"Listening is worship"

Gordon Hempton is fighting to save the sounds of silence in Washington state’s Olympic National Park — one square inch at a time.

Diane Daniel | July 2008 issue

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Hearing the chirp of a bird in the distance, I expect our unofficial park guide to identify another animal resident here in Olympic National Park, as he had earlier with the call of a Roosevelt elk. “An intruder,” he whispers in a serious tone.

As Hempton whips out a hand-held sound metre from his bike messenger bag, I realize it’s not birdsong but the drone of an airplane in the far distance that has brought him to attention. “One nineteen,” he notes in an official voice, reporting the time while opening up the instrument that charts noise levels on the decibel A scale, the easiest way to measure sound. “Overpass duration: two minutes. 51 dBA, with a base of 42. That base is from birdsong and the river in the distance.”

The intrusion, he reports, is twice as loud as the natural sound. “I’m not going to do anything about it because it’s not in One Square Inch,” he adds.

Hempton is referring to our destination and his mission, a tiny spot in northwestern Washington state that he has deemed One Square Inch of Silence. It’s marked with a reddish rock and a “Jar of Quiet Thoughts”—visitors’ musings on what Hempton has declared to be “the quietest place in the United States.”

Hempton, a 55-year-old Washington-based natural-sound documentarian and audio ecologist, is one of the world’s top sound recordists. He’s measured the decibels in hundreds of spots across the country and the world, and has witnessed, painfully, a sharp decline of spaces devoid of mechanized sounds. “I don’t want the absence of sound, I want the absence of noise,” he says. “Listening is worship.”

Hempton’s professional credits include radio and television documentaries, a collection of 53 natural-sound recordings and an Emmy award for the 1992 PBS documentary Vanishing Dawn Chorus. Next spring, Simon and Schuster’s Free Press will publish One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Save Silence in a Noisy World, a book Hempton is co-writing with journalist John Grossmann. He hopes others will pick up the mantle across the country and beyond.

“The logic is simple,” explains Hempton, who lives in the tiny town of Joyce, two hours northwest of the park. “If noise can impact many square miles, then a natural place, if maintained in a noise-free condition, will also impact many square miles. When you defend one square inch, in today’s world you help manage, to some degree, thousands of miles. Olympic National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Reserve and a wilderness area. If we can’t save quiet here, don’t tell me we’re going to save it anywhere else.”

Had today’s offender been heard at One Square Inch, some three miles east of the visitor centre and about 50 yards off the Hoh River Trail, Hempton would have checked flight paths and airline schedules for the day and written a note asking the intruder to circumvent the park. (Only Alaska Airlines flies over regularly.)

In this green rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula, Hempton relishes pointing out the instruments of nature’s symphony. Living in these mossy, fern-blanketed old-growth forests are some 300 species of birds, and we’re treated to the calls of many, including bald eagles, western winter wrens and the thumping bass beats from the wings of the ruffed grouse taking flight. The park is home to one of the country’s largest herds of wild Roosevelt elk, and these rivers hold some of the healthiest runs of Pacific salmon outside of Alaska.

Then there’s the almost-constant precipitation, with its percussive chorus of drips, drops, pings and poundings. The air feels so thick and rich that every few minutes of our walk, I stop and draw a deep breath through my nose.

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