The sound of silence

Silence.

My innocent and naive childhood years were spent in Alaska, just South of Fairbanks on Eielson Air Force Base.  Most of my memories take place outside, from winter to spring to summer to fall, and everything in between.  What I don’t remember, is ever hearing silence.  My winters were filled with snow machining and the steady traffic that occurred on base.  We would sled on the small but steep hill behind our house and scream as we played king of the mountain while we crunched snow with our feet and our hands.  Summers were spent nonstop camping under a midnight sky consumed with buzzing mosquitoes, and as a family of 5 we were always making noise.  The popping of an evening fire, the gas stove boiling water, the crisp flop of a deck of cards on the picnic table.  Even while fishing I remember the sound of the casting and reeling of our rods and old men cracking old men jokes on neighboring boats.  In-between all of that was the constant reminder of living on a military base: the roar of Fighter jets, a noise that as a military brat, I loved hearing and still do to this day.

When I moved to southeast Virginia during my pubescent teen years, the noises changed, but I still never remember silence.  Living in the suburbs of Hampton Roads meant the endless noise of man-made sound pollution.  Blaring low bass that made your organs vibrate, the berate honking of a road raged driver.  I was fortunate enough to live in a smaller town moderately separated from it all.  Our house was situated at the end of our road, nestled gently beside an inlet that led to the ocean.  It was only ever temporary relief from the urban monstrosity I was forced to call home, but it was relief nonetheless.

 

Spring and summer in our small town were filled with crickets, the moaning of bull frogs, and the constant hum of motor boats cruising in and out of our small inlet.  Noise from our distant neighbors echoed across the water as the sounds bounced back and forth like unanswered conversation.   Most of my winter memories are on the ski slopes, listening to my snowboard carving fresh corduroy, the chairlifts crank and pop as they passed over us, and the sound of starting buzzers and cheering when I began slalom racing in college.

My world was rarely, if ever, silent.  Not the real silence at least.  The kind of silence that is so quiet it’s almost deafening.  The kind where when you stand still, you hear your own ears ringing.  The kind of silence that is peaceful, but at the same time, absolutely terrifying.  This breed of silence was unknown to me and I was convinced it didn't exist.  Maybe in movies where emotions and perceptions were created for you, but not here.  Not in this place.

After spending almost 10 years in southeast Virginia, I decided to leave the big cities and began seasonal work in South-Central Idaho.  Most of that summer was spent in the desert surrounded by sagebrush in all directions for as far as the eye could see.  I camped on the job, miles away from the nearest city, and on the weekends I hiked and backpacked the wilderness of the majestic Sawtooth Mountains.  Desolate dirt roads, high alpine lakes, and the persistent smell of Ponderosa Pine entered my soul and never left, even when I did go into town.

I had found a peacefulness and serenity I had never experienced anywhere else and for the first time I thought I had experienced true silence.  Leaving the city filled a void I never knew needed filling and I smiled as I embraced this new perception.  But as I sat to enjoy a peaceful lake on one of my many hikes, I realized I had only escaped the man-made noises.  Aspen trees shook in the wind, birds and squirrels exchanged gentle conversation, and the streams gurgled with the snow melt that continued well into October.

My sensations tingled with every step I took.  Even here, my world was not silent.

I pondered the difference.  Sound is sound, no matter the source.  It's still the tingling sensation you get in your ear that provokes an emotion.  One that makes you close your eyes and mindlessly drift into a world all to yourself, peaceful, serene.  Or one of anger, an explosion of uncontrollable outrage and impulsion that leaves you shocked and dismally disappointed.  That tingling sensation that brings about perception.  What's jargon to me is another man's treasure.  But what's guilty pleasure for me is another man's empty noise.

With my seasonal work ending in Idaho, I began new work in Southern Alaska on the Kenai Peninsula.  My long plane ride, filled with a constant coughing, crying, and whispering, left me wondering if I would find the same peace I had discovered in Idaho.  A perception of sound that made my ears smile.  I looked out the window as we flew over the west coast and ultimately the Pacific Ocean and stared down at hundreds of thousands of miles empty of man's footprint.  I wondered what sounds existed between the valleys, the mountain peaks, the rolling waves.

My job on the Kenai, ironically enough, was going to be to listen.  To explore the different parts of the vast Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and simply listen.  To try to separate the anthropogenic noise from the biological sound.  The chorus of birds from the whine of a snowmachine.  The trees displaced in the wind from the hum of a bush plane.  The soft tracks of an elusive mammal from the voices of man.

I lived in town.  Snow machines, snow plows, and low flying airplanes were a constant reminder of civilization.  I longed for the emptiness of the desert I once knew.  Darkness came earlier here than I remembered as a kid, but it never masked the noise.  Even on the job, I was surrounded by an uncanny amount of sound.  Packs shifting, snowshoes crunching snow, the heavy breathing that inevitably occurred from our winter hikes.  Even when we turned off our Arctic Cats, there was a persistent ringing left in our ears that we couldn't escape.

Other sounds filled the air too though.  The chatter of boreal chickadees, who sounded defeated compared to their southern counterparts.   The low mournful song of a great horned owl summoning his mate.  The wind caressing the trees and the snow brushing the ground.

It didn't matter my perception of these sounds that embraced my ears, both the sounds I tried to listen for and the ones that slipped in unnoticed.  Silence felt impossible.

When I wasn't in the field, I was stuck inside, listening.  We recorded sound for days at a time, sometimes months, and it was my job to listen to every single recording and document what we heard. Snow machines, airplanes, ravens, chickadees and wind were all common occurrences that came to me as no surprise.  They were all things I heard on a regular basis.  What did surprise me though was the amount of silence I documented, which easily made up the majority of the "noise".

On our recordings though, silence wasn't recorded as silence, but instead as white noise.  A jargon of sounds unpleasant to the ear.  Silence created the same noise as a TV not on a receiving channel.  A blur of absolutely nothing.  It caught me off guard.  Silence had a sound.

I wondered silently in my head if in my search for silence, I had been going about it all wrong.  If sound was perception based, maybe silence was too.  What if the idea of silence had been conditioned in us.  What if we had been brain-washed by school teachers, parents, and Hollywood hits that silence was this unchanging idea, something locked in time for years.  I had assumed if the idea of sound was a tingling sensation in my ears, that silence would be a lack of that sensation.  That was my naive perception of what silence was.  That's what I had been searching for all these years -- A lack of feeling.

So I made it my goal to find this silence that I heard.  On our next outing, once my coworker and I reached the end of our hike, we sat, closed our eyes, and we listened.  It was the dead of winter.  Early January, no wind, but a bitter negative 23 degrees below Fahrenheit. I was convinced we were the only animals stupid enough to be on the rocky outcrop, exposed.

A part of me was bitter.  Reaching that rocky outcrop was no easy task. We had snowshoed uphill for over 2 miles, breaking trail and post-holing two feet deep with every step as we wandered Alaskan Wilderness, oblivious to the man-made trail that sat well maintained in the dirt below us under more favorable conditions.  Despite my core being warm, my fingers and toes were numb but nothing seemed to warm them.

At the top of the hill, we were greeted by break taking views of Skilak Lake and the distant Chugach Mountain range.  Despite the bitter temperatures, sweat beaded on my forehead and I removed my headband not only to release the heat I had created, but to allow my ears to be at their full capacity while I searched for silence.  I realized in that moment that I had never searched for silence.  I had never stopped to find it.  My intake of sound came without trying and I had expected the same to come with silence.

I still wasn't sure exactly what I was searching for and I still wasn't convinced silence, true silence, even existed.  But I thought maybe if I changed my perception of what silence was, I would find it up here on this bitter rocky outcrop, while exposed to the Alaskan winter that most people justifiably avoided.

The air was still.  Even the ravens hid in unknown places.  Small cumulus clouds scattered the skies horizon, but today they didn't dare whisper.  No airplanes hummed, no songbirds sang, no snowmachines whined.  I grasped my poles to help keep my body still.  I listened.

I heard nothing.

There was no white noise like the recording suggested.  But instead, for a moment, my entire world was paralyzed.  All my senses ceased to exist.  I heard nothing. I smelled nothing. I tasted nothing. I saw nothing. I felt nothing.  And that's when the silence became deafening.  

I began to hear a ringing in my ears.  It reminded me of how I felt after loud concerts, only there was no music playing.  My entire body shook from the feeling of my heart beating rhythmically as blood was pumped continuously and I could literally feel my breathing slow.   My ears tingled at this new but unknown sensation.  I opened my eyes, but my entire world was frozen. A photographic image in my head that even as I looked around, didn't move.  It didn't feel real, and it wasn't until a solemn raven coasted past that high ridge line, silently, that my world came back into focus.

I had experienced silence.