Quiet is a Bandaid
Quiet is a bandaid. It covers the wound until it can repair itself.
The keystone of our recent trip to the Pacific Northwest was finding quiet. Years ago, I heard about the “One Square Inch of Silence” in the Hoh Rainforest on a podcast and felt the pull of it in the way you do when a thing is just right. It’s a place relatively untouched by human sounds. Of course, a rainforest can’t help but make natural noise given all the life it holds close.
So when the time came to plan for our summer RV trip, Washington had to be on the list, both because of the silent inch and because that stretch of moody ocean has been calling me back ever since my first visit a few years ago. So we made a big circle around Olympic and found ourselves in the Hoh for three nights.
I planned the hike carefully, not only because there were signs for cougar activity at the entrance to the trail and the ranger had been emphatic in his warning about their presence. I woke early and buckled on my pack while walking from the campground to the parking lot and then past the visitor center. I stopped to take a picture of the trail map, as I always do even when I’m using a trail app. Never hurts to have too many maps, even though with this trail it was wholly unnecessary. It was one trail slicing into the heart of the Olympic forest, with no detours or side loops.
“Spiritual experiences turn out to be much more slippery. Less willing to come when called.”
I had thoughts about how this would go. Pictures in my head of my early morning hike all by myself. Communing with the rainforest. Listening, actually listening, because that’s what I was here for. Taking my time and stepping outside myself. In short, trying very hard to produce a meaningful experience in a certain place at a certain time and in a certain way.
You can imagine how that worked out - as things usually do when they’re forced. Spiritual experiences turn out to be much more slippery. Less willing to come when called.
I didn’t find it. The red rock that marks the One Square Inch eluded me. It was quite difficult to contain disappointment when that feeling was happening on a beautiful forest trail on a damp, cool morning during a hike that I got to take all by myself. Most of the way back I tried to reconcile the tension between the should-be-grateful and the but-I-didn’t-get-to-hear-it.
“That happened here too: the harder I looked, the less likely it was to show its face”
Wanting to hear silence may seem like a strange goal, but it is one of the best things about being on trails. No matter where there are, there’s a quality about them that encourages listening, even when they’re beside a road. I try to find quiet whenever I’m on a trail, but am not good at it for the same reason I fail at meditating most of the time. Because my mind is human and therefore distractible and prone to seek the new and the shiny.
We’ve all been in the position of seeking something so diligently that it never appears. That happened here too: the harder I looked, the less likely it was to show its face. I tried to take in all the other wonders around me and remember the contradictory nonsense that’s easier to read in a glossy article than to do on a breath by breath basis: to try but not try.
I tried to find quiet and it didn’t work for my ears or my mind. I tried to have this one walk mean something more than the others but failed. When I was finished, I didn’t feel closer to myself.
But I’ll keep looking, hearing, seeking, and maybe find something unexpected on the trail another day. Pull off the band-aid and see what’s newly healed.
Inspired by events in the Hoh Rainforest, Olympic National Park.
on the land of the Jamestown S'Klallam, Lower Elwha Klallam, Makah, Port Gamble S'Klallam, Quileute, Quinault and Skokomish (source).