"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

When I said, in Gordon’s words, “but noise is an emission,” Boren replied, “they’re both important factors to look at when looking at the picture.”

Over dinner, a thick homemade chicken soup donated by a friend of Hempton’s, I asked what he would have said to the trail volunteers if they’d been using a chain saw. “I would have talked to them about using hand tools. A lot of people don’t know that a sharp saw can cut just about anything,” he says. “I’d inform them, and then respect whatever they did. I have been called an enviro-wacko, but I respect everybody’s right to their opinion.”

Hempton heard plenty of opinions last summer when, as part of the research for his book, he criss-crossed the country in the Vee Dub to talk to experts and regular folks about noise and quiet. Hempton initially was reluctant to take on the project, proposed by a literary agent, because of time constraints. “But this book is just one more opportunity to get the message to the reader that quiet is something special, one of life’s basic joys. This is one of the reasons One Square Inch was established.

“My assignment on the trip was to listen to America,” he says. “I admit that when I left to go across the country, I was a little confused. Have I become this eccentric connoisseur of silence in the quietest part of the country, living in my own little fantasy world, or is this something that really matters to other people? Well, what I learned was that, overwhelmingly, quiet has provided a profound experience in people’s lives.” Along the way, he “listened to the landscape” and recorded it, and the book will be packaged with a CD of soundscapes from the journey.

Hempton ended his eastward journey in Washington, D.C. He walked the final 100 miles on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal trail along the Potomac River. He met with as many government officials as he could, including Mary Bomar, the director of the National Park Service, and U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington state, whose office is “exploring the concept of a legislative vehicle to support One Square Inch,” spokeswoman Ciaran Clayton says.

When I suggest he’s becoming the national voice of silence, Hempton says, “It’s an interesting thing to speak for silence and not obliterate it. I do speak for silence but I hesitate to say I’m the voice of silence. All I can say is that I truly enjoy quiet. I don’t really like the attention.”

While he carries a sound metre the way a photographer carries a camera, Hempton says he’d prefer to leave it at home. “I do all these measurements for One Square Inch. I don’t want to measure it, but I do. Really, a quiet place is a quiet place.”

Diane Daniel is a freelance journalist who lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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