And for the hours, it will be what o’clock I say it is.
—Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft, 1906
I don’t go in for a cranialsacral massage. Hydrotherapy? Please keep your hose away from me. Melatonin, serotonin, Saint-John’s-wort? Happy pills merely bloat me. I’ve never tried Effexor, but I doubt it would have much Effect. Hypnotherapy makes me regressive; sorry, but I hated second grade the first time. Tom the therapist is helping, but I have to keep coming back for more, every other week, a junkie whose crack pipe is confession. Let me tell you what works for me: the Hoh Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula, two hundred–odd miles west of Seattle. If the whole world looked and operated like this ageless place, there would be no stress, no distemper, no gunplay—just billions of people sitting cross-legged in a clearing, listening to the wind rattle through the hollows of a Sitka spruce. Doctors are catching on to the fact that the woods can cure us. I hear they’re starting to prescribe a walk in the forest instead of antidepressants. We’re returning to the ethos of the nineteenth century, when nature prescriptions were considered normal, not kooky. Even a quick glance at a photo of a forest can provide some mental benefits. It’s only a matter of time before pharmacists develop an Rx code for setting up a tent.
Never in my life have I seen or heard of a place like the Hoh. I was out there with Amy and Julianna one misty June day with Gordon Hempton, a famous acoustic ecologist who explores the world looking for and recording unique natural sounds. The boulders, trees, and logs wore baggy sweaters of jasper-green mosses, herbs, and epiphytes. Shelf mushrooms grew in crooked platforms. The branches and portly trunks of Sitka spruces had the most elaborate beards and hairdos I’d seen on any plant life, their mosses fashioned into weaves, permanents, and cornrows. Our boots brushed licorice and cinnamon ferns, and we stepped over fallen half-rotted trees called nurse logs, which have saplings sprouting from them. Sometimes I saw weird little squirrels in the crannies of alders, their fur the color of soot. Out on the peninsula, inscrutable mice sleep under red rocks and can jump ten feet if so inclined.
Hempton is finicky about natural silence; if a plane flies overhead, it screws up his recordings. He likes the Hoh because it abounds with wind and animal and water sounds. I made arrangements to meet him there because he specializes in naturally silent places, and says they are getting harder to find by the year. I don’t mean silent as in all the wildlife is stock-still, holding its breath. I mean silent as in the “absence of mechanical noises,” including plane whoosh and generator hum. Hempton had a penetrating stare, a three-day beard, and a survival hat with a loop of twine around it. His boots were scuffed. He was smart and super-serious, silly and childlike all at the same time. He rubbed a buttercup on Julianna’s chin to assess how much she liked butter. Her chin turned yellow, which meant she liked butter a good deal.
Hempton, son of a Coast Guard captain, moved through the forest like an enlisted man, shoulders square, posture straight. A homemade camouflage bag hung across his left shoulder. He spends a lot of time humping heavy gear through the woods, so he has avoided most of the dry rot that makes aging people in America look wrecked; I mistook Hempton for a spry fifty-year-old, though he was sixty-two at the time. I know I’ve said this many times in the course of this book, but I will repeat it once more for good measure: camping keeps you young.
Sitka spruce rose up two hundred feet above us. No loggers ever cut down trees this far up the valley, so the Hoh looked primeval, mystical; it was easy to imagine a brontosaurus family on the cobbles near the river. Hempton at one point high-fived some deer ferns and paused to listen. After a while of tramping, the four of us arrived at the base camp Hempton had picked for us, 1.2 miles from the Hoh Rain Forest visitors’ center, where we’d met him that morning for the guided walk. He’d told us that this spot, overlooking the river, was his favorite camping place in the Hoh Basin because you could watch elk drink at dusk and see freshwater otters splash in the froth. Julianna and Amy were tired and footsore, so Hempton and I left them at the base camp and walked deeper into the Hoh.
He was going to show me a sanctuary of quiet. As we walked along, I heard no plane sounds of any kind. Hikers passed from time to time, but they kept their voices hushed. For the next hour or so, I heard only the trills, meep-meeps, and upslurred pee-shweets of the Pacific coast flycatcher and the bass lines of the Hoh River, which flowed just south of where we walked. Sometimes Hempton would stop to admire some natural riff I hadn’t noticed until he pointed it out. “Mmmm-hmmm,” he said at one point. “That’s a nice combination of wind and river roar.” In another reach of forest, I heard a sound like babies gurgling in the treetops. Elephants trumpeted. It was just the wind knocking spruces, moving boughs, making timbers creak. Trees sang off-key. Sometimes they cleared their throats, grumbled, coughed, and burped. “Listen to the sour stomach of the woods,” Hempton said as we walked deeper into the forest. We arrived at our destination, an elk trail through an opening in a spruce whose roots vaulted upward to form a nave just wide and tall enough for Hempton and me to stand inside it.
Hempton stood before the spruce opening and told me in a polite but certain voice, “Beyond this point there will be no talking.”
The elk trail portal is 3.2 miles from the Hoh Rain Forest visitors’ center. Hempton has made no effort to hide the location. He’s even posted the GPS coordinates online: 47° 51.959′ N, 123° 52.221′ W pinpointing the stone that marks the spot. But no one was there when we arrived, and I noticed only subtle indications that humans had visited the place recently, including a couple of boot prints on mushy grass.
We stepped through the spruce in search of the stone Hempton used to mark his silence sanctuary, and walked on soft mud through matted moss, cinnamon ferns, and huckleberry. I heard a blend of insect and bird wings, wind-rustled ferns, and the steady droop-droop-droop of water. We stepped over logs and slippery roots that formed a footbridge leading around a dark puddle. Hempton walked me out to a nurse log on the forest floor. In a moment I saw a red, vaguely pyramid-shaped red rock on a bed of lichen. I was expecting something along the lines of a Stonehenge dolmen, but the stone could have fit in my palm.
For the next few minutes a dome of sound enclosed me. Birdcalls suggested the shape of the sky. Hempton had named this piece of forest One Square Inch of Silence because he wanted it to be a silence sanctuary, a place to defend quiet. Hempton told me he’d chosen the place in part because the elk path was already there and he didn’t want to encourage anyone to trample a new trail; he’d also chosen it because it was the first place where he couldn’t hear generator hum when walking away from the Hoh visitors’ center.
While I was standing in the sanctuary, feeling floaty, Hempton fox-walked behind me, reached down, plucked the marker stone off the log, and dropped it into my palm. I was so surprised I wanted to shout, but that was forbidden. “For me?” I asked him in mime. I felt honored but sheepish. It seemed so wrong to carry away the marker—which shows how much I bought into the idea of this patch of land’s being a sanctuary.
When we’d passed through the Sitka portal to return to the trail, Hempton let me know it was okay to speak again. “The stones have become powerful reminders,” he said. “You know, quiet is the birthplace of truth and beauty. If you find yourself in a noisy place, you may ask yourself, Why don’t I feel this way all the time? How can I bottle this? Well, there you are. Now you have the rock.”
The name One Square Inch of Silence came to Hempton in 1989, when he was in a wilderness area and heard the “great roar” of an airplane. “A single origin of noise, for example, a jet, can drag a cone of noise over a thousand square miles,” Hempton said. Following the same logic, making a stand to protect just “one square inch of silence” in a beautiful forest can protect one thousand square miles from human-generated noises, which works out to be about three-quarters of the landmass of Olympic National Park. I will admit that the concept doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, which is why I like it. I’m all for quixotic projects. There is much more that I could say about his One Square Inch project, but for me it’s enough to know that Hempton loves this place, and was willing to make a 174-mile round-trip from his home in Port Angeles just to show those woods to me.
We were hiking back toward my family, me with the stone in my hand, and we were making good speed, when Hempton stopped without warning.
I almost ran right into him.
I thought he was going to comment about a sound blend he’d noticed, but now he turned as if to confront me, holding his palms up. A glow came over him like someone was holding a sodium vapor light in front of his face. I could tell he was going to lay something heavy on me.
“Are you ready to change?” Hempton asked me.
“Yes!” I replied.
“Are you ready to change your life and everything about you?”
“Yeah,” I reiterated.
Hempton took a step back and nodded. “You’re ready to change,” he said, still looking me straight in the face. “Which means you’re ready to be a listener. Because, if you’re willing to listen, you have to be open.”
For a while I stood there stunned, because on the one hand, I had no idea what he was talking about, and yet, intuitively, it made sense. I’ve always wanted to change. That’s one of the reasons I camp, not just to escape but also to disrupt myself. Hempton waited for me to recover. Then he gestured toward the bushy swags of moss, the light flashing on a maple leaf fern. “If everything about you is open, then this is the perfect place to be.”
When I reunited with my family on the Hoh River sandbar, I pressed the red stone into Julianna’s hands. She looked honored, surprised, but also taken aback. What was this for?
Hempton and Julianna watched the river for a while, but he had to get ready for a family celebration. We said our good-byes and off he went.
Something came over us when we were camping on that river. Julianna had fashioned toy boats out of leaves and bits of bark. The river pulled them down, and they crashed in the currents.
No one could find us now. No cell reception here. No signifiers of time. My cell phone’s date-keeping function claimed it was May 1980. The white noise of the water blotted out everything else. Sitting in gumbo mud, I watched my daughter heave stones in the river. She lingered in the river muck and daubed fine grains of dust all over her face until her teeth shone. I smeared my face with dirt, and both of us crouched there, looking at the water, and she tried to show me otters, but I couldn’t see them.
During our campout along the river, we did nothing, read nothing, saw nothing, and nothing happened. The sunscreen, granola, pasta primavera, and toothpaste all started tasting like one another after a while. Bits of instant coffee started working their way into the mac and cheese, formed floaters in the drinking water, and spilled on my sleeping bag, and everything had a horrible aftertaste. There were molar-shattering bits of macaroni all over the stockpot. But we were beyond caring. Julianna and I danced like mad people on the sandbar, circling, occasionally passing each other off to imaginary barn dance partners, chanting, barefoot, shoving rocks out of the way, keening, trilling, our decibel levels rising, our voices synced, the two of us sputtering nonsense, off-key, croaking “Hoo-de-dooh-de-dooh-de-dooh!”
So this was what truly silent camping was like: a whole bunch of river noise, with our shouting right on top of it and the river covering our shouts. We’d roar, and the river would roar over us. Silence isn’t silent; I had to wear earplugs just to block the Hoh out at night in my sleeping bag. Yet the ambient sound was so loud it canceled out all negative distractions. Our bodies, our brains, were so used to antagonism and strain that the absence of these things became, perversely, a thrill for us. My wife is often on edge in camp with me, and for good reason. I once set up a tent with her on a beautiful field that, as we soon found out, was perilously close to a rifle range. But the Hoh River sluiced her usual worries away. She looked as stony and content as I’ve ever seen her. Glacial melt clouded the Hoh River, which flowed past us at a volumetric rate of 2,538 cubic feet per second. It scoured our sandbank, which formed a tapering finger. In the distance, the fiery crown of Mount Olympus rose over us.
We remained for two days after Hempton left us there. I hadn’t brought enough food for Julianna’s first-ever backpacking trip. We were down to nut crumbs soon. Then we were down to nut dust. Julianna squirted a plug of Smucker’s strawberry spread into her mouth from an economy-size squeeze bottle, and the sight of this made me gag. Julianna shrugged. “What can you do?” she told me. “This is camping.”
This was not the final trip in the camping project, yet it felt like a culmination and a tying of the knot. There was something about the river whoosh, that cold, consuming static that reminded me of time itself. The act of transmission was almost complete. Father to son. Son to daughter. I knew that when the trip was over, my usual neuroses, and Julianna’s ordinary concerns, would slither up behind us again. Hempton told me the marker stone from his silent sanctuary would help keep me calm, but I know my own brain too well to believe this would work. To keep the snake at bay, I would just have to keep on camping, indefinitely, until it took. Or maybe it never would. Maybe the whole point is you’ve got to keep returning.
The last night in the Hoh Rain Forest, I woke up early. The natural yet discordant and somewhat headache-inducing sounds of my wife and daughter snoring in their sleeping bags brought to mind a campout I took with my father in the wilderness near Mammoth Lakes. It was not supposed to happen this way, but everyone else in the family backed out of the campout for various reasons. I was thirteen years old, and my father was fifty-five.
We didn’t speak much on that trip. I did not have any words to share with him, so I tried to absorb the scenery around me. It was almost too much to take in: the specks of mica in the granite, flashing in the sun when we walked by; the hawks; the ice sheets; the quaking aspens; the woodpeckers and the noises they made; and how the sky felt on our necks and noses. We leaned our packs on a rock and listened to the wind blow branches together. It sounded like rain. I took in a combination of sights, smells, and sensations that whirled together until I couldn’t separate them anymore. I call it camping synesthesia, when the senses get so jumbled up. John Muir knew all about it. He once said that flower bells rang with sweet church music in the mountains. Henry David Thoreau talked about the “delicious evening” at the pond, “when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.”
My father was already bald. When you’re in your teens, people over thirty seem old, people over forty are ancient, and my father was in a whole other category. He was stomping through the mud in his flat-bottomed Korean War army boots, and using his olive-drab flak jacket as his windbreaker. His footprints were craters. As we started to prepare the campsite, clearing the sticks and poky rocks, laying out the pup tent, resting the clunky old gas stove on a flat-topped log, I regretted that we’d never spent this kind of time together before. Now we were sitting on a log, breathing in, pounding tent spikes with a rock, counting stars, and getting ready to eat our disgusting dinner.
Our main course was Kraft Squeez-A-Snak, a shelf-stable and eminently vomitus cheese product that came in eight-inch plastic tubes, each with a tight and puckered sphincteresque aperture through which you’d force the alleged cheese product when you squeezed with all your might, releasing a flatulent plufffft sound. On that trip, my father made me hold my stale and broken Triscuits and Wheat Thins oh so carefully beneath the X-shaped opening, twisting the tube just so, and allowing the slurry to flop onto my crackers. Horace Kephart would have gagged on this food. Yet I was, incomprehensibly, happy. Something about the slimy cheese, the wind, the cold, and the meadow’s steady seep through the floor of our tent and into our sleeping bags added to the feeling of transport.
At least this is true in retrospect. In case you haven’t noticed, most camping trips improve over time, unless something truly tragic and horrible happens to you out there. Besides, fine dining and fluffed pillows would have killed the mood. My father has catholic tastes (though he’s Jewish). He loves Tom Stoppard plays and cruise ship impressionists, Barbara Cook and feathered Vegas showgirls. He’s equally fond of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and Abba’s Gold album. He gets loud and wild sometimes. But something about the woods reduces him to stillness. A different side of him comes out.
The night wore on, my father fell fast asleep, and the moon lifted over the Minarets. I remember thinking, I want for nothing. I’m his son, he’s my dad. Everyone in my family is alive and accounted for, the evening will be pleasant, and tomorrow will be beautiful. We have nothing here, and everything, and there is no rush, and we’re strangers to this place, we lay no claim to it, but I’ll hold it in me. Forty years from now, when I can’t sleep, I’ll think of this campout. Right now I’m alive on earth and soon I’ll close my eyes and sleep on my Therm-a-Rest, and my whole life’s lined up the way it’s supposed to be, and that’s when my father started in with his goddamn snoring.
For the next hour, as the noises got worse, I took back every sentimental thing I’d thought and said about him and the trip, and it became unbearable. For a while, I resented my father. My fury at him was incandescent. How dare he keep me awake like this? It sounded like a brace of elephant seals belching on a Northern California beachhead. Every few minutes, the snores got louder and more elongated, each snore stretching, growing, Rowwg! Ploot! Rowwg! Ploot! over and over. I finally woke him up to complain about the noise. He apologized, went back to sleep, and snored some more. After a while, the snores began to mimic speech until it sounded like my dad was having a Samuel Beckett–type soliloquy in the tent: “Who? Me? Who? Me? Who? Me! WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
My brain lit up, fully engaged. I hardly slept. I crawled out of my tent and watched the sun go up, lighting the tops of gigantic cinder cones, great mounds of chocolate-colored rock above a stream that widened every so often into emerald pools. Each pool contained stones the size of grapefruits, a few twigs, and one or two golden trout. After a long while of standing in this place, with no other hikers anywhere, a shadow fell on me. My dad was out taking a morning walk. He apologized once again for the snores and the stomach noises.
Then he reached in his pack and took out a log of shrink-wrapped shelf-stable deli meat. Extra food! He’d packed and forgotten it. My father pulled out a pig sticker of a knife, sliced a wedge off the summer sausage, and handed it to me. It was hard and shiny, like linoleum. I could barely get my teeth in it, or swallow it. It was salty, greasy, indigestible, but in that moment, with my father and the mountains behind it, it was the most delicious food I’d ever eaten. I’m lying—the sausage made me gag, but the context and the scenery made it almost palatable. I’d like to say we had a conversation to match the surroundings, or that we shared a statement of intent, a grandiose gesture, a secret, an aphorism, a reason, but we weren’t thinkers, we weren’t philosophers, we had no secrets, and there was nothing to add, no issues to discuss. Instead, we climbed a cinder cone.
My father found a path to the top and waited at the halfway point. I hiked all the way up to the summit. At the top, I saw that someone had left a little trail that was perfect for sliding. I sat down with my feet in front of me. As I fell forward, the pebbles rolled me down the hill, faster, forcing me to use sticks and my boot heels as brakes. Sliding down the cone, I couldn’t imagine anything outside the woods. School was starting in a week, and I would go back to my endless succession of woebegone crushes, my struggles in class, getting picked last for everything, and forgetting my locker combination, and it didn’t matter. My life before the campout was an Etch a Sketch mess of loops and squiggles. It was as if someone had gotten hold of the screen and shaken it clear. Perhaps we campers are looking for the same thing in our car camps and motor homes, in our pup tents and safari tents, in a guided bushwhack through the Adirondacks. I’m talking about a sense of erasure, a complete whiteout, the kind I experienced with my father all those years ago on the slopes of the Eastern Sierra. I’ve been trying to get back to it ever since.