In the Company of Silence

  I once led a program called "Endangered Night."  It was about the stars and how light pollution is making the constellations increasingly difficult to see.  Many people are aware of the tragedy of our brightened skies, but what about "endangered silence?"

   Two years ago, I was in the desert at this time, living in a tent near an RV, helping with a research project.  It wasn't an easy time for me.  I was going through a great deal of inner searching and was in a new place with new people.  I wasn't certain where I stood in relation to anyone there.  At night or in the mornings, I was often terribly lonely, lost, and uncertain.  But during the days, I loved the desert, and I loved the solitude.

There are not many places in developed countries where you don't have ambient sound drifting about at the edge of your consciousness: cell phones, distant traffic, the buzzing of electric lines.  Even on a hike, the nearest road or the conversation of other hikers may hum on the edge of your hearing.  Hiking around in the desert was some of the greatest quiet I have ever found.  Even the jackrabbits seem to be masters of silence, sitting still in the heat watching you from large, orange, unmoving eyes.  It is easy to pass by a jackrabbit if you are not looking for them.  Even bounding away in long-legged strides, they make hardly any noise in their hurry.  Sometimes watching them, I found that the wide spaces made it seem that a part of my spirit was made to go bounding too, through the long places like a jackrabbit.

       Even in February, the desert is hot during the day--a nice clean, dry heat.  Somehow the bright sunshine seems to still everything and turn time back to a less hurried age.  The rocks and sparse plants, everything pokey or spikey, seem to infuse the place with an arid nostalgia.  Yet, I enjoyed being on my own for parts of the day.  "By my onesome" is a better description of how I felt on those explorations than "by my lonesome".  Even with company, when we spoke, it did not feel noisy, and when we were not speaking, the silence was anything but unnatural.  We could listen instead to the crunch of the gravel under our feet in the dry washes, or the slide of a bank crumbling under our boots.

     At night, coyotes sounded distant and the clop-clop of the wild burros sound close, so loud, like someone's footsteps coming close to investigate.  When they were near by I would wake wide-away, heart thumping, although burros would be unlikely to bother us.  When the sound of their hooves died away, the sound of the night was so beautiful that it was like a a clear night with no moon, and the comings and goings of sounds were like the stars, highlighted by the surrounding velvet of night.

   The cities of Arizona are growing by leaps and bounds.  Aside from the fact that water there is scarce, there is something rare and wild that will be lost if the cities creep in on the rocks and the acacias.  Not just the jackrabbits and the roadrunners, not just the gila monsters and the cougars and mountain goats, not just the small determined desert flowers will be lost.  There is a stillness in the desert not often elsewhere found.