On a recent, late-spring morning, in the blue hour before sunrise, I awoke alone to the sound of my breath in a tent I pitched in the middle-of-nowhere New Mexico.
No birds. No insects. No planes in the sky and no cars on the dusty roads that cut through the rocks and mesquite in the desert around me. Just slow breath, in and out, as if nature had turned on its noise canceling.
“This is the quietest place I’ve ever been,” I thought that morning.
Back home in the Philadelphia area, quiet is rare. I live blocks from six lanes of highway, and I can hear its collective drone 24/7, despite the noise barriers. It’s late August now and the gas-powered leaf blowers are ever-present, but I also hear house crickets and wind chimes, the blue jay that visits my bird feeder in suburbia.
It’s not all bad.
The surreal quiet of southwestern New Mexico stuck with me, though, and got me thinking about what I seek from nature, what I consider noise — a tractor-trailer engine braking — and what I consider heavenly instruments, like the haunting call of common loons I heard with my coffee last summer in Vermont.
Where are the quiet places closer to home, I wondered?
So I did a little research, hoping to visit some of those places this summer for much-needed peace, and for journalism. Research has shown, time and again, that silence is healing, both physically and mentally. Quiet lowers blood pressure, increases focus, and improves mindfulness, that elusive state so hard to attain thanks to the modern world and the technologies that, in theory, were meant to make life simpler.
“The bottom line is that quiet makes us healthier and happier human beings,” said Matt Mikkelsen of Quiet Parks International, a nonprofit that helps municipalities and conservation groups preserve quiet places.
As the “rural” reporter at The Inquirer, I’ve visited most of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties and had a good hunch about where I’d find swaths of silence, places like Potter County, aka “God’s Country,” or the vast Allegheny National Forest further west. Closer to home, there’s Sullivan County, one of the state’s least-populated counties. I’ve spent a few dozen nights in tents there and passed days staring at trees.
To make it official, though, I visited the Quiet Parks International website. It gives out awards and official designations in rural and urban settings, on trails, and even below the sea.
There’s no official “quiet park” in Pennsylvania, but the organization allows people to nominate potential silent refuges that could be later tested with decibel meters. There were surprisingly few in Pennsylvania. The lone nominee in Western Pennsylvania’s vast, rural forest was the Hammersely Wild Area, a relatively untouched 30,253-acre tract of wooded valley and plateaus in Potter and Clinton counties. There were a handful of markers in Philadelphia and some surrounding counties that could, eventually, become urban quiet parks, including two I visited in recent months: Bartram’s Gardens in Southwest Philly and the Shofuso Japanese Cultural Center in West Fairmount Park.
Caroline Winschel, director of development and communications at Bartram’s Gardens, said connectivity, not quiet per se, is what the 50-acre park along the Schuylkill strives for.
“Just by the nature of being in a city, we can’t control the surrounding noise,” Winschel said. “We can be a place where you can find quiet in a way you wouldn’t expect, a place to find a moment of beauty and reflection or just a nice place to stretch your legs.”
When I visited Bartram’s in late July, I heard air traffic, the biggest offender to quiet, along with dirt bikes and car horns. Some distant, rhythmic pounding of construction echoed along the river. Somehow, though, in the wild, flowery fields that lead down to the river, I was overwhelmed by the wind through the tall grass and treetops, the collective trill of thousands, perhaps millions, of delicate tree crickets hidden in them. By the river, I looked out over Center City and thought of people I knew somewhere in those high-rises, and listened to the water lapping against the shore.
Those are the sounds that stuck with me.
Potential urban quiet parks, like Bartram’s and Shofuso, would be graded differently, allowing for higher decibels and shorter gaps between quiet moments, said Ulf Boman, executive director of Urban Quiet Parks. Car and train noise is allowed, Boman said, but the frequency of air traffic is often a deal breaker, the reason why no nominees in New York City have qualified.
In June, I traveled west to the Hammersely Wild Area and did a 10.4-mile loop through deep, lush valleys. I didn’t see a soul for four hours and my ears only picked up the leaves rustling above me, birds and chipmunks, my water bottle clanking against my hip, and the natural white noise of water flowing over rocks. I heard a plane once or twice and the bizarre calls of two barred owls, described as someone saying “Who cooks for you?”
The visit to Hamersely was rewarding, physically and mentally. It was quiet enough, though incomparable to New Mexico or Maine’s Baxter State Park, where I slept in a lean-to with my kids a mile from anyone else. Even Hammersley, as remote as it is, might not meet Quiet Park standards because of air traffic and Pennsylvania’s most ubiquitous hobby: deer hunting and the rifle sounds that accompany it.
My biggest revelation, however, was my last visit, to Shofuso, in August. A late text message from Sandi Polyakov, the center’s garden curator and preservation director, dimmed my hopes for deep quiet before I arrived: lawn mowers and leaf blowers were out in force in Fairmount Park.
A dozen visitors wandered around the neatly manicured garden, eyeing the large, orange and white koi that swam routes along the pond’s edge. Polyakov wasn’t aware anyone nominated Shofuso as a Quiet Park but he seemed proud.
Polyakov took me into Shofuso’s ceremonial tea room, a simple, traditional Japanese structure with woven rice floor mats and lightweight, sliding “shoji” doors. One open shoji revealed a Japanese maple beyond it, its delicate leaves rustling in the hot breeze. It looked technicolor, a living piece of art framed by the doorway. The sound of crickets carried in, and the hint of a broom making rhythmic sweeps on the surrounding, wooden walkways.
The Japanese, Polyakov said, thought of every detail to touch the senses, even the different sounds water makes when it’s hot or cold.
“We’re savoring the moment to that level,” he said. “It’s perfect example. Yes, it’s a sound, it’s also like quietness.”
Shofuso, Polyakov told me, was built in Japan and shipped to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art shortly after, where it became a hit. After its run, cities put out bids to house it and its builders chose Fairmount Park and we’re so lucky it wound up there.
After walking me through another, larger hall, with an even more expansive, perfectly-framed view of the garden, Polyakov left me alone, to wander. While it wasn’t the quietest place I’ve ever visited, Shofuso’s serenity went deeper than any other location, a calming and much-needed salve for my endless summer.
And a much shorter drive.
