Quiet(er)

Late September, and as seasonal residents leave and restaurants and inns close, as the local newspaper thins with fewer announced events and the roads become less traveled, the island’s quiet gets quieter. The world around us slows.  

The maples merely hint that soon the woods in their slow burn will undress, but the ferns and bracken in their yellowing have already collapsed. Eiders, all mutter and sotto voce chatter, raft up in great numbers on the Bay, but weeks ago, our departed resident osprey emptied the sky above Heart Island of all its music. Red squirrels now pause in their post-acorn-thunking frenzy and it's the deer, lured by our generous oak’s windfall, who grow bold. So quiet is each of their slender-legged steps, surely practicing for the blaze-orange cap-and-vest days in the weeks ahead, I do not hear their close approach to my open kitchen window.

Now, too, is when I’m lured – to take more frequent walks on our quieter roads, less populated trails, especially on quintessentially gold and blue September days, the light, as though liquefied, spilling over the island – “like every clapboard just got a fresh coat of paint,” my friend Bill has said of it. Days often so quiet and still that as a crow wings overhead, I can hear the rasp of pinions against air.

In a culture where noise, almost all of it man-made, has become routine, how many fewer are the opportunities to listen to quiet. Not that we don’t reject them. And reject solitude, too, quiet’s sidekick. Too often we turn away from the reflection quiet often births, some of us afraid, perhaps, of being ambushed by certain parts of our self that may show up. Or of finding ourselves in, as Plotinus called it, “the flight of the alone to the Alone.” Noise and its myriad distractions help shield against what might easily tip toward loneliness, a dose of quiet merely the painful pause before being delivered back to friends and family, even strangers in a loud theatre, a crowded shopping mall or pulsing stadium. 

In many child-rearing circles, our family’s included, an antidote to misbehavior often egged on by scheduling overload, lack of sleep or loud, continual stimulation is a “time-out.” Once evoked, children are often sent to their rooms, and there, in spite of it being another place rigged with computers and TVs, the idea is to be still and quiet. To disengage. Defrazzle.

Isn’t it odd that time-outs are considered punishment? That an intermission from external din is not meant to reward? So essential is quiet and a heaping dose of solitude to me, particularly when I feel battered by the outside world’s man-made assaults pulsing with high-level decibels and loud, clamorous demands and by my own inner-booming blather and thrum, I wish time-outs were mandated. As rigorously pursued as a daily run or visit to the gym.  Better still, I wish, as a friend once suggested, that some legislator would propose a bill decreeing one day – just one? – as Day Without Noise. Yes, please, someone order us into a time-out.

Of course not everyone agrees. Here, for example, loving this island requires an embrace of its natural and inherent not-much-happens-here quiet. But here, too, in households and at gatherings, numerous are the attempts to fill, enrich, ignore or even reject the quiet. When defined as a lack of opportunity or exposure to experiences other than the familiar, it routinely drives some people away from here, even those whose families for generations have never left.

Visitors often wrestle with our island’s brand of quiet. They arrive, marvel, soak it up, but readily admit they need only a small dose. Yes, there are those of us who visit and return, sometimes summer after summer, who may even try to figure out how to remain year-round. Vaster, though, are the numbers who agree, “Yes, it’s lovely,” but look stupefied when responding, “Me? Live here?” Their interest in visiting is more akin to the mid-winter’s trip to a beach resort where, as glossy brochures instruct, the idea is to “recharge the batteries.” As if we were appliances that needed only a new filter or more efficient rinse cycle to clean out the sludge. It certainly seemed foreign to me that a New York friend once found it less frightening to walk the streets of Hell’s Kitchen at midnight long before it became the desirable address it is today than to walk in our woods at dusk where the quiet, he claimed, is “really creepy.” To be more himself, he needs the buzz and hum, a 24/7 double-espresso jive. Which is not to say that from my winter-time perch in Chicago, I can’t relate to year-rounder island friends who, come January, routinely fly to New York or drive to Boston for a “city-fix.”

As newborns entering the world, a hard thwack is one of our first welcomes. We answer it with a lusty bawl. We let the world know with our loud hungering cry that we’re ready for its rich cacophony and our mind’s natter and nag. But aren’t we all born needing quiet, too? Remnants of our hushed, sloshing first world?

We each need to find a place – don’t we? – where by choice we can be still, where we might hear the quiet center of our being, the voice within our thoughts. Some personal sanctuary or retreat. Be it a place like my own adolescent girl’s platform "treehouse"perched in a crabapple above an alley, or a stand of sheltering spruce near a crowded house, or a muffled closet interior, an urban rooftop, a park bench at the furthest remove from traffic, a library, a church, a patch of open meadow, a vacant lot, a dark room?

I envy those who’ve learned to meditate or find peace regardless their physical location. I empathize with those who, like me, never travel without ear plugs or are tempted to spend money on expensive noise-cancelling head phones, whose idea of one form of hell is to be sealed in an airplane where cell phone usage is permitted throughout the flight. I come from a family of six who had to squabble over a single bathroom, share a clutch of tiny bedrooms and one TV, but I had a basement, a yard, a nearby patch of woods to roam, and a mother who was known to say, and often, “Be quiet, I can’t hear myself think.”

Maybe it’s especially true in late September, as my days here wind down and the quieter quiet settles again like a welcome coverlet against the chill, that I’m reminded again of how privileged I am to have this house, this piece of land, particularly when so many people are without shelter of any kind. To have found this island with its full and enriching pockets of quiet. To have the freedom and means to be here. To have had a mother who needed to hear herself think.

Today, as distant clouds, John Muir’s “fleeting sky mountains,” gather on the horizon, the sun is showing me how it’s already sunk a bit lower in the sky but is still warm on my back and arms as I put the finishing touches on my about-to-slumber garden. As I trim, prune, stake, rig up what I think will keep the burrowing voles from nibbling the trunk of a new climbing hydrangea this winter, my spade tings, my shovel scrapes. Close to where my shears snap and clip, a plethora of buzzing bees plunder the snakeroot’s last white blossom-packed wands and a morning shower’s dripping remnants plock from awning edge to wood-planked deck. Nearby, the resident crow family erupts into a loud back and forth cawing, perhaps some kind of argument in which the parents, even so late in the season, are still dismayed by the lack of their newest offspring’s flying prowess.

Silence it’s not. Not like the wood pile newly stacked against our garage like neat rows of sentries guarding the periphery. Or the woodstove yet to have a match struck against its side. But an undisputable stillness. A familiar, longed for, and necessary quiet.