Whenever my mom visits from San Francisco, she comments on how quiet it is in the suburbs where I live. In the wee hours of the morning, when the bats go home and the birds begin to sing, I can still hear the occasional car on the freeway, about a half mile away. Come morning, there isn’t a single day when I don’t hear construction (six houses are going up near me) or a leaf blower or power mower.<\/p>\n
If I was wealthy and powerful, I’d find a way to create a couple days a year when no power tools were used. If you want to mow, use a push mower. A broom works instead of a leaf blower. I think our world is polluted with sound and our minds never get to rest in quiet.<\/p>\n
My friend Sharon has a farm up in Duvall, east of Seattle. Up there, you don’t hear crows — too far from the city. On nights I’ve slept there, the sound of a plane overhead seems out of place.<\/p>\n
I don’t want an absence of sound — there’s a place where you can achieve that<\/a>, and apparently, it will drive you mad. But I would like to hear the world without machines once in a while. There’s a place <\/a>here in Washington State that would do — in the Olympic National Park. I wish it was bigger than a square inch, though, and I wish we all had access to something like<\/a> that a couple times a year. Or a month.<\/p>\n What do you do for quiet? Or do you avoid it at all costs?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whenever my mom visits from San Francisco, she comments on how quiet it is in the suburbs where I live. In the wee hours of the morning, when the bats go home and the birds begin to sing, I can still hear the occasional car on the freeway, about a half mile away. Come morning,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[618,793],"class_list":["post-788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-silencio-por-favor","tag-one-square-inch-of-silence","tag-wordcount-blogathon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":789,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788\/revisions\/789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}