Silence
Have you ever heard silence? Real and forever quiet. The kind of quiet where your brain, in its infinite capacity, cannot contain of the lack of information. I am talking about the kind of silence that makes your ears ring. Utter silence. No humming refrigerator, no crying sirens, not even a rustle in the leaves.
I have heard this kind of silence just twice in my wanderings. Once in the North Woods of Maine after a foot of fluffy powder fell on every exposed surface. I walked into the single-digit cold before dawn and climbed a rickety deer stand deep in my Uncle’s property. When my breathing settled, the forest fell still and I realized I could hear nothing. It was so quiet my hushed breath seemed to hide from the chill. As I sat trying to understand what I was, or rather, was not hearing, a wooshing sound faded into the stage. I looked skyward just in time to see a Bald Eagle flying absentmindedly thirty feet above the trees. Each woosh of his wings rattled snow from the branches. It was the absurd noiselessness, not the cold that gave me a brain freeze. Without the persistent metronome that is sound, time fell irrelevant.
Bad Water Basin
At the bottom of the United States, 282 feet below sea level to be exact, is the Bad Water Basin salt flat. Alex and I wandered well away from the parking lot searching for undisturbed crystalline structures formed as the meager water that exists here evaporates. A mile or more out I released the shutter on my big digital camera and could swear the ground shook as it thumped. Bad Water Basin is so vast and hollow that even if there had been a breeze, nothing would have interrupted its path for miles. We stood for a bit, letting our ears ring in search for any hint of anything; but there was nothing.
In the presence of pure silence, time stops and nothingness takes over and suddenly you hear yourself in astonishing clarity.
It seems inconsequential, the thought of brief and real silence. It is not. As I proof read this I could not help but think of people around the world born without hearing or worse yet, those that lose it through some unfortunate circumstance. The novelty I described and the feeling that comes with it is someone’s everyday reality and I do not mean to undermine that truth.
