Quiet!

The creak of trees leaning against trees: like a child’s first violin lesson.
The occasional, unhurried trill of birds: laughing?
The wind playing in the Notch like a jazz drummers brush on stretched skins: unhurried, yet capricious.

Finally, after a four hour drive, a night in a Motor-Inn, and a long hike along the 19-Mile Brook Trail, we had shed the sounds of so-called civilization and all we could hear was the hush of breathing: the earth’s and ours.
Much is made of the sights of nature. We travel hard and long to change our points of view: to gaze out on a pristine beach and a flat ocean, or a craggy peak dappled with granite, covered in deep green. But we receive greater benefits, I believe, from the change in our aural world: from exchanging the coarse sounds of our everyday existence for an encounter with silence.
It may be as well, that silence is a far more precious, and rare commodity than simple visual beauty.
Our home town Plymouth does not suffer from a lack of scenery. People travel from great distances to ‘see’ our antiquities, recline on our beaches, take in our sights. These scenes are a special benefit for the year-round residents of the town as well, and are a large part of the appeal of living in Plymouth.
My own home, though modest by most standards, has a wealth of relative privacy. Set back from the road, surrounded by woods, shielded for the most part from the lights of passing vehicles.
I have often simply stood in my yard and enjoyed the stars, or basked in the moonlight, while doing my best to ignore the echoing engines of cars on the street, trucks on the highway, helicopters and planes passing overhead.
There is no ignoring however, certain other industrial sounds, such as the exaggerated bass produced by modern automobile sound systems: a sound you feel more than you hear. And almost every home you enter offers a subtle cacophony of beeps and boings and clicks and whistles.
Can you even imagine back to the day when a family fell asleep to the simple sound of a fire’s embers settling, the restless voices of horses, the occasional coyote, and the crescendo of crickets? Now add to those natural sounds the water pump engaging, the air conditioner’s rush, the television’s din, and the computer and a host of other electronic devices calling out like lost sheep.
You have to go a long way, make a special effort, to shed these sounds. I am not sure if such quiet is available anyplace in Plymouth: perhaps in the heart of Myles Standish State Forest –but then its popularity and ease of access work against that; maybe along the coast, or out along the beaches of Saquish –but even there you often hear the sounds of motor boats and the nearby restaurants and night spots with their late night revelers.
Even in the White Mountains of New Hampshire –where we traveled, quiet is not something the loveliest Inn or Bed and Breakfast can guarantee their guests. The night before our recent trek we stayed just a few miles away from the trailhead, in a town that can boast no more than a few hundred residents. Despite this relative isolation every few minutes the ground rumbled and the air resounded from the sounds of logging trucks going through their gears. And in our room itself, the well-intentioned innkeepers had placed air conditioners which produced a commotion equal to a 747 passing over Nahant.
It is not that I cannot abide any of the sounds of the civilized world. I love the reverberation of a well-tuned motorcycle dropping into gear and accelerating. The raucous kalimba-like play of boat riggings in a crowded harbor can be music to the ear. Even the thunderous chords that leak through the windows of a passing car (yes, I mean you Matt) can make me smile, remembering the decibel levels of my youth.
But I have come to realize how precious the quiet is, how elusive it can be, and how hard I am willing to work to find the places where it can still be found, in its natural state. For silence, I think, cannot be manufactured. Quiet, I believe, is not the result of things being blocked out. Stillness, I have found, is not the absence of activity, but rather a kind of harmony of unhurried actions.
It’s just that I take pleasure in things that, just a few years ago, I hardly knew existed.