When I called to book a room at the Lake Crescent Lodge a few months ago, the very nice reservations clerk paused after taking down all my info. “Before I process your card,” he said, “I should warn you: the walls are very thin.” He repeated it, for emphasis, and I felt like I was being asked to verbally sign a release acknowledging the conditions of our future stay in the 108-year-old hotel, and promising not to complain. Yes, I told him – I hear you. The walls are very thin!
Paul and I stayed at Lake Crescent earlier this month, on a far too short trip to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula after a few days in Seattle with my family. Those first days in the city were a whirlwind as cousins and friends converged to say goodbye to my uncle Stephen, the eldest of my father’s four siblings and the last of the crew to pass away. It was the end of an era; the end of this generation of loud, bossy Baynes, and attention was duly paid. The weather was beautiful and we all spent hours sitting on my sister’s patio, drinking wine and reminiscing – to the point one night that the neighbors hollered over the hedge to shut up.
The trip to the peninsula was our palate cleanser – a few days of quiet solitude after the joyful noise of this reunion. We were going to hike into the rain forest to acoutstic ecologist Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence, and the Lake Crescent Lodge was our base camp. Tucked inside Olympic National Park, on the shore of a very deep and very cold glacial lake, shaded by towering firs, the lodge’s main building features a dozen or so small, vintage rooms, two shared bathrooms and showers, and, yes, extremely thin walls. Walls so thin you can hear your neighbor cough, or unzip their pants, as though they were standing in the room with you – no hedge-side hollering required to make their presence known. We never saw our neighbor; I couldn’t tell you their age, gender, or any other particular. But we shared in creating the soundscape of the hotel – along with the music from the downstairs bar, the flushing of the toilet down the hall, the swallows nesting outside our window, and the clatter of dishes from the kitchen directly beneath our room.
I thought about our unseen but exceptionally heard neighbor the next day, as we hiked three and a half miles into the Hoh Rain Forest in search of Hempton’s consecrated space. So designated on Earth Day 2005, “One Square Inch of Silence” is more an idea than anything else; a piece of site-specific conceptual art designed to highlight the unique natural soundscape of the forest, deep inside one of the few national parks in the country without a road running through it, and little “flightseer” tourism relative to parks like Grand Canyon or Yellowstone.
“The logic is simple,” writes Hempton in his book of the same name. “If a loud noise, such as the passing of an aircraft, can impact many square miles, then a natural place, if maintained in a 100% noise-free condition, will also impact many square miles around it. It is predicted that protecting a single square inch of land from noise pollution will benefit large areas of the park.”
“One Square Inch of Silence” is ostensibly supported by the Park Service but attempts to manage noise in the park have been erratic at best in the intervening years. We noted, wryly, that Hempton’s book was nowhere to be found in the Hoh Visitor’s Center gift shop, and on our three-hour hike up to the site we heard at least four jets fly overhead. In the city, such noise incursions are just more aural wallpaper. But in the forest giant conifers draped in sweaters of clubmoss loom over a soft and densely packed forest floor and act as baffles, lending the trail an uncanny quiet into which even four planes in two hours can be an aural assault.
I’ve been to the Hoh a few times before, but not for at least a decade and never to this particular site. It’s not hard to find (Hempton has some vague directions on his website) but it is off the main trail enough that passers by are only faintly audible. It is a place of heartbreaking beauty. On this day a brilliant blue sky was visible through the treetops, the sun painting the forest floor with light, illuminating innumerable permutations of green cast by licorice ferns, lichen, salmonberry, trillium, tiny shoots of young hemlock, Douglas fir, and red cedar striving upwards – and everywhere that moss, coating tree trunks, cascading from branches, climbing up downed logs. All was quiet – but not exactly silent.
“There’s no such thing as silence,” John Cage famously once said, recalling the 1952 premiere of the piece that became known as 4’33” – in which a pianist sat at a piano and, for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, did not play a note. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
Similarly, in this “silent” space in the forest you can hear the birds chatting away over the rushing river, the buzzing of a bee, the skritch of a black squirrel charging headfirst down a tree. Sitting at there as we did, in vocal silence at least, for quite a while, I heard the ringing of my own ears over the more generalized vibrational thrum of the forest, alive with all sorts of neighbors I couldn’t see but could hear plain as day.
The corollary to the premise that silence is not silent is that all sound can be understood as music. That’s what Cage was getting at with 4’33” (and a whooole lot of other work but this bit of structured silence is the point here). This invisible chorus of bugs and birds and water and wind is how the Hoh communicates, each element sending its message: there’s food here; it’s safe to rest over there. And when a jet plane roars overhead at it’s hard to mishear its message of danger.
In the Hoh River Valley, Hempton writes that he can hear the river singing – a phenomenon made possible by those tall trees, that moss, the still morning air. The song is not just beautiful, it is healing. He writes:
“I particularly enjoy this kind of music, as compared to, say, the song of a bird, admirable and even inspirational as birdsong is. A whole-valley listening experience is the result of place, not an individual performer. I can feel the importance of the living community, how one thing is not more important than the other. It’s everything that matters. When listening to this music of place, whether here in the Hoh or in the backcountry of Yosemite, I am inspired to be a better neighbor, a better parent, a better child, because I feel part of something much bigger: a collective place that makes music and sings to me.”
This model of active listening is fundamental to Paul’s art practice and it’s one of the things I found intriguing when we first started dating. Back in those early days, in the thick of the pandemic, we went for a walk in one of the forest preserves that ring Chicago. It was probably late August, warm and lush, and as we wandered down a path I remember keeping up an anxious, urgent chatter, telling him about a bad thing that had happened in my past, about how it hurt me, to warn him against the damage I was bringing into our baby relationship, to raise a red flag before it was too late.
We walked and I talked for a while and then he said something to the effect of, “You’re OK. We’re here now. It’s a beautiful day – just listen.” For a hot second I froze – had I been too much, too loud? – and then for a flash I was angry: was this guy telling me to be quiet?!? But just as quickly those automatic threat responses, to freeze and to fight, were disarmed; I realized I was safe. As we walked along down the trail I quieted my own mind enough to listen to the forest’s music, and what I heard was the beginning of a love song.
It is my cancerversary this week, though I’m not sure exactly with which date to mark it. Was it the day of my mammogram, a year ago yesterday, when the tech who had been kind of curt and bitchy looked at the images and became kind and solicitous? My heart sank in that moment, even before she said they would be sending me for a biopsy. Or was it the day of the biopsy, when, lying on the table, needle buried in my boob, I posed the tragically naive question, “What do you think it could be besides cancer?”
”Oh I don’t think it’s anything else,” the radiologist replied, and I started to cry.
That was a year ago tomorrow. The official diagnosis came a day later, but after the biopsy I texted Zoe, who lived nearby: “Are you home? Can I come over?” I walked into her house in a daze as she looked at me, curious and gentle.
“I think I was just diagnosed with breast cancer?” I said, sinking onto a soft chair.
This anniversary is not something to celebrate, my life turned inside out in a few quick days. (For those new to this newsletter, maybe you want to take a moment to read this, the very first post, for background?) And in truth, since I got back from the Pacific Northwest, I’ve had a hard time holding onto the feelings of peace and love engendered by forest and family. I’m frustrated right now – with the intractable scar tissue in my chest wall that has me despairing of ever practicing aerial with any facility again; with the increasing demands on my time that leave me unable to care for my beaten-up body with the mindfulness it deserves; with the mounting debt that threatens to suck me back under after I spent years digging out from it the first time.
Yesterday my occupational therapist sat me down (well, metaphorically – I was already lying prone) and gave me a pep talk. Recovery is SLOW, she said. You’ve been through so much, it will take time, a year, at least, for you to feel close to normal – and you may never quite feel the same again. But you’re not doing yourself any good playing the comparison game. It doesn’t matter that this time last year you were so strong, what matters is that you are doing what your body needs right now to heal.
Be here now: a little bit of Zen from the lymphedema clinic.
So, on this anniversary, I celebrate being here. Not dead, not (too) maimed, not (as) depressed (as I was a few months ago). It’s a beautiful day! Thanks for being here with me.
PS! Paul recorded the intro for this episode of Framework Radio, a show dedicated to environmental sound recording, while we were on the Bainbridge Island ferry earlier this month. Listen in to the first few minutes and hear just how happy a Washington State ferry can make me feel. And then you may want to back away from the speaker a bit lol.