I wrote this story last year for the Isthmus, our local indy paper. Enjoy if you will.
52 decibels. Sitting on the porch.
My dog Lucy is a hundred pounds of muscle, fluff, and exuberance. Our block is a major canine thoroughfare, so every 10 minutes or so, her exuberance is vocalized. She has a throaty bark that bounces off the wood floors and creates sympathetic vibrations on my banjo strings long after the barking has stopped.
Luckily she is generally quiet and the neighbors have dogs as well, so they get it. But I can tell you that when she lets out a woof, it is irritating at best and painful at worst. I live close to a major road in Madison. It carries four lanes of traffic from Fitchburg and Verona to University Avenue, so it’s significant white noise. 58 decibels at peak traffic.
I’m not complaining, mind you. It’s a simple fact that humans create noise, both naturally and via technology. As I write this I’m listening to a Bach violin concerto (52 decibels). It’s a pleasant noise, but noise nonetheless. I turn it off and the room drops to 42. Just the air conditioner.
42 dB: Front yard, 10:30 p.m., letting the dog out before bed.
In the state of Washington, there is one square inch of land that is alleged to be the quietest place in the United States. It’s in the Hoh Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula, 47.865972 North, -123.870361 West, to be exact. The woods, mosses and organic materials act as natural sound deadeners. It’s more than 11 miles from the closest road. It’s the place in the U.S. with the least sound pollution, sound from unnatural sources.
The One Square Inch was the brainchild of Gordon Hempton, a sound recorder whose auditory images can only be described as art. Placing microphones inside a giant dead sitka spruce as the ocean breezes blow across its massive opening creates a thrumming that sounds like the huge dead tree is very much alive.
Hempton’s art consists of capturing the sounds of the natural world. He doesn’t believe quiet places are absent of sound: they are absent of artificial sounds. The sounds that can hurt.
Sound pollution isn’t just annoying, it’s deadly. According to the World Health Organization, noise pollution is one of the most dangerous environmental threats to health. And according to the European Environment Agency, noise is responsible for 12,000 premature deaths and 48,000 new cases of heart disease every year. That’s almost 50,000 heart attacks from noise. On top of that, there’s tinnitus, stress, fatigue, tachycardia, hypertension and a host of other maladies.
Dhaka, Bangladesh, is the noisiest city on the planet, with an average measurement of 119 decibels. That’s an insanely high number. It also bounces between being the second and fourth most air-polluted city in the world, so let’s just say the folks at the visitors and convention bureau have their work cut out for them. How people survive there is mind-boggling. The answer is simple, though: because they have to. But 119 decibels: that’s the same as a jackhammer. Constantly.
93 dB. Splitting wood. Wearing noise-canceling earbuds under headphones.
My neighbors are okay with me running an 8-horsepower Briggs and Stratton driving a 20-ton splitter so long as they get to raid the woodpile now and then. It’s a monster that makes quick-ish work of four full cords of ash and bur oak that’ll heat the house for a few winters. My chainsaw is even louder and downright irritating, but hearing protection stays on a hook right next to the saw. Ain’t no one using that thing without protection.
So what’s a city-dweller to do? I live in a quiet part of town near the Arboretum. Even so, the drone of the Beltline permeates the forest and it’s decidedly not quiet even there. But unless you think about it, you don’t hear that either. There’s a reason they call it background noise.
Maybe that’s why I need nature so much. Not just nature, but quiet nature.
44 dB. Sitting in a canoe in the middle of Mann Lake, Vilas County.
It’s not super quiet here, but it’s not the quantity of the sound; it’s the quality. No road noise from the end of the lake I’m at. That’s the quality part. The birch trees are going to make noise no matter what, even with a light breeze. That’s fine: birch trees make the best white noise. White pines have a higher pitch that’s soothing as well. I pulled my canoe and sat down on the pine needle duff. 36 decibels if I put my decibel meter on top of the sound-absorbing bed of duff, and there’s no significant wind.
You don’t have to go to the wilderness to experience that sort of quiet, but it helps. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is one of several designated quiet parks worldwide. Hempton worked hard to establish a quiet park designation. Wilderness Watch successfully sued the military to prevent flights over the entire area: a major victory for quiet. It has over a million acres free from human-created noises other than the ones we visitors cause.
If you want quiet and dark, the BWCAW is like a magnet for the silence-starved soul. The flat surface of the water carries sound farther than land, since there are no obstructions to block the sound waves. A loon call can travel a mile down the lake. Surreal.
The permit required to enter the BWCAW has a list of do and do-nots. Number 11 says (emphasis theirs), “A QUIET CAMPER IS A NO-TRACE CAMPER. WHY? Noise impacts other people’s solitude and scares off wildlife.”
I don’t understand the need to carry a bluetooth speaker into the wild places, but I hear them more than I’d like. I think it’s because we are used to using sound as company, or to block out the thoughts we’d rather not think about.
31 dB. Dead calm, on the shore of Pallette Lake.
This is the quietest I have experienced since I started keeping track, quiet enough that I could hear some ringing in my ears. The ringing is called phantom noise and when the surroundings are that quiet, you hear it for sure. If you hear phantom noise, it really is that quiet.
Of late I have become more sensitive to human-made sounds. I find them more irritating than I used to, and now I wear earplugs to concerts: I’m that guy now. I think my sensitivity started soon after I had a cardiac event that could have easily taken my life if I were more than 10 minutes from the emergency department at University Hospital. Whatever the reason, it’s real, and I find myself working more and more without any background music. I’m more than comfortable with quiet; I crave it. And as Gordon Hempton says, “When you save quiet, you save everything.”