Winter storms knocked down trees a hundred feet tall, eight feet in diameter at the base. Already lichen, shelf-fungus, and flowers the size of pinheads punctuate these fallen logs. A dozen kinds of fern twirl around scatters of bark, and soon entire new glades will be springing up. In my acoustically sensitive state, I wonder, what is the sound of leaves stretching very far to find open sunshine?

The Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park in the northwest corner of Washington state—if Washington is shaped like a mitten, the park’s at the tip of the thumb—is my first stop on a listening tour. I’m hoping that if I pay close enough attention, I’ll learn what the world sounds like when it’s only talking to itself.

I need that, because modern life bludgeons us with sound. Cheap car stereos have more amplification than the Beatles used at Shea Stadium. Thanks to the endless hiss of traffic, 6 a.m. lawnmowers, the clang of construction, that annoying cell phone jangle, we live inside noise. Even when we think we’re in a silent place, we’re not. Tests show that if you ask relaxed people in this country to hum, the note they’ll most likely produce is a B natural—the same as the electricity roaring through the wires everywhere surrounding us.

A silence-seeker savors the unparalleled quiet of the Olympic National Park. Photo courtesy Edward Readicker-Henderson.

And in the quietest place in the continental United States, no matter how determined I am not to make a sound, my heartbeat thrums in my ears, almost drowning out the birdsong. I shift my weight, inadvertently bump my walking stick; it falls, clattering against a tree trunk like a wind-up drumming monkey before it finally comes to rest in a patch of moss.

In 1995, Gordon Hempton, an Emmy-winning natural sounds recording artist who was recovering from a bout of temporary deafness and horrified by the noise around him, chose this tiny spot of land in the Hoh Rainforest—47º 51.959N, 123º 52.221W, to be exact—and declared it a sanctuary of quiet. The One Square Inch project was born.

Gordon’s idea is simple, lovely, hopeful: Just as waves ripple out from a dropped pebble in a pond, silence will radiate from a spot that’s kept beautifully still. “One Square Inch is exactly that, an inch I’m defending from noise,” he says at the trailhead, looking over the three of us—me and two young women, a soaking-wet trio of sound pilgrims. “And can one square inch of quiet manage a thousand square miles around it? So far, every indication is that it can.”

Along the three-mile hike in, we stop for slugs, for snails the color of beach sand, for snakes sure they’re doing a remarkable impression of tree roots. The Hoh River, cloudy with glacial silt, parallels us, turning gravity into music, the ever-downhill rush to the ocean.

Then, as we cross a low ridge, the entire soundscape changes. The river drops away, and this tiny valley, Mt. Tom Meadow, seems to hold quiet like a whispering secret. With a meter the size of a paperback book, Gordon checks noise levels. The forest—wind, trees, river, two or three unseen birds calling from the underbrush—comes in at 27 A-weighted decibels (dBA) about half as loud as normal conversation level. Or, to put it more simply, the ringing in my ears is the loudest thing I hear.

We cross under a tree shaped like an upside down wishbone, tramp through mud that grabs at my boots, and then into the deeper forest along an old elk trail. And there, without any fanfare but a tiny marker placed there by Gordon himself, is the Inch.

We scatter, each staking out a bit of territory, each listening eagerly, and just as eagerly hoping to hear very little. What does true silence sound like? At first, there is only the soft noises of the three other people, all boots and Gore-tex, all trying hard not to move, not to breathe loudly, but then the longer I sit, the more I hear. The river rumbles the bass line of the landscape’s music. Birds provide the treble. A woodpecker offers percussion while I watch a translucent spider, no bigger than a match-head, work a triangular fern leaf, and mosquitoes, one of nature’s only drone sounds, zero in on my exposed skin. My breathing stills, my heartbeat slows, and I feel as if I am unfolding, becoming a part of the quietest spot in the United States.

Then the noise comes. “A big fat airplane!” in the disappointed words of a fellow hiker. The plane more than doubled the ambient sound of the Inch, and we reacted to it as a threat: drawing in, tracking the source of the sound, hunching down for cover until the last traces of engine noise finally died away and the landscape’s quiet slowly reasserted itself.

I wonder what we lose when we lose the last bit of country where our sounds—motors and electricity and the unnatural twist of sound through plastic—don’t reach, and we have no respite at all. Surely that would be a failure of national imagination, a blight on that great American dream of room for everything.

Everything, it seems, but the perfect quiet of nature.

When I leave the Inch I think about what I’ve heard in the only place where I’ve ever been that the works of man weren’t always in some way a dominant sound: rain; the river muffled by distance; wind striking notes on trees with leaves, trees with needles, or the dead-end sound of it crashing against one of the giant Sitka spruce trunks. Although the line of sight in the forest is almost nothing—every view is blocked by old-growth—I hear at distances I’m simply not accustomed to, hearing too many things I can’t identify. I’m sure that was an owl a mile or so off, but I can’t begin to name the other half-dozen species of birds that chirped and hooted and harrumphed. We have somehow turned into strictly visual creatures, forgetting that animals define their home by knowing its every sound.

But maybe even worse than the airplane is the simple fact that the entire time I was at the Inch, trying to listen to the world, what I really heard were the noises inside my own head. “When you’re in a really quiet place,” Gordon had said, “it forces you to see who you are.” Apparently who I am is someone whose mind resembles nothing so much as a bunch of clowns at a pie fight, a scene of constant noise and bustle, thoughts spewing like whipped cream.

Purple lupine frame spectacular views of the Olympic Mountain range.

Maybe my next stop, Rialto Beach, will help. Olympic National Park includes not only the mountainous interior, but also nearly the entire Pacific coastline of the state of Washington, fronting more than 3,000 square miles of open sea. Rialto is, according to Gordon, “the most musical beach in the world,” and the ocean always soothes.

From the Hoh to Rialto is less than 50 miles, but in what seems to be a recurring pattern, I make half a dozen wrong turns and get very lost. Finally, on the western edge of the continent, I am there. In front of me, a line of driftwood, from small branches to entire tree trunks, shields waves from the inland world. The dominant note is a low-pitch hum, almost industrial and constant, like a factory very far off running impossibly large machines. Wave patterns overlay the hum: three small waves followed by a larger wave that comes nearly to where my feet are dug into the sand. Finally, a sound almost too fragile for me to pick up until I’ve sat and listened for more than an hour: the purr of water pulling back over rocks like a particularly delicate wind chime.

“There’s nothing you need to learn about listening,” Gordon had said. “We’re all animals. We all know how. We’re all good listeners when we’re at our most natural.” I think about times when I have been utterly entranced by sound: listening to a musician practice a Bach suite, cello echoing; the roo-roo bark my dog makes when she’s indignant; wind howling across Iceland. And my favorite sound of all, the nearly complete silence of the woman I love sleeping.

“To listen for something is one of the worst things a person can do,” Gordon had continued. “Just open up.” And it’s true; in all of those moments, every highlight of sound I can recall from my past, I wasn’t listening, I was simply there, and that was enough.

A gull flies overhead, low enough that the thump of its wings alone seems strong enough to keep it aloft. Never mind the aerodynamics, flight must have started with this sound, the sheer muscle of wind in feather.

And taking that as a sign of hope, I head to Hurricane Ridge, about 50 miles as the crow flies northeast of Rialto but three times that distance by car. Just past Port Angeles the road turns its back on the ocean and into a different season; from the sea to the ridge the car climbs over 5,000 feet, and the temperature drops 20 degrees.

When at last I get out of the car and walk onto the ridge, a landscape covered with alpine plants only inches tall, the sound is what I hope birds experience, wind unimpeded and on its own errands occasionally deigning to come to earth and lift a raven into the air.

I don’t listen for any of it. I hike to where I see nothing but the bruise blue of distant mountains and simply hear. At least for a little while. Longer than yesterday. Longer than the day before. And that’s a hopeful thing because what the world is telling me in these sounds is that any time I remember to pay attention it will be there, singing to itself and to anybody else who wants to listen.

Searching for Silence The Saturday Evening Post

South of Raymond on Highway 101 the forested hills opened out to give a view of salt marsh. The smell of the sea laced the pungency of fir needles. Habitation thinned out. My old pickup camper’s wipers made a monotonous beat. The radio got only static. Clouds marched in off the Japanese Current low enough to snag on the coast range. Wind gusts swayed my camper. Repeated bridges offered glimpses of the Pacific. I was counting bridges now.

All my life I have sought these marginal places where land and water and sky meet. Life boils down to simple things: Will the ducks be there, will the wind be right, and will the ducks decoy? No telephones, no deadlines, no tight white collars. Usually I sought these remote places alone, but I hadn’t been alone the day I was stupid. I hadn’t hunted ducks since that day. The road curved through one final stand of second-growth fir and onto the bridge I was looking for. Downstream, the tide was full, marshes covered by the wide bay. I shuddered, remembering.

At the south end of the bridge, the causeway to Bay Point led off at right angles to the highway. The road sign said two miles. Bay Point itself consisted of maybe a hundred weathered houses and corroded mobile homes around a small mooring basin. Low sheds lined the basin. The tied-up fishing fleet bobbed and clanked nervously on wind waves coming around the breakwater. A handful of men in foul-weather gear worked among the boats. I felt them watch me out of the corners of their eyes, the way residents of remote places do strangers. My shoulders got tighter. I was looking for a particular boat. A bright pea-green bowpicker. I had seen it only one time in my life, the day I was stupid out on the bay, but I knew I would recognize it anywhere.

It wasn’t in the boat basin.

You don’t just get out and brace the locals with your questions in a place like Bay Point. At least I don’t. The gulf between your worlds is too enormous. I have hunted near such isolated communities nearly half a century. In all that time I exchanged fewer words with their inhabitants than one typical day in an office. But the pressure of my purpose was on me. I drove to the one tavern in town.

It occupied a small, gloomy former 1930’s gas station. There was one lighted beer sign in the window. A few Formica tables, a jukebox, a short, wooden bar along one wall. Maybe half a dozen people watched me come in, and they all had stopped talking by the time I picked a barstool. I was wearing my old, olive-drab Filson mackinaw and khaki pants, but they knew I was an outsider. The bartender was a woman with a broad, closed face and guarded eyes. She gave me a Budweiser and change and went away. I felt somebody sit at the other end of the short bar.

“You ain’t from around here, are you?” Nasal challenge, like a B-Grade Western from my childhood.

I looked up then. He was a slope-shouldered, older guy with a fat, guileless face. Of course I had to draw the local snoop right off.

“No,” I said. Any talking feels like too much talking in a place like that.

Illustrated by Sterling Hundley

An invasive question, slightly hostile. Outsiders seemed 
to spell trouble here.

“I’m looking for a guy who owns a boat,” I said.

His wattles shook when he cackled. “Lots of guys own boats here, Mister. Them and the bank! You repossessing a boat?”

“No, I want to buy the guy who owns this particular boat 
a beer. He helped me out of a jam out in the bay. On those islands up there.”

“Yeah? What was you doin’ up there?”

“Hunting ducks.”

He relaxed a little. “You do any good?” The eternal question of the hunter.

“We damn near drowned. Would have, if it hadn’t been for this guy.”

He sidled closer across the stools, interested now. “Sounds like a story to me.”

Everybody in the place seemed to be listening, too. It was an opening that might lead to the man I had come to find. So I told him my story. …

“There were five of us that day, out in the gray, wintry dawn on what seemed like the edge of the world. We could hear the boom of the surf from the Pacific. At low tide the serpentine coils of the river that flowed out of the densely forested hills were invisible below undulating humps of bay mud and marsh grass. There was no traffic on the 101 bridge. At the foot of the boat launch beneath the bridge the dark water had begun to lap higher as the tide turned when I backed my big old camouflage-painted duck boat down the ruts. The rain drifted like smoke, blurring distances. My old 20-horse Mercury turned over easily. Its only purpose in life was to take me duck hunting, and back again safely. I pampered it with regular service, it slept in the garage between seasons, and always did as asked. I had no way of knowing its dependability would be of no help on this day.

“I had hunted this river in the more prudent upstream marshes, and done very well. Dan usually hunted the pair of low islands out in the open bay below the bridge. He said the shooting out there warranted the extra exposure to the elements. So that day, I ferried him and my son out to the islands. Topped with marsh grass, the islands were separated by a mud bank maybe 30 yards wide. Dan and Beau built a blind on the seaward island while I went back for Bob and Bob Junior. It was to be Bob Junior’s first duck hunt, my son’s third. Beau hadn’t killed a duck yet. With the quick impatience of youth he was beginning to wonder if he ever would.

“The four of them set four dozen lightweight decoys on their anchors on the mud while I worked out of the boat alone, setting trawls of my heavy, handmade cork decoys farther out. There were vast rafts of loafing widgeon not a half a mile out to sea. Even in the washed-out light, the white wing patches of the drakes bloomed brightly when they flapped. The tide was making steadily now. The ducks would follow it in to feed. The tide would cover the exposed mud around us just at shooting time. It seemed a perfect setup.

“Birds began to move right on time, but the first ones flared off our 70-decoy set. Dan said my boat, beached on the mud below our blind, was the cause. I had killed the wariest waterfowl—Canada geese, late-season sprig, and adult snow geese—out of that boat. And I grew up on the salt, where my personal rule is that you should always be within reach of your boat. But Dan was the host that day, so I deferred to his judgment and moved the boat to the far end of the second island. Bob Senior grinned at me as I waded back across the ankle-deep slough separating the islands. We worked together and had been through some tense bureaucratic times. He knew my temper and tendency to stand my ground. Now, he seemed to be silently congratulating me for not interrupting the harmony of the hunt.

“We let the boys shoot first. Bob Junior and Beau managed to take a pair of widgeon drakes out of a decoying flock. My Labrador, a winter dog named Summer, bounced out and collected. But the birds continued skittish. I clipped down a mallard drake at long yards with my left-hand barrel. Summer chased it clear out of sight across the widening water toward the Bay Point causeway. Came back with it, triumphant. She was a hunting fool. By then the boys were chilled. Beau and I started back to the boat to get the vacuum bottle of hot chocolate.

“The slough between the islands had deepened. Toward the center, the water was inches from my hip-boot tops. I could go ahead and soak myself or wait another hour until the turn of the tide. My second rule of cold-weather duck hunting is to avoid a soaking if at all possible. So I elected to wait.

“That was my second mistake that day. The tide didn’t turn at the appointed hour. It just kept coming.

“We told the boys to watch the logs floating upriver. When they paused, the tide would be full. When they began to drift back downstream, it soon would be time for hot chocolate. After what seemed like an awful long time, Bobby mentioned that the logs still were racing upstream awfully fast, and he was right. By then, the water was up to the highest point on our island, lapping at the skirts of our camouflage netting. Before too long we were shin deep. Within another half-hour, there were no visible islands anymore. We stood in the center of a wide, uninterrupted expanse of water from the forested slopes to the causeway, dimpled by the driving rain. We ignored the ducks after that.

“Dan had chest waders. He made a try for the boat. Long before the slough could suck him down he was to the top of his waders. It seemed any direction he moved would take him deeper. We all stood perfectly still, the adults looking at each other without comment. There seemed nothing left to say. There was no point using fancy words like hypothermia to try to hide the gravity of our situation from the boys. Both were proud graduates of state hunter-safety courses. They knew we were in serious trouble, but talked to each other in matter-of-fact tones. They began to shiver when they told us the water was over the tops of their hip boots …”

The bartender slammed her cash register drawer, hard. It jerked me back to the present.

“I won’t hear any more of this. I can’t. Anybody want anything, get it yourself.”

She went into the back room through ratty bead curtains. A door slammed back there, harder than the cash register.

“S’okay, Mister.” My listener leaned forward, still caught up in the story. “Molly gets like that. She’s entitled.” I hadn’t lost any of the rest of my audience either. “Them islands are dangerous as hell. Everybody around here knows it. What happened next?”

“The water kept inching up our bodies.

“My thinking seemed to slow down. ‘Just wait it out,’ I kept telling myself. The tide has to turn. We were 90 minutes past the tide-table high. Bob and I held our sons close, bracing them. I remembered that awful old joke about the devil coming through in a motorboat. I hoped the devil had other business today. My real fear was that waves from the sea would start rolling more deeply into the bay, or that the wind would rise.

“My old duckboat floated silently higher than our heads now, not a hundred yards away.

“One of the boys suggested we fire signal shots. Our measured shots brought no response. But still we cradled our guns, in case someone came along. That’s what I told myself. But I just couldn’t bear to surrender the LeFever to the salt. I held Beau’s little H&R Topper, too. Surrendering the guns would somehow be surrendering hope.

“Beau wanted to swim for the boat, supremely confident of his ability to make it. I was afraid he was too cold to clamber over its high sides, or crawl up over the motor. Not strong enough to crank the motor if he did make it. But mostly I couldn’t bear the thought of watching him go under, beyond my ability to reach. I belatedly realized Summer had vanished. She had been swimming a steady orbit around us, evidently unconcerned, for a long time. But none of us had seen her go.

“At first I didn’t hear the voice, calling across the water.

“ ‘There’s somebody there,’ Bob said. ‘On 
the causeway.’

“I looked through the steady rain. A man stood on the edge of the road.

“ ‘Do you need help?’ I heard him then.

“ ‘We can’t reach our boat,’ I yelled. ‘We have children out here.’

“ ‘Hold on,’ came back the words. ‘Just 
hold on.’ Then he was gone behind another veil of rain.

“ ‘You think he has a boat?’ Beau asked. ‘Where was his car?’

“ ‘He’s going for help.’ Bob sounded more confident than I felt.

“I could see lights still on in Bay Point, though it was past noon. A dark and dreary noon. What if the man had misunderstood? What if he had a bayman’s fine contempt for greenhorns and didn’t really understand how desperate we were? I couldn’t seem to form a cogent thought, and couldn’t seem to find any reason to hope. All I could do was stand still and hold onto my son. The water was 
up to my waist now, which meant it was halfway up Beau’s chest. Dan was in almost to his shoulders.

“The driftwood still moved inland. I thought it had slowed but didn’t trust my eyes.

“My gaze drifted back toward Bay Point, attracted by a flash of white. It looked like a bow wave. A black dot moved across the water. I didn’t say anything. What if it was just a crabber, headed out to check his pots? I didn’t want to stir false hope.

“Dan had no such qualms. ‘I see a boat,’ he said. ‘It’s coming this way, I think.’

“ ‘Is it him?’ Bobby asked.

“ ‘It’s green,’ Beau said. ‘A big green boat.’

“Moments later his eagle vision was confirmed as the big, green, high-sided bowpicker bore down on us. It’s engines throttled back, and it coasted to a stop some distance out, to avoid swamping us. Then it nudged toward us carefully. The pilot wore a weathered khaki chore coat and an old Jones hat pulled down snug against the rain. His lower face was a ruddy blur as he concentrated on his maneuvering. When he spoke, his voice had cigarettes and hard whiskey in it.

“ ‘You’re deepest. I’ll take you first,’ he told Dan. ‘The rest of you just hold on.’

“He went down on his knees against the hull and hauled Dan aboard in one powerful motion. I have no idea how much Dan weighed just then, with his chest waders 
full of water. But he went aboard like a sack of dog food.

“ ‘Now the boys,’ our rescuer said. The boat sidled over like an obedient saddle horse.

“Dan took all the guns. Our rescuer plucked Bobby and Beau aboard.

“ ‘I’ll go last,’ Bob said. ‘My boots are full. It will take both of you to lift me.’

“I got a foot up on his bent knee and drove up and over, assisted by the bayman. Bob weighed over 260 pounds in his sock feet. The bayman and I yarded him aboard like a prime Alaska halibut.

“Just like that we were all safe.

“The bayman put me over into my boat and said he would take everybody else back to the launch. I was so busy picking up the decoy rig, and then searching the far shore for Summer, that I never saw his boat go back toward Bay Point. I didn’t find Summer. When the chill soaked through my waterlogged Filson, I motored back to the launch. When I came under the highway bridge, my camper was almost hub-deep in the river. I had parked far above the normal high-tide mark. My boat glided almost to the camper door before it grounded. Natural laws seemed to have gone crazy that day. …”

“The tide will do that.” My companion was behind the bar, helping himself to another longneck. He offered me another.

“I know that now.” I took a long swig. It was cleansing in a way to reveal my blunders to these people. They knew what stupidity could cost out here.

“Them winds way offshore back 
the water up in these shallow bays … something fierce,” he said. “Even with no wind at all in here on the bay. Tide tables don’t mean a damn thing in winter when that’s happening. You got lucky. Them boys were okay? Molly will want to know that.”

“Inside my camper, the boys were wrapped in sleeping bags and slurping hot soup.

“ ‘I never thought I’d be this glad 
to see a can of Campbell’s soup,’ Bobby grinned.

“Bob was spraying down the guns with WD-40. I changed out of my wet clothes and squeezed in behind the dinette table with soup of my own. Somebody tapped on the camper door. Dan spoke to someone, leaned back in. ‘Back in a minute.’ When he came back he had Summer with him, romping, completely dry and very proud of her.

“ ‘Two men from that fishing village,’ Dan said. ‘They saw her up on the causeway. Knew she wasn’t local, so they came down here looking for her owner.’

“ ‘Did they know this other guy?’ I said. ‘I never even got to thank him.’

“ ‘Well they must know him, if 
they know every dog in town. But I didn’t ask.’

“The tide did turn, of course. It was dropping fast by the time we loaded up all our gear and pulled out in early dusk for home. For the rest of the season, my waterfowling fervor was missing. I could not get my mind around the fact that stupidity had put my son at risk. I was certain that our rescuer had identified me as the one who should have known better, who should have protected the group. I sensed his brooding disapproval. I could never justify my stupidity to him. But I could thank him for giving our lives back to us. 
So I returned to Bay Point alone, to settle that debt.”

My companion at the bar heaved a sigh. “But you don’t know his name? Anything about him?”

I tried to describe our rescuer’s appearance, but he snorted a laugh.

“Might be half the men in town, give or take a little face hair. You sure 
you’d spot his boat?”

“Unless he repainted it. It was 
the brightest pea-green you ever saw. 
A bowpicker—”

Chairs scraping. All at once everybody in the place seemed to be standing up. Two or three of the men were bigger than I was, and a lot tougher-looking.

My companion at the bar looked 
as if I had punched him. Hard.

“That’s the sickest damn kind 
of a joke I think I’ve ever seen 
pulled,” he said tightly. “What’s your game, Mister?”

“You better get out of here,” the biggest one of the others said.Windburned and weathered, he 
looked like a bayman, too. “Just get 
up and go.”

My own temper was heating up. 
“I just want to thank this guy. He 
saved my son’s ass out there in the 
bay. And mine, too, and my friends. 
I’m not the law. I’m not a collection agency. What the hell’s wrong? 
Doesn’t he live here anymore? This 
was just December it happened. Just two months ago!”

The big guy weighed me. I met his gaze stubbornly.

“You better come with me, then,” 
he said finally.

I followed him out into the wind. 
I admit I had my hand in my Filson pocket, closed around my old Buck folding hunter. I had violated some local taboo, that was clear. But I 
was not going to take a beating 
without knowing why. I was nervous, expecting others to follow us. But 
none did.

“Just down the street,” the big man said. It was getting dark fast. “You’ll 
be wondering about Molly,” he added. “Her kids hunted them islands. A long time ago now. They was 13 and 16 years old when their dad left ’em out there and went off around the point. Fishing was good back then, and he didn’t want to miss a beat. He had a long way to go, but he always thought he was tougher than the ocean. Always pushed it. But that day he didn’t make it back to them islands in time.”

“My God! The boys—”

Illustrated by Sterling Hundley

My stomach knotted, remembering how close it had been for the five of us.

“How on earth could you live with something like that?”

He gave a smile like a grimace. “Mostly, you drink a lot.” He shrugged.

“Here’s where we’re going.”

He paused in front of a rusty old hurricane fence threaded with ratty vinyl privacy slats. When he leaned 
his shoulder into it, the gate creaked open. The pea-green boat was there, 
on a rusting trailer all tangled in blackberry vines. I recognized it instantly. It sagged on the trailer as 
if its keel were broken.

“That the boat?” he asked.

“That’s the boat. What happened to it? It was just fine in December.”

He shook his head. “Blackberry vines don’t grow that fast, Mister, even out here. This here boat belonged to Molly’s old man. It was busted up the night he was lost at sea, a year to the day after 
his kids died. We found it on the river bar at low tide.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“We don’t paint boats green anymore around here. It ain’t lucky. And this one has been right here in this yard for over 30 years.”

What did you think about this story? Write to us at Letters, The Saturday 
Evening Post, 1100 Waterway Blvd., 
Indianapolis, IN 46202 or send an e-mail to letters@saturdayeveningpost.com.

Pea Green Boat The Saturday Evening Post