how noisy the city seems at first glance, it’s still quiet enough for whistling to matter.

I’m feeling better and better about this place.

But my silbo demonstration is cut short by a different whistling, as the wind kicks up, and I suddenly understand those TV bulletins I wasn’t paying attention to last night. The wind is the leading edge of Tropical Storm Delta, which had started off headed for the Caribbean like a nice, normal storm, but then did an abrupt U-turn and crossed the Atlantic the wrong way. Delta is now about to be the first tropical storm ever to hit the Canary Islands.

A warm rain falls, then pours. The trees whip, the school closes, and the island buttons down; residents are told to stay indoors and have candles ready.

I quickly use up the amusements of the hotel—having the staff teach me the Spanish for “pacemaker”—and spend the rest of the day in my room, where the TV says only “problemas con la señal.”

So I open the balcony doors and listen.

I want to hear the way I heard before I was taught to hear—before I learned to block sounds out. I want to hear like an animal in nature, ignoring nothing, because all sounds are important.

The rattle of palm fronds. Wind hitting the cliffs that curve into the harbor, the distant sound of quickly rising surf smacking into a black sand beach. The high-pitched squeak of a construction crane the wind is pushing around. A dog barking. There’s another sound, lower, which must be the building itself standing firm against the storm, and every now and then, an alarm goes off, as a particularly strong gust slams into somebody’s car.

I slump back onto the bed. Less obvious sounds start to become clear. Footsteps in the hallway, rattle of the bathroom window, rumble of the maid’s cart. The exposed wood beams above me creak.

What years of playing bass badly have taught me is that sound radiates through time, notes rise and decay; no sound is consistent. Proper listening is a slow process.

I have time. I close my eyes to block out all distraction.

The barking dog gets on my nerves, the squeak of that crane is like nails on a blackboard. I try to relax more and open myself to sounds, allowing them all to be themselves.

When I wake up, the balcony door slamming as a squall hits, my heart racing out of control, I know I still have a ways to go.

***

I must admit, I had two more reasons for coming to the Canary Islands to look for the quietest place in the world. One is that I barely speak Spanish, just a few words on my good days. It’s not so much the distraction of others’ talking that I’m worried about, but my own. If I can’t say anything, clearly, I have to be quiet.

The other reason is the sound of the ocean. Once I gave up on the idea of absolute silence—no such thing, because you end up listening to the blood move in your veins, a distinctly creepy experience—and concentrated on accessible places with no human noise intrusion, I had to ask: what sounds do we require? What sounds are actually good for us? And what came to me first was moving water. Murray Schafer, who more or less invented the study of acoustic ecology, said, “it is the fundamental of the original soundscape and the sound which above all others gives us the most delight.” Oceans are like battery chargers for the soul.

Plus it gives me an excuse to spend a couple days at the shore while I pretend I’m accomplishing something.

After checking out San Sebastian’s two beaches, both black sand and full of dogs unimpressed by the “No Dogs Allowed” signs, I skirt the edge of the island’s central peak, driving through villages where the main road is one lane wide, but still has cars parked all along it and traffic moving in both directions. Palm trees shade porches and balconies, road crews shovel rock falls from the storm. Past the village of Hermigua, the ocean appears, as large and wild as I’ve ever seen, the beach smashed by rollers that haven’t seen solid ground since Iceland.

I spread out my picnic of the local goat cheese. The first bite makes me wince, the cheese is so strong, so salty. The second bite convinces me it’s one of the best things I’ve ever had in my mouth, and it only gets better from there, the mixture of salt on my tongue, the salt scent of the ocean in the air, the crash of the waves all I can hear.

It takes me miles to cover territory that the silbo whistlers could have bridged in seconds. The last trace of the storm is still moving across La Gomera’s highlands when I stop at Agando Rock, which looks like a thumb sticking up 3,500 feet. It takes me a minute to get the car door open, the wind blasts so hard, and when I stand at the edge of the viewpoint where there is very little view because the rock disappears in cloud, I have to brace one foot against the railing to keep from being blown over and off the edge.

I almost go over anyway, but I still have a big, stupid smile on my face. A good storm is a wonderful thing.

The road corkscrews down through a thin valley of terraced fields, where hopeful beehives are set among prickly pear cactus in full bloom, and some other kind of cactus looks like fat fingers in need of a manicure.

The weather improves as the altitude drops, and when the clouds finally part, I squint even through my sunglasses.

I wonder what it would be like to live in one of these villages, making my home in a light-dazzled ochre house. I’d sit on the balcony to watch the neighbors, get my bread each morning from where the delivery man left it on the light pole at the bottom of the steep hill. I could attend Sunday services at the tiny Ermita Virgin de la Salud, where the courtyard is littered with pink flower petals the size of hummingbirds.

But I keep moving. That’s not the quiet I’m looking for.

The ocean appears quite suddenly at Valle Gran Rey, which I’ve been told is the island’s most beautiful beach. I walk to the point, past a woman in a red thong splashing in the waves, while El Hierro, the island Ptolemy called the end of the world, plays peek-a-boo from behind distant clouds.

I spend an hour quite alone with the surf. Each wave hits the shore a little differently, and I realize that it’s a kind of sensory hypnosis—maybe only fire can do this to us as well—so that it’s not so much a pure sound, but a sound that blocks out everything else, including thought.

I don’t want to be hypnotized. I want to be wide awake and overawed.

Okay.

Close, very close, but this isn’t it, either.

So I walk out past the dozen or so sunbathers, wondering why none of them move a hundred yards away, where there’s the same ocean and no one else around. These half-naked strangers huddling together have chosen to be here, have traveled thousands of miles, burned up their vacation time just to be surrounded by other people who’ve burned up their vacation time, everybody laid out on a fraction of this beach, everybody smelling like coconut tanning lotion.

But then I think about dinner last week in London, near the Church of St. Martin Within Ludgate, where, in 1677, architect Christopher Wren designed the vestibule to muffle the sound of carts rumbling outside. The restaurant was famous, crowded, we had to shout to hear each other, and it took three days for the cigarette smell to dissipate from my clothes. It was one of the great meals of my life, and for all the hours we sat there, my friend Susanne’s face had a blissful smile.

“I’d live here if I could,” she said. “Have a room upstairs, eat every meal here.”

The restaurant was a quiet place to her. A peaceful place.

In the end, any search for quiet is entirely personal and entirely subjective.

So I leave the sunbathers, hoping they are in a state of contentment. For me, though, no matter how beautiful the egret fishing, its feathers the same color as the spume, it’s not quite right. I walk past one man doing pushups and two more holding in their stomachs for the woman who has tried on three different swimsuits but not gone near the water, and, climbing back into my car, I head out.

Halfway up the mountain, I stop to look back. I don’t know what to try next. I was so sure water was the answer, that the ocean would be the place where I finally found some rest.

Right below me and not at all interested in my problems, a falcon falls off the slope, red tail catching the sunlight as the bird hovers in the strong sea breeze. Silently, the falcon swoops, rises, hovers, swoops again, then flies off, all without flapping its wings a single time.

And then I’m in the forest again, for the simple reason that, sooner or later, that’s where all roads in La Gomera lead.

Once upon a time, the shores of almost the entire Mediterranean basin were covered with laurelsilva, which confusingly doesn’t mean laurel trees, but laurel-like trees. Today, La Gomera has the last decent-sized chunk of that original flora remaining, hidden in the clouds that seem always to surround the island’s central peak.

As I drive into Garonjay National Park, the aftermath of the storm is still working for me. Mine is the only car on the narrow road, which is completely covered with blown leaves. In the fog, I nearly miss two corners, unable to tell where forest ends and road begins.

I find a spot with enough room to pull my car off, and step under the trees, the road quickly disappearing behind me. Five hundred years ago, a hundred years ago, somewhere in this near white-out would have been an official station for a man to stand, waiting to relay messages across the island in the whistle of silbo. Did his whistle sound like the island’s own silbo, the wind speaking to these plants found nowhere else—the twiggy jirdana, more like firewood than a living plant; the madroño’s smooth pink bark; a magarza, which looks like it wanted to be a tree, but then simply laid down and gave up? Or did he wait quietly, comforted by the familiar?

Moving slowly and carefully through slick fallen leaves, I walk into the cloud until my heart tells me it’s time to stop.

I realize I haven’t spoken a single word today, except to order lunch. Lao Tzu said, “Give up haste and activity. Close your mouth.”

I have nothing to say and am incapable of haste.

Resting on a comfortable log, each time I think about getting up, I force myself to sit still a while longer. I sit until I’m no longer thinking of ways to describe this to the people back home. I sit until I’m no longer thinking about what’s for dinner, or if I’m going to have a hard time getting back to the car.

I sit until my hands are numb from the wind.

The three levels of wind in the trees become four, with different notes for when it passes bare branches, or leaves, or the pale green moss that covers the first twenty feet or so of the thin trunks, or when it simply skips over the treetops like a stone across a still pond.

I sit until I am hearing the tones of everything around me.

About every fifteen minutes, a bird maybe a quarter mile away gives a single chirp.

I sit until I’m simply here.

If Darwin was even vaguely right, this is our oldest genetic memory of landscape. Long before we walked upright on the savannah, long before church bells defined a territory of belief, long before there were Abba revivals in Las Vegas, we clung to our branches and listened to the wind move through the trees around us, and we were home and we were safe and we were perfectly, perfectly calm.

This is it. This is exactly what I was looking for. The quietest place.

The place where the world sounds exactly like it did when it was all new and shiny.

The wind rises, falls, the trees creak, the branches rub, the leaves rustle, and as for me, my heartbeat is slow and strong and regular, and I’m as peaceful as when I’m wrapped around the woman I love, my face pressed to her neck.

Okay.

###