SEQUIM — The man who dropped out of graduate school to become a better listener — and who moved to the North Olympic Peninsula for a particular “positional resource” — turned the chamber crowd on its ear.
Gordon Hempton, an Emmy Award-winning sound recordist who’s worked with Microsoft, National Public Radio and the Smithsonian Institution, emerged from his Joyce hideaway Tuesday to talk with the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce about silence.
Over lunch at the SunLand Golf & Country Club, he enchanted his audience with a pair of crystalline recordings: of the Pacific’s orchestra at Rialto Beach and of “snow melting into music,” a phenomenon so named by John Muir, the wilderness explorer known as the father of America’s national parks.
Hempton is author of One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Quiet in a Noisy World, the story of his journey from the Hoh Rain Forest to Washington, D.C., where he introduced federal officials to his idea of peace.
“At one time, quiet was as common as clean water,” Hempton began.
But the world now wallows in a cacophony of traffic, advertising chatter and myriad other masks concealing natural sound.
Hempton sees — and hears — Olympic National Park as one of the last places on the planet to wrap oneself in quiet.
The forests, the wilderness coast and the high mountainsides offer us an experience, he said, that’s good for body and soul but increasingly harder to find.
He calls it simply the “solace of silence.”
Hearing wilderness
Hempton said the park still has places where you can hear wildness for miles and miles: the bugling of Roosevelt elk, the sighing of evergreens, the rush of rivers, the love call of the hermit thrush.
And the local economy is positioned to benefit, he believes, if the park and its environs are marketed as quiet destinations, refuges for people and wildlife alike.
Olympic, he added, is one of the most sonically diverse of the national parks.
Then Hempton played a track from his archives: Rialto Beach, about 20 minutes from Forks, where the elements play a symphony.
Ocean swells rise and roar, gulls call to one another — and one of the world’s largest cellos, in the form of a giant Sitka spruce log, can be heard.
‘Positional resource’
Listening to it all, the chamber members tried harder than usual to be quiet as they finished their lunches. Faces softening, many closed their eyes and smiled as the beach music filled the air.
This is a “positional resource,” Hempton said, something that’s growing scarcer every year. Even Antarctica has noise, from the generators providing power for its research stations, he said.
Sequim, with its proximity to the park and other natural areas, such as the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge, is well-situated to promote these quiet places.
To his mind tourists, residents and the environment stand to gain from the health-giving effects of quiet.
“The world is hungry for relief from toxic noise,” Hempton said.
But he added that the peace of the Olympics is threatened.
Commercial jets are permitted to fly over the park, and it’s legal for small planes to take people on air tours over the mountains and forest.
Air tours
Olympic is developing an “air tour management plan,” Hempton said. And Rite Bros. Aviation of Port Angeles offers scenic flights over the park.
“We pretty much take people anywhere they want,” Rite Bros. office manager Kristi Meek said Wednesday.
For $175 per hour, “they can go over Mount Olympus, out west over the Sol Duc Valley and Lake Crescent, and over to Dungeness Spit.”
When pilots fly over the park, they’re required to stay at least 2,000 feet above the ridges and treetops.
Meek estimated the company books about 70 scenic flights a year over the Peninsula.
In that sense, the Peninsula is a long way from Grand Canyon National Park, where some 90,000 air tours were flown last year.
The air-tour management plan “is not something we’re actively engaged in,” said Olympic National Park spokeswoman Barb Maynes.
Still, Hempton said, this is the time to defend Olympic’s quiet from increases in air traffic.
“All it would take is one piece of legislation” in Congress “to ban aircraft over our most pristine national parks, beginning with Olympic,” he said.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.
