Thanks to “progress,” finding a quiet place is becoming more challenging. Absolute quiet, of course, isn’t a reality because there will almost always be some natural ambient noise. I have experienced ultra-quiet spaces in the past year. They were at White Sands National Park and in a forest in northern Washington. However, those instances are rare and lasted less than 30 seconds.
All you can hear is the occasional scuff of my boot as I turn to shoot this video. It was eerie and fantastic.
But human-manifested noise is a growing problem.
I’ve noticed this a lot more since returning to our sticks-n-bricks in Michigan after nine months of traveling in our Airstream. It seems every time we return, it’s louder here. When we first purchased our house about 16 years ago, it was at the edge of a township. Our neighborhood was a dividing line between a quiet suburban area and a neighboring rural one.
That has changed. The population has increased, as has the traffic. The number of homes and businesses has increased, and, of course, the noise has increased.
The township has a master plan that supposedly shows how things will grow over time. Whenever someone complains about a new development being counter to the master plan, the township board seems to respond by saying, “Oh yes, you’re right. We should update the master plan.” But that wasn’t the point of the plan, was it?!
With the increase in houses and businesses, it’s nearly impossible not to have noise from vehicles, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, construction projects, and other caterwauling throughout our local streets.
All of this “progress” comes with additional light pollution. Want to get someone up on their soapbox for a good old-fashioned rant? Ask Jessi about the absence of dark skies.
We have parkhosted twice at LBJ State Park outside of Fredericksburg, Texas. The hosting gigs were two years apart and we could not believe how much the quiet areas around town had fallen to development. And it appears that development is continuing headlong at a rapid pace. We could go back in two years and hardly recognize the place.
It’s not just cities, towns, and villages that are noisy. Campgrounds are louder than ever, thanks to outdoor TVs and speakers on RVs. Plus, there is the incessant whine of leafblowers when camping now. Some RVers think it a necessity to keep nature out of their campsite. That, to me, seems counterproductive to camping in nature. But if you must keep your site pristine, please consider using a broom.
Hiking trails are getting busier, which means there’s more chatter among hikers, which increases the noise. That’s fine; it’s not a terrible thing. Just keep your conversations to your hiking party so the rest of us don’t have to hear them.
But two things I’ve seen more of lately drive me crazy: people talking loudly on their cell phones and using Bluetooth speakers.
Cell phone etiquette seems terrible everywhere. But when I’m out enjoying nature, I don’t need to hear only one side of a conversation as you exclaim loudly about how your team “has to deliver for this client.”
And if you must have music to drown out the sound of nature while hiking, put in some earbuds! Bluetooth speakers playing your choice of music on a trail is rude. Not everyone likes your music, and many of us are there to find peace and quiet in nature.
And often, when Jessi and I think we have finally found a tranquil place with no one else around…a passenger jet will fly overhead. Jets zigzagging across remote skies mark another scar of human “progress.”
You’ll notice I’ve put “progress” in quotation marks in this blog post. That’s because I love and hate the concept.
Thanks to “progress,” we can now camp in remote areas while still working full-time thanks to technology like Starlink, solar panels, and our Jackery power bank.
But “progress ” also has brought more noise to places that used to be safe from the hustle and bustle of daily life. RVs are getting bigger and noisier. Campgrounds are getting busier and louder. Hiking trails are getting noisier even when they aren’t necessarily busier.
The dirty hand of man can go unnoticed in the city because his dirty hand made the city. But in this place, where innocence is a mineral in the soil, the filfth of our touch is an apocalypse.
Elsa, 1883, Season 1, Ep. 7
One of my favorite quotes from the TV miniseries “1883” is from the main character when describing what it’s like to be in Texas. They are crossing the plains in areas white settlers had not yet settled and remarks, “The dirty hand of man can go unnoticed in the city because his dirty hand made the city. But in this place, where innocence is a mineral in the soil, the filth of our touch is an apocalypse.” ~Elsa, 1883, Season 1, Ep. 7
Does this post make me sound like a bit of a Grinch? Absolutely! Do I care? No! Having an opinion doesn’t mean you have a popular opinion. Sometimes, you want to rant and feel better as a calm settles over you. At least until some unwelcome noise interrupts that calm in 3, 2, 1…and the neighbor just fired up his lawnmower. I’m not kidding—I couldn’t have timed the drafting of this blog post any better!
