[Quietcars] Is Silence Going Extinct?, The New York Times, March 15 2012

[Deborah Kent Stein]

Fascinating!  Thank you so much for sharing this.  What wonderful research - 
I'm so glad people are looking at all this.  And now I know why our Chicago 
robins start singing at three o'clock in the morning.

Debbie


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nightingale, Noel" <Noel.Nightingale at ed.gov>
To: <quietcars at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2012 11:09 AM
Subject: [Quietcars] Is Silence Going Extinct?, The New York Times,March 15 
2012


> This article seems appropriate for this list as it raises the 
> counter-argument to cards being silent but deadly.
>
> Link:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/is-silence-going-extinct.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
>
> Text:
> Is Silence Going Extinct?
> By KIM TINGLEY
> Published: March 15, 2012
>
> Setting off in the predawn gloaming of central Alaska, we were the sounds 
> of swishing snow pants, crunching boots and cold puffs of breath. As 
> sunrise gradually lightened the late November sky, we took visible shape: 
> a single-file parade on a narrow white trail traveling west, deeper into 
> Denali National 
> Park<http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/north-america/united-states/alaska/denali-national-park/overview.html?inline=nyt-geo> 
> and Preserve. It was three degrees and so still that when we pulled up to 
> rest, I heard no wind, no sibilant leaves, just a barely perceptible 
> ringing in my ears. Tundra swans, kestrels and warblers had all flown 
> south. Grizzlies were asleep in their dens. We tramped over frozen streams 
> and paused to discover water still trickling faintly in hollows below. To 
> the north, a morning blast of pink and orange brightened snow-shrouded 
> Mount Healy at the edge of the Alaska Range; to the south - where the sun 
> is always rising or setting during winter at a latitude just three degrees 
> shy of the Arctic Circle - an alpine ridge remained covered in shadow and 
> alder.
> We saw a beaver hut on a frozen pond and moose tracks in snow. Ice frosted 
> the nettles of black spruce and the beard of our leader, Davyd Betchkal, 
> the park's physical-science technician. Betchkal's beard recalled that of 
> his hero, the naturalist Henry David Thoreau, at the start of the Civil 
> War. Otherwise he was a 25-year-old Wisconsinite wearing a lime green hat 
> knit by his mother. He and I shouldered backpacks each weighted with 30 
> pounds of recording equipment. Far up ahead, a park ranger on skis towed 
> more gear by sled.
> Our destination was a ridge above Hines Creek, where Betchkal planned to 
> assemble a station to collect a month's worth of continuous acoustic data 
> documenting an intangible, invisible and - increasingly - endangered 
> resource: natural sound. Our mission was not only to trap the ephemeral 
> but also to experience it ourselves, which at the moment was impossible 
> for three reasons: 1) the chafing of our nylon outfits; 2) the chunking of 
> our military-issue Bunny Boots on ice; and 3) planes.
> "If you're on foot and you choose to focus on the natural quality of the 
> landscape, you're completely immersed in nature; nothing else exists," 
> Betchkal said to the back of my head, letting me set the pace as we 
> traipsed steadily uphill. "Then a jet will go over, and it kind of breaks 
> that flow of consciousness, that ecstatic moment." Meditating on our 
> surroundings, I became a little curious how much farther we had to go. 
> "Don't think about that - that's my answer," Betchkal called ahead 
> cheerfully. "Another answer is that I don't know."
> An undeveloped swath of land nearly the size of Vermont, Denali should be 
> a haven for natural sound. Enormous stretches of wild country abut the 
> park in every direction save east, where Route 3 connects Fairbanks to 
> Anchorage. One dead end and mostly unpaved road penetrates the park 
> itself. Yet since 2006, when scientists at Denali began a decade-long 
> effort to collect a month's worth of acoustic data from more than 60 sites 
> across the park - including a 14,000-foot-high spot on Mount McKinley - 
> Betchkal and his colleagues have recorded only 36 complete days in which 
> the sounds of an internal combustion engine of some sort were absent. 
> Planes are the most common source. Once, in the course of 24 hours, a 
> single recording station captured the buzzing of 78 low-altitude props - 
> the kind used for sightseeing tours; other areas have logged daily 
> averages as high as one sky- or street-traffic sound every 17 minutes. The 
> loudest stretch of the year is summer, when hundreds of thousands of 
> tourists flock to Denali, embarking on helicopter or fixed-wing rides. 
> Snowmobiles are popular with locals, and noise from the highway, the park 
> road and daily passenger trains can travel for miles. That sort of human 
> din, studies are beginning to suggest, is imperiling habitat - in Denali 
> as well as wilderness areas around the world - as surely as a bulldozer or 
> oil spill. But scientists have so little information about what landscapes 
> should sound like without human interference that trying to correct the 
> problem would be like a surgeon's wielding a scalpel without knowing the 
> parts of the body, let alone his patient's symptoms. To restore ecosystems 
> to acoustic health, researchers must determine, to the last raindrop, what 
> compositions nature would play without us.
> For more than 40 years, scientists have used radio telescopes to probe 
> starry regions trillions of miles away for sounds of alien life. But only 
> in the past five years or so have they been able to reliably record 
> monthslong stretches of audio in the wildernesses of 
> Earth<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/earth_planet/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>. 
> Last March, a group of ecologists and engineers taking advantage of 
> advances in collecting, storing and analyzing vast quantities of digital 
> data declared a new field of science: soundscape ecology. Other 
> disciplines have long observed how various sounds affect people and 
> individual animal species, but no one, they argued in the journal 
> Bioscience, has yet studied the interconnected sounds of whole ecosystems. 
> Soundscapes - composed of biological utterances like birdcalls, 
> geophysical commotions like wind and running water and anthropogenic 
> noises like motors - are "an acoustic reflection of the patterns and 
> processes of the landscape," the paper's lead author, Bryan Pijanowski, an 
> ecologist at Purdue University, told me. "And if we can take sound samples 
> and develop appropriate metrics, we might be able to say, 'Hey, this is a 
> healthy landscape and this is an unhealthy landscape.' "
> Indeed, though soundscape ecology has hardly begun, natural soundscapes 
> already face a crisis. Humans have irrevocably altered the acoustics of 
> the entire globe - and our racket continues to spread. Missing or altered 
> voices in a soundscape tend to indicate broader environmental problems. 
> For instance, at least one invasive 
> species<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/invasive_species/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>, 
> the red-billed leiothrix of East Asia, appears to use its clamorous 
> chatter to drown out the native European blackbird in Northern Italy. 
> Noise can mask mating calls, cause stress and prevent animals from hearing 
> alarms, the stirrings of prey and other useful survival cues. And as 
> climate change prompts a shift in creatures' migration schedules, 
> circadian rhythms and preferred habitats - reshuffling the where and when 
> of their calls - soundscapes are altered, too. Soundscape ecologists hope 
> they can save some ecosystems, but they also realize they will bear 
> witness to many finales. "There may be some very unique soundscapes around 
> the world that - just through normal human activities - would be lost 
> forever," Pijanowski says - unless he and colleagues can record them 
> before they disappear. An even more critical task, he thinks, is alerting 
> people to the way "soundscapes provide us with a sense of place" and an 
> emotional bond with the natural world that is unraveling. As children, our 
> grandparents could hope to swim in a lake or lie in a meadow for whole 
> afternoons without hearing a motorboat, car or plane; today the engineless 
> hour is all but extinct, and we've grown accustomed to constant, mild 
> auditory intrusions. "Humans are becoming an increasingly more urban 
> species, and so we're surrounding ourselves with concrete and buildings" 
> and "the low hum of the urban landscape," Pijanowski says. "We're kind of 
> severing the acoustic link that humans have with nature."
> In Denali, silence and solitude define the winter. Fall, Betchkal says, is 
> the departure of the sandhill cranes - an urgent, lonely trilling of 
> flocks<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/05sandhill-cranes.mp3#audiofix> 
> taking flight. Spring returns with wood frogs, the park's only amphibian. 
> "They're a riotous little chorus of fellows," Betchkal told me the day 
> before our expedition, as I watched him assemble and test, in an empty 
> library across from his office building, the station he planned to deploy. 
> Outfitted in a flannel shirt and jeans, he could have been a woodsman 
> readying his traps if not for the headphones he wore. "It's like a really 
> organic, biological sounding rasping, but it's really nice, like krrrup, 
> krrrup<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/09wood-frog.mp3#audiofix>," 
> he continued, pausing amid a tangle of wire to roll his R's. In high 
> school, Betchkal's band teacher told him that before he could play a note 
> on his trumpet, in order to appreciate how the instrument produced the 
> syllable, he needed to articulate the sound himself. Betchkal thinks the 
> same is true of wildlife sounds: "To understand what they're all about, 
> you have to make them," he said. "You've got to. People think it's goofy, 
> but it isn't. It's studying."
> Sounds are remarkably difficult to describe without onomatopoeia. Defining 
> the resource he wants to protect - in words and numbers, to scientists and 
> policy makers - is a fundamental challenge for Betchkal and other 
> soundscape researchers. Betchkal, though, is well suited to his role. As a 
> boy, he went camping in Wisconsin's Devil's Lake State Park with his 
> father, an amateur ornithologist who taught him the pleasures of lying in 
> a sleeping bag listening to birdcalls. At the University of Wisconsin, 
> Madison, he majored in biochemistry and botany while running soundboards 
> for indie bands at the King Club downtown. For Betchkal, whose office 
> bookshelf holds titles as various as "An Introduction to the Psychology of 
> Hearing," "Statistical Treatment of Experimental Data" and "Glacier Travel 
> and Crevasse Rescue," perhaps the greatest appeal of soundscape ecology is 
> the way it intersects other fields of study. "It's almost like going back 
> to old-school naturalism," Betchkal said, "where you paid attention to 
> anything and everything that was fascinating. That's totally what I'm 
> into - interdisciplinary science."
> Surprisingly, soundscape ecology, with its focus on the natural, got its 
> start in the streets. An M.I.T. city planner first applied the word 
> "soundscape" to habitat analysis in 1969 for a study he did on the 
> "informativeness" and "delightfulness" of various sonic environments 
> around Boston. Pushing volunteers about in wheelchairs, first blindfolded, 
> then ear-muffled, then without sensory checks, he discovered that the 
> sounds of seaports and civic centers were just as important as their 
> appearance in influencing how much people enjoyed being there. This was a 
> novel notion, even though objections to undesirable sounds date back to 
> the invention of neighbors. In his influential 1977 work, "The Tuning of 
> the World," the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer charts man's 
> relationship with noise. As long ago as 3000 B.C., he notes, the Epic of 
> Gilgamesh discussed "the uproar of mankind," which aggravated the god 
> Enlil. "Sleep is no longer possible," he complains to the other gods. In 
> the second century A.D., wagon traffic "sufficient to wake the dead" 
> ruined the Roman poet Juvenal's ability to rest between Satires. Many 
> English towns were sequestering their blacksmiths by the 13th century, and 
> Bern, Switzerland, passed its first law "against singing and shouting in 
> streets or houses on festival days" in 1628. Over the next 300 years, it 
> also legislated against "barking dogs," "singing at Christmas and New 
> Year's parties," "carpet-beating" and "noisy children." In 1972, the U.S. 
> Environmental Protection Agency declared noise a pollutant.
> Only recently, however, have governments from Japan to the European Union 
> begun to recognize natural sounds as a resource requiring protection. When 
> Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916, it was to 
> "conserve the scenery"; not until 2000 did a Park Service director issue 
> systemwide instructions for addressing "soundscape preservation." In 1986, 
> a midair plane crash above the Grand Canyon National Park - where 
> sightseeing tours had operated virtually unchecked for almost 70 years - 
> prompted Congress to pass the National Parks Overflights Act, requiring 
> the Park Service to work with the Federal Aviation Administration in 
> remedying the "significant adverse effect on the natural quiet" that 
> aircraft there appeared to be having. The act also called for studying the 
> impacts of overflight noise on other parks.
> Initial research returned alarming results. In Yosemite, planes were heard 
> 30 to 60 percent of the day. In the Haleakala volcano crater in Maui, 8 to 
> 10 helicopters passed overhead per hour. What's more, other experiments 
> showed, much as the M.I.T. study did, that noise affected the way visitors 
> saw landscapes: when volunteers viewed photos of natural vistas while 
> listening to helicopters on tape, they rated the scenes less picturesque 
> than they did under quieter conditions. By 2000, the National Park Service 
> had staffed a division to gather data on park soundscapes nationwide and 
> create, with the F.A.A., air-tour management plans at 100-plus locations. 
> More than a decade since - partly because of disagreements between 
> aviation and conservation interests - no such plan is in place, though 
> many parks have begun looking for ways to trim other noise, turning off 
> idling shuttle buses, curbing car traffic and investing in less uproarious 
> maintenance tools. Grand Canyon managers, after nearly 25 years of 
> laboring, last year proposed amendments to the timing and routes of 
> sightseeing flights that would make the park somewhat more serene.
> When Denali fielded its first sound station in April 2001, far earlier 
> than nearly every other park in the country, the primary concern was 
> determining the level of annoyance caused by planes and snowmobiles. But 
> scientists were about to realize the damage society's widening sonic 
> footprint could do to natural ecosystems. In 2003, a Dutch team studying a 
> common songbird, the great tit, reported in Nature that males of the 
> species shifted their calls to a higher frequency in cities, where 
> low-frequency human noise masked their normal song range. Further proof 
> that urban sounds cause wild creatures to adjust their vocal styles 
> quickly followed. Nightingales sing louder in louder environments. 
> Robins - usually diurnal singers - switch to nighttime in areas that are 
> chaotic by day. Subjected to constant mechanical whirring, certain 
> primates, bats, whales, squirrels and frogs all change their cries. Many 
> other animals, it seems, lack the physical equipment to adapt, and perish 
> or move away. Not only are individuals editing their tunes in real time - 
> as the great tits did - but natural selection is also rewarding louder, 
> higher-frequency singers, redirecting the course of evolution.
> Species can fight for airtime in a limited bandwidth by changing their 
> volume or frequency, or by rescheduling the timing of their calls. But 
> there's no way animals can alter their ability to listen - for their very 
> survival - if human noise conceals, for example, the twig-snap of a 
> prowler or the skittering of prey. In the United States, where more than 
> 80 percent of land is within two-thirds of a mile of a road, the listening 
> area available to most creatures is rapidly shrinking. Beyond hunting and 
> hiding, even invertebrates use the gabbing of unwitting cohabitants for 
> navigation. Sightless, earless and adrift in the open ocean, coral larvae 
> seek to settle on tropical reefs by swimming toward the throbs of 
> muttering fish and snapping-shrimp claws. Eurasian reed warblers en route 
> to southern Africa at night flutter blind over pine forests, sand dunes 
> and the Baltic Sea until, hundreds of feet below, the cheeping of other 
> warblers signals the presence of sustaining wetlands. If those aural cues 
> disappear, the species that heed them may be floating and flying without a 
> compass.
> Explosive human sounds can have catastrophic impacts, especially 
> underwater, where they travel faster and farther than they do in the air. 
> Porpoises and whales have beached themselves fleeing the high-pitched 
> shrieks of U.S. Navy sonar, researchers believe; they also blame the 
> low-frequency booms ships use to search for oil and gas for fatally 
> ripping through the organs that cephalopods like squid use to detect 
> vibrations. Fewer studies have examined the health impacts of more 
> mundane, chronic noises on terrestrial species, but proof is emerging that 
> the droning of freeway traffic and the 24/7 rumbling of 
> natural-gas-pipeline compressors directly harm the ability of birds 
> nesting nearby to reproduce. Jesse Barber, a biologist at Boise State 
> University who is the co-author of two recent papers about the impacts of 
> noise on land-dwelling animals, writes that "it is clear that the 
> acoustical environment is not a collection of private conversations 
> between signaler and receiver" but a network of broadcasts reaching both 
> intended and invisible listeners. Like pulling Jenga blocks from a 
> teetering tower, removing sounds from soundscapes - or adding them - he 
> warns, "could have volatile and unpredictable consequences."
> In the library across from his office building, Betchkal crawled among 
> cables, politely probing each instrument with a voltmeter like a 
> plaid-clad doctor with a stethoscope. The park has been able to take 
> continuous recordings since only 2010 (previous setups recorded five 
> seconds of audio every five minutes), and the scale and quality of its 
> efforts in the wilderness are among the most advanced in the world. Though 
> each station costs about $12,000, glitches are common: the instruments 
> still aren't designed to work together, or in outdoor conditions. Wind has 
> toppled them; rivers have flooded them; grizzlies have mangled 
> microphones. Betchkal fiddled much of the morning before he felt satisfied 
> that the station was running properly and began to break it down, packing 
> it methodically away and carrying it to his office. Pulling a checklist 
> from his desk, he started filling bags with tools he might need the next 
> day: blue crystal desiccants in vials to keep the air in the equipment 
> boxes dry, wire strippers, extra cable. He'd never set up a station in 
> November and December before. Part of the point was to add to baseline 
> measurements of the park's overall soundscape - another was to measure 
> just how quiet the winter could be and preserve that sensation for 
> posterity. "I suspect that it gets down below the threshold of human 
> hearing," Betchkal said, adding duck seal, Gaffer's tape and an Exacto 
> knife to the bag. "Below zero decibels." If he did manage to capture a 
> stretch of quiet that extreme, I wondered, what would it reveal?
> "Openness!" Betchkal exclaimed. He paused to chase his thought. "Quiet is 
> related to openness in the sense that the quieter it gets - as your 
> listening area increases - your ability to hear reflections from farther 
> away increases. The implication of that is that you get an immense sense 
> of openness, of the landscape reflecting back to you, right? You can go 
> out there, and you stand on a mountaintop, and it's so quiet that you get 
> this sense of space that's unbelievable. The reflections are coming to you 
> from afar. All of a sudden your perception is being affected by a larger 
> area. Which is different from when you're in your car. Why, when you're in 
> your car, do you feel like you are your car? It's 'cause the car envelops 
> you, it wraps you up in that sound of itself. Sound has everything to do 
> with place. What is beautiful about this place? What is interesting or 
> iconic about Alaska? Anyway," he bowed apologetically at the waist, 
> "that's a lot of words. What I'm really measuring is the potential - the 
> potential to hear natural sounds. If you're choosing to listen, what are 
> you actually going to hear?"
> Around noon, nearing Hines Creek, we halted on the trail. The afternoon 
> was windless. We were warm from walking but rapidly started to freeze; 
> feeling left our fingers and noses first. Betchkal pointed off the path to 
> the south, across a field of tangled willows, to a steep, snowy ridge, 
> atop which he wanted to put the station. We shook up chemical hand warmers 
> so they'd be hot when we reached the summit and charged into the thicket 
> after Jeff Duckett, the ranger. Branches crashed against jackets and 
> backpacks. We tripped on roots and fell. The sled proved too awkward to 
> carry, and after retrieving two solar panels and a box of gear, Duckett 
> and Betchkal abandoned it. At the foot of the hill, we began switchbacking 
> upward through knee-high snow drifts. A Piper Cub skirted low over our 
> heads, the roar of the engine momentarily blotting out the sounds of our 
> breathing. Reaching the top, we dumped the audio equipment and threw on 
> extra jackets. Betchkal got to work quickly, arranging tripods and running 
> Arctic cable designed not to snap in subzero weather. Below, miles of 
> black spruce spanned the valley separating us from Mount Healy.
> Ostensibly, Betchkal's stations capture exactly what we would hear if we 
> could stand invisibly in the wilderness for a month. The recordings can 
> reveal the sonic relationships that play out in our absence - and help us 
> to modify our acoustic footprint. But our understanding of sound will 
> always be limited by our perception of it. We will never experience the 
> ultrasonic cries of insects, lizards or bats without distorting them. 
> Decibels are self-deception. Bell Telephone Laboratories conjured them to 
> measure loudness in the 1920s (the "bel" honors the company's eponymous 
> founder), but they represent volume as our ears register it, and the 
> louder a sound is, the less of it we actually take in.
> Hearing arguably fixes us in time, space and our own bodies more than the 
> other senses do. Our vitals are audible: sighing lungs, a pounding pulse, 
> a burbling gut. John Cage, the composer, once tried to observe complete 
> silence in a soundproof room, but he still heard distinct noises - made, 
> it turned out, by the nerves and blood of his own body. "Until I die," he 
> concluded, "there will be sounds." We can shut our eyes at will, but not 
> our ears, and what we hear is penetrating and physical - a wave entering 
> our head. Even the deaf perceive internal jangling and external sonic 
> feedback. The tactile nature of sound - the way it bounces back to us from 
> other surfaces - helps us locate ourselves in relation to our surroundings 
> and to know what's behind us or around a corner. Fast asleep, our 
> heartbeats quicken at a loud noise. In the womb, before we are aware, we 
> hear the cacophonous exertions of our mother's body. Returning from a 
> field trip to the Potomac River refuge in Northern Virginia last year, a 
> fourth grader wrote - in a passage that eventually reached a biologist in 
> Soldotna, Alaska - that "the best thing about this place is that it has 
> such nice noises you don't feel alone when you are alone."
> In a series of gloveless maneuvers, Betchkal screwed together a weather 
> station that would measure temperature, wind speed and direction, plus 
> humidity. He arranged the solar panels, connected them to a box of 
> batteries and sent power to the instruments: a sound level meter that 
> continuously logs decibels at specific frequencies and an audio recorder. 
> The meter powered on. The recorder did not. "Come on, you little stinker!" 
> Betchkal said. Thinking it might be frozen, he slipped the device under 
> his long johns, yelping when it met his thigh.
> The next day, Betchkal showed me on his computer how he uses a program 
> called Splat to analyze the data he gets. "Like in farming," he said, 
> "you've made the harvest, and now we're going to take that raw thing and 
> cook it or refine it down into something that can be used for different 
> products." Splat takes the data from the sound-level meter and arranges it 
> on a spectrogram: a blue field of time on which sounds appear as orange 
> shapes, their height representing their frequency, their brightness 
> showing loudness, their length duration. Scrolling through the month, 
> Betchkal labels many sounds by sight. Once he's done tagging, the data can 
> take on meaning, morphing into a graph of the circadian rhythms of 
> wood-frog calls, say, or a park map of helicopter audibility.
> Betchkal also listens to a subsample of the recordings. "I love this 
> clip," he said, pressing play on his computer. We heard a snuffling at the 
> microphone and, nearby, the bellowing of 
> babies<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/02bear-with-cubs.mp3#audiofix> 
> that were actually bear cubs. "Part of my job is to go around and document 
> these rare sounds," he said, "to better understand the resource that needs 
> to be protected - are there really important sounds out there that are 
> disappearing?" He clicked again, and the tinny gurgle of an ice 
> cave<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/06alpine-stream.mp3#audiofix> 
> filled the speakers. "There's thousands of little bubbles," he said in 
> narration. "I imagine like a big cave, and each room of the cave probably 
> has different ways of reflecting sound. We can share sounds with people 
> who might not be able to walk up to that ice cave and go hang around 
> inside of it. Maybe even better, it excites them enough that they're like, 
> All right, let's go on a hike! We're going to check out an ice cave! Or 
> whatever."
> Listening to Betchkal's recordings of people passing his stations in the 
> course of their travels can be unexpectedly elegiac. Tents flap, camp 
> stoves hiss, people laugh, sniffle, adjust their packs. Once, trolling 
> through audio from a mountain site, Betchkal happened upon a two-man 
> concert, climbers duetting on guitar and mandolin. Another time, he 
> discovered a rocky summer avalanche, an escalating 
> rumble<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/03avalanche.mp3#audiofix> 
> so deep it shook his desk.
> On the ridge top, Betchkal's body heat and hand warmers failed to revive 
> the recorder. After more than an hour of troubleshooting, a spare pair of 
> AA batteries succeeded in getting the device to work - but that meant, 
> unlike the rest of the solar-powered equipment, it would run for only 
> about a week. "It's disappointing to me - really disappointing," Betchkal 
> said. "But that can happen - that does happen. If things go wrong, I'll 
> come back, and I can fix them." He wrestled the instrument case closed and 
> sealed it against the snow and wind of the coming month. The weather had 
> begun to seep through our Polartec defenses, numbing our joints; water and 
> pen ink were solids; cheese sticks gonged against canteens. "One last 
> thing we need to do," Betchkal said, shaking off defeat. "I know 
> everyone's probably cold and tired, but we're going to listen. Get 
> comfortable, be sure you're not needing to fidget with stuff - " A zipper 
> zipped. Two magpies chirped. I lifted my arms from my sides to shush my 
> sleeves and closed my eyes.
> Night fell as we retraced our steps along the trail. The sky turned from 
> lavender to indigo while the snow on the ground and the mountains glowed 
> even when the last of the sun was gone. We headed for Jupiter, hanging low 
> above the trees, and as we walked, I pictured the station back on the 
> ridge, wrapped in the same darkness. When Betchkal harvests the audio, he 
> will find us repacking our packs, exclaiming over our frozen apparatuses 
> and sliding down the hillside into the willow field below. He will also, 
> for three minutes, witness us still our movements and attune our ears to 
> one of the quietest places left on Earth. In that window, I could hear the 
> vastness of the valley - no sound marks materialized, like buoys bobbing 
> on an empty ocean, to segment the sense of infinity. The landscape 
> enveloped me, as Betchkal said it would, and I felt I was the landscape, 
> where mountains and glaciers rose and shifted eons before the first 
> heartbeats came to life.
> "Standing in that place right there," Betchkal told me later, "I had a 
> complete sense that I was standing in that place right there and not drawn 
> or distracted from it at all." I felt located, too, but I could also 
> imagine that if I hollered, my voice might not ever bounce back - that 
> where I was, precisely, was a ridge top in a wide wilderness on a spinning 
> rock in outer space. Ahead of me on the trail, as we neared our 
> destination, Betchkal's figure blurred in the darkness. The trees around 
> us disappeared. There were, at last, only our footsteps. Then, barely 
> audible, an inevitable airborne murmur - a sign from the civilized world.
> Sounds from Denali National Park and Preserve, 2004 to 2011, courtesy of 
> the National Park Service.
> Play 
> Audio<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/01-ptarmigan.mp3#audiofix>
> *         0:12 Ptarmigan, the State Bird of 
> Alaska<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/01-ptarmigan.mp3#audiofix>
> *         0:46 Bear With 
> Cubs<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/02bear-with-cubs.mp3#audiofix>
> *         0:53 
> Avalanche<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/03avalanche.mp3#audiofix>
> *         5:12 Dall 
> Sheep<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/04dall-sheep.mp3#audiofix>
> *         0:15 Sandhill 
> Cranes<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/05sandhill-cranes.mp3#audiofix>
> *         1:15 Alpine Stream Feeding Into an Ice 
> Cave<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/06alpine-stream.mp3#audiofix>
> *         2:34 
> Squirrel<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/08scolding-squirrel.mp3#audiofix>
> *         0:26 Wood 
> Frog<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/09wood-frog.mp3#audiofix>
> *         1:07 Large Insect Landing on a Microphone 
> Windshield<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20120314-soundscapes/10insect.mp3#audiofix>
>
> Kim Tingley<mailto:kktingley at gmail.com> is a freelance writer and an 
> online columnist for OnEarth magazine.
> Editor: Dean Robinson<mailto:d.robinson-MagGroup at nytimes.com>
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