To savor the shiver of a breeze through aspen leaves, the zither of flies and bees, the beeping of chickadees — that’s what I’m here for. The sounds of this place are delicious, and the quieter I get, the more I hear. Quiet is never just for its own sake. Quiet is the germ of all things audible.
I’m at a Forest Service cabin in far northeastern Oregon, a place called Billy Meadows. For the first four days I shared the place with a bunch of friends; then they all left, and the place became blessedly mine. In their absence, fresh sounds emerge — the skitter of bird-feet on the roof, the wing-hum of hoverflies.
Quiet is my watchword. I’m getting quieter by the day, tiptoeing around the cabin, easing the doors open and closed. I roam the woods in search of elk every morning, but I have not yet seen one. Moths, chickadees, squirrels, yes. A fawn and a doe one morning in the meadow. But no elk.
I read and write for hours a day, and hike the gravel roads through the forest and open meadows, and I’m mostly productive and very happy here. But all the tiptoeing around is not quite working. I’m trying too hard to be quiet, and the effort is turning the smallest sounds into discordant noise. There’s a pine by the front door with a dry branch that screeches in any breeze. The dripping of the kitchen sink starts to irritate me. The whine of a mosquito rubs a nerve.
Late on the afternoon of my fourth day alone, I was reading on the porch, when a chickaree scampered into the nearest pine and started barking at me. I hadn’t done anything, hadn’t moved except to turn book pages, hadn’t made a sound. Why this squirrel lit into me, I had no idea, but, in his simple, straightforward vocabulary, he gave me hell. He barked and barked, recoiling a little with each vocal detonation. I tried to ignore him, drawing on days of quiet composure. I kept to my reading, willing my mind to float on its own pool of silence.
But, tell me, how long can a chickaree keep up that barking? What is the longest time a human has endured the scolding of a squirrel?
After a mere 10 minutes of being harangued, I broke.
“Shut your yap!” I shouted.
The chickaree clenched and gulped, scrambled to the backside of the pine trunk, then emerged a moment later on a branch higher up. He barked a few more times without conviction, then began to worry a nut.
At first, I was ashamed of my outburst. But pretty soon I began to feel lighter inside, disburdened –– the way you feel when you tell a friend about something embarrassing you’ve done. It was a relief to put my little neurosis out there in the world. After that incident, I knocked around the cabin more casually. I had been behaving like an extra-careful visitor, but now I felt at home. I still opened the front door with barely a sound, and always, when I stepped out onto the porch, I quietly scanned the meadow for elk, deer, coyotes. But I also started singing aloud more often, and I didn’t fret about rattling dishes in the kitchen.
On the evening of my sixth day alone, I took my guitar onto the front porch. I was banging chords and singing This Land Is Your Land, when I heard some high-pitched squeals. Coyotes, I thought. But then more voices joined in — weird wailing and grunting. Elk! A bunch of them, and coming closer. A minute later, I heard a clattering sound, like water rushing over stones — the clamor of hooves on gravel — and a huge herd of elk, more than two hundred of them, poured down the road into the meadow. What an uproar! The calves bawled for their mothers, the cows called back, the bulls barked out orders, all in squeals and grunts and moaning expectorations. I sat quietly at first, afraid I might spook them. But then I strummed the guitar a little, and hummed a ragged harmony while the elk grazed loudly in the meadow.
I sat on the porch for hours that evening, home at last. The sense of belonging brought an inner quiet that coexisted with the sounds of the place. It’s different from tiptoeing around hoping to have a trophy experience; more like a gentle detachment from the constant commentary of one’s ego.
Sometimes the nights here have seemed so quiet I imagined I could hear the sizzle of starlight piercing the atmosphere. That raucous jawboning of the elk, on the other hand, rivaled the noise of a marching band. Maybe quiet can happen at any decibel level.
Charles Goodrich’s books include the forthcoming Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden; see www.charlesgoodrich.com.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The squeal of silence.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
