"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

Although I don’t carry a sound metre, I do relate to Hempton, and have been known to drive myself and others a bit nuts obsessing over mechanical sounds. I fly out the door if a truck is idling to ask the driver please to switch it off. “Do you hear it? Can’t you hear that car?” I’ll implore camping friends at the faintest engine sound off in the distance. Indoor noise bugs me too. Blow dryers, electric shavers, vacuum cleaners, bean grinders, blenders. They all make me crazy.

I can just as readily conjure a list of favourite natural soundscapes. There were the few days I spent in the Sahara Desert when I heard only the constant wind, or the July night when I sat on the edge of the woods in southern Illinois listening to crickets so deafening I couldn’t hear my friend talk. Last year, my husband and I spent a pitch-black night in a North Carolina swamp listening to owls screech and river otters splash without ever seeing them. My favourite sound in the woods is when the wind causes two branches to scrape together in a creaking groan right out of a horror-movie soundtrack.

The sounds that started Hempton on his journey came from on high during a muggy summer night in the Midwest. Armed with an undergraduate degree in botany from the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay, he was on his way from Seattle to graduate school in plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison when he took a break in Iowa. “I pulled out my bag to sleep in a harvested cornfield and a thunderstorm rolled over me,” he recalls. “I thought, How could I be 27 years old and never have listened before? I thought I was a good listener, but I’d never listened to anything without intention.”

Later, he says, when he tried out a store’s sound equipment outdoors, “Listening was a whole different experience. I walked out the door one person and back in another.”

Hempton is relaying this story while he drives along curvy Highway 101, which leads to a road that dead ends in the Hoh Rain Forest. When making a point, he fixes such an intense gaze on me with his clear green-brown eyes that I fear we might run off the road. That would be dangerous enough in a newer vehicle, but we’re in “the Vee Dub,” his pale green 1964 Volkswagen bus.

I don’t feel unsafe, just aware of the thin metal surrounding me, the lack of a shoulder harness, and the inefficient job being done by the van’s slow, squeaky windshield wipers. “They sound like a nice relaxing swing on the back porch,” Hempton says, perfectly nailing the noise.

Hempton also owns a 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee, but prefers the bus when he doesn’t need to lock up $50,000 worth of recording equipment. “The Vee Dub forces you to slow down and really see things,” he says. “The only problem is it’s loud. It’s the loudest thing I own, at 80 dBA. That’s not healthy.”

Hempton has the bus retrofitted for camping, with a fold-out mattress (although he usually sleeps on the ground or up on a rack hung between trees), water storage and even a tiny wood-burning stove. Although he might sound like a pony-tailed holdover from the ’60s, he more resembles an Eagle Scout, with short hair and a clean-shaven, angular face.

Within months of discovering his calling, in 1980, Hempton had dropped out of school and returned to Seattle to become a “sound tracker.” To support his habit, he took a job as a bike messenger. “I was all about deliveries,” he says. “I got paid $1 for every delivery and I knew how many I needed to buy each piece of equipment I wanted.”

He married a fellow bike messenger and the couple, now divorced, started a family. (His son is now 23, and his daughter 18.) “That was really a transitional point,” he says. “I was absolutely convinced that the natural soundscape was disappearing.”

Hempton had plenty of time to ponder that when he became bedridden with pneumonia. “I had to file for unemployment. We had a 3-year-old son and I was burning wood from old furniture for heat. But there’s always the morning, and that’s when I heard the dawn. In my mind’s ear I imagined listening to the sounds of the sunrise as it circled the globe.”

That became the idea behind the 1992 documentary Vanishing Dawn Chorus, for which Hempton recorded the sounds of sunrise on six continents. When he won an Emmy for that project, his life changed, he says. “I no longer had to explain myself as the bike messenger who did natural sound recordings.” Since then he’s worked on dozens of projects, some for recordings and documentaries and others for such corporations as Microsoft and The Relaxation Company.

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