I’m standing by the brass pig at Pike Place Market waiting for Gordon Hempton, whose numerous discs—I especially prize Tennessee Nightwalk and Dawn Chorus—teem with pristine, high-fidelity recordings made around the world. From the Kalahari Desert to the jungles of Belize, Hempton has taken his microphones just about everywhere.
Feeling foolish because I can’t remember what he looks like, I wait,
savoring snippets of passing conversation punctuated by the chorus
of fishmongers bellowing behind me, “Clean the crab! Clean the
crab!”
Then I spot the only other person doing what I am doing: listening.
It must be him. Hempton is standing very still about 10 feet away. We
greet each other, and at Pike Pub, Hempton tells me about the upcoming
reading (Tues April 14, Town Hall, 7:30 pm, $5) for his book, One
Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy
World (Free Press). Cowritten with John Grossmann, Hempton’s
compelling tale grew out of his experiences in Olympic National Park,
just a ferry ride away on the Olympic Peninsula.
“Of all 390 parks in the National Park System,” attests Hempton,
“Olympic National Park is the listener’s Yosemite—a place
of quiet and sonic diversity.” Nestled inside the park is what Hempton
calls OSI, short for One Square Inch of Silence, a sanctuary
he’s designated to fulfill a surprisingly hard-to-attain goal: a place
to listen without hearing the sounds of human activity.
The chief sonic intruder at OSI? Airplanes. Recalling a meeting with
bio-acoustician Kurt Fristrup, Hempton assails the ear-smothering
power of engines: “When a jet is flying overhead, your aural world
has shrunk.”
One Square Inch chronicles Hempton’s cross-country journey to
Washington, D.C., to meet with the FAA, National Park Service
officials, and Senator Maria Cantwell to advocate for One Square Inch
of Silence in Olympic National Park. Along the way, Hempton visits and
listens inside Benaroya Hall, an anechoic chamber in
Minneapolis, the Aearo factory (which manufactures ear protection
for the military), the Lincoln Memorial, and many other sonically
intriguing sites.
In D.C., Hempton takes his case to government officials, explaining
that by protecting one square inch from human-made sounds, up to a
thousand square miles of surrounding quiet can be preserved: “I’ve
been to every one of our United States in search of quiet,” he
tells them, alluding to his thousands of hours spent recording in the
American wilderness. “I believe quite confidently that there is no
natural quiet left east of the Mississippi River, and that the
noise-free interval—that time between noise events—is
generally under a minute when you’re west of the Mississippi River.
Sometimes it’s a few minutes, and if it exceeds 15 minutes during
daylight hours, that’s truly exceptional.”
Singling out the lush centerpiece of Olympic National Park, Hempton
concludes, “The Hoh Valley is the only place I’ve been to where the
noise-free interval is measured in hours. And that is really worth
protecting.” Learn more at www.onesquareinch.org. 
of course, the more people that know about it, the more that visit, and the more annoying bellevue betties will ruin the incredible silence of OSI.
it’s a bit of the rick steves effect, no?
Not necessarily. It’s a bit of a hike to OSI; not absurdly remote, but not an easy “drive and hike” either.
While I’ve hiked through Olympic National Park and savored the silence there, I have yet to visit OSI. I plan to do that this summer and write about it.