JOYCE — Proceed with care through One Square Inch of Silence.
The new book by Gordon Hempton could affect your hearing, even alter your consciousness as you sense sounds you’ve not heard for years, if ever.
Hempton, 55, is an acoustic ecologist, a recorder of nature’s sounds for Microsoft, National Public Radio and various television programs. He’s won an Emmy and attained success sufficient to live anywhere he chooses.
He chose Joyce, for Salt Creek’s murmur, the sighs of wind in the evergreens, the winter wren singing its springtime aria.
But Hempton hasn’t been home lately. He’s wandering the West reading from this first book, whose full title is One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World.
It’s the story of his trip from Joyce to Washington, D.C., in 2007 to explain to the federal government something he hears in Olympic National Park’s future.
National Quiet Place
The first National Quiet Place, Hempton believes, should be in the Hoh Rain Forest — a haven visited by 150,000 people per year.
These woods are a place of wild sound: river, birds, bugling elk, towering trees, a congregation chanting a hymn to the sky.
On a recent Saturday, Hempton lingered in his backyard, singing the praises of his favorite place.
“Olympic National Park has the most diverse natural soundscape of any national park and the longest noise-free interval,” he said.
Hempton camps there whenever he can, near the stone he placed to mark his envisioned “one square inch of silence.” It’s a seed for the sanctuary he hopes for, a two-hour hike from the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center about 3 miles up the Hoh River Trail.
This is the quietest place in the United States, Hempton writes on his Web site, www.OneSquareInch.org.
Yet whenever he visits, day or night, jet engines puncture the peace.
For his book, Hempton sought out other natural soundscapes around the country and found much more aircraft and automobile noise — in Arches National Park in Utah, across the nation’s plains states — on the way to Capitol Hill, where he met with Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Mountlake Terrace, to explain his One Square Inch concept.
Keep jets out of the sky over one small space and you protect up to 1,000 square miles around it, Hempton believes.
Seeks no-fly zone
In Olympic National Park, the solution, Hempton said, is a no-fly zone across a 20-mile radius around Mount Dana and the Hoh Valley.
Meetings with Cantwell and with National Park Service officials haven’t produced the congressional action Hempton wants — yet.
The publication of his book is a mere step in his journey, as he sees it. Undaunted, he continues preaching his gospel about the music he’s long held sacred.
Try listening, he suggests, to the giant Sitka spruce logs on Rialto Beach. They’re “uncarved violins,” vibrating with the crash of each Pacific wave.
“Rialto is the most musical beach in the world,” he said with a sunny smile.
The value of his book, Hempton said, will be in whether it inspires readers to tune in and turn on to nature’s sound track — in the woods, on a beach or a windswept grassland.
A scare drove Hempton to take up his mission with fresh fervor five years ago. His hearing started to disappear for reasons his doctors couldn’t name. It was as if he were foreshadowing Beethoven, about to be robbed of his symphonies.
Hempton has his suspicions as to the triggers of his hearing loss. He worked on a loud train-recording project and has had infections — but never learned the cause of the problem that turned out to be temporary.
He regained 100 percent of his hearing after several months.
“I am thankful every day,” he said.
Though Hempton believes it’s the National Park Service’s role to protect quiet places like Olympic, he vowed after regaining his hearing to make it his job as well.
‘Hungry for quiet’
These days Hempton speaks of quiet tourism, as America, Europe, Asia lose their aural refuges. “The world is hungry for quiet. We have something” in Olympic “that few places can offer.”
Olympic National Park could be marketed as an alternative to places such as the Grand Canyon, where 90,000 air tours are permitted each year.
The canyon has become “a grand collector of aircraft noise,” Hempton writes.
Karen Trevino, manager of National Park Service’s natural sounds program, confirmed the number of air tours permitted over Grand Canyon National Park.
Speaking from her Fort Collins, Colo., office, she added that Hawaii’s volcanoes and Haleakala national parks are among others with thick air traffic.
Trevino predicts, too, that air tour operators will request a larger allocation of flights over the Grand Canyon in coming years.
It would take an act of Congress to turn the tide of aircraft, be it tour helicopters or 747s, away from national parks and monuments, Trevino said, though she called Hempton a valuable “partner” in the path to park peace.
Air tours are not big business in Olympic National Park, said park public information officer Barb Maynes, though she acknowledged that commercial jet traffic does download noise onto areas of the park.
“We certainly appreciate [Hempton’s] interest,” she said, adding that the park’s management plan addresses “the totality of the resources, not just the soundscape.”
“In everything we do in wilderness” — and Olympic’s nearly 1 million acres include 877,000 of wild land — “we examine what the minimum tool would be” for trail maintenance and other projects.
Maynes added that Hempton’s “Jar of Quiet Thoughts,” a repository of notes from visitors to the One Square Inch site, has been removed.
“The jar does not fall into the parameters to receive a scientific research permit,” she said. It led to “social trails,” an impact to the forest that wouldn’t have occurred without Hempton’s placement of the jar.
Hempton, meanwhile, has been traveling, giving readings of his book from Seattle to Denver to New York City. He’s a spokesman for natural sounds, for the hushed forest outside Forks, where in the morning the birds and frogs join into an orchestra of “oboe, cello, flute and drum.”
He also praises the way quiet nourishes creativity. Hempton began writing his book while the electricity was out in Joyce. Later, when he had to reach down for the right words, he’d flip the breaker switch to create his own power outage.
________
Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
