Searching for peace and quiet, near and far, in Pennsylvania

On a recent, late-spring morning, in the blue hour before sunrise, I awoke alone to the sound of my breath in a tent I pitched in the middle-of-nowhere New Mexico.

No birds. No insects. No planes in the sky and no cars on the dusty roads that cut through the rocks and mesquite in the desert around me. Just slow breath, in and out, as if nature had turned on its noise canceling.

“This is the quietest place I’ve ever been,” I thought that morning.

Back home in the Philadelphia area, quiet is rare. I live blocks from six lanes of highway, and I can hear its collective drone 24 / 7, despite the noise barriers. It’s late August now and the gas-powered leaf blowers are ever-present, but I also hear house crickets and wind chimes, the blue jay that visits my bird feeder in suburbia.

It’s not all bad.

The surreal quiet of Southwestern New Mexico stuck with me, though, and got me thinking about what I seek from nature, what I consider noise — a tractor-trailer engine braking — and what I consider heavenly instruments, like the haunting call of common loons I heard with my coffee last summer in Vermont.

Where are the quiet places closer to home, I wondered.

So I did a little research, hoping to visit some of those places this summer for much-needed peace, and for journalism. Research has shown, time and again, that silence is healing, both physically and mentally. Quiet lowers blood pressure, increases focus, and improves mindfulness, that elusive state so hard to attain thanks to the modern world and the technologies that, in theory, were meant to make life simpler.

“The bottom line is that quiet makes us healthier and happier human beings,” said Matt Mikkelsen of Quiet Parks International, a nonprofit that helps municipalities and conservation groups preserve quiet places.

As the “rural” reporter at The Inquirer, I’ve visited most of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties and had a good hunch about where I’d find swaths of silence, places like Potter County, a.k.a. “God’s Country,” or the vast Allegheny National Forest farther west. Closer to home, there’s Sullivan County, one of the state’s least-populated counties. I’ve spent a few dozen nights in tents there and passed days staring at trees.

To make it official, though, I visited the Quiet Parks International website. It gives out awards and official designations in rural and urban settings, on trails, and even below the sea. The group is interested in promoting quiet for every living thing, not just us humans.

“Quiet is good for the birds and animals, too, as it helps them communicate, attract mates, and sense danger,” its website claims.

There’s no official “quiet park” in Pennsylvania, but the organization allows people to nominate potential silent refuges that could be later tested with decibel meters. There were no parks or even nominees in New Jersey, where I live, and surprisingly few in Pennsylvania. The lone nominee in Western Pennsylvania’s vast, rural forest was the Hammersley Wild Area, a relatively untouched 30,253-acre tract of wooded valley and plateaus in Potter and Clinton Counties. There were a handful of markers in Philadelphia and some surrounding counties that could, eventually, become urban quiet parks, including two I visited in recent months: Bartram’s Garden in Southwest Philly and the Shofuso Japanese Cultural Center in West Fairmount Park.

Caroline Winschel, director of development and communications at Bartram’s Garden, said connectivity, not quiet per se, is what the 50-acre park along the Schuylkill strives for.

“Just by the nature of being in a city, we can’t control the surrounding noise,” Winschel said. “We can be a place where you can find quiet in a way you wouldn’t expect, a place to find a moment of beauty and reflection or just a nice place to stretch your legs.”

When I visited Bartram’s in late July, I heard air traffic, the biggest offender to quiet, along with dirt bikes and car horns. Some distant, rhythmic pounding of construction echoed along the river. Somehow, though, in the wild, flowery fields that lead down to the river, I was overwhelmed by the wind through the tall grass and treetops, the collective trill of thousands, perhaps millions, of delicate tree crickets hidden in them. By the river, I looked out over Center City and thought of people I knew somewhere in those high-rises, and listened to the water lapping against the shore.

Those are the sounds that stuck with me.

Potential urban quiet parks, like Bartram’s and Shofuso, would be graded differently, allowing for higher decibels and shorter gaps between quiet moments, said Ulf Bohman, executive director of Urban Quiet Parks. Car and train noise is allowed, Bohman said, but the frequency of air traffic is often a deal-breaker, the reason why no nominees in New York City have qualified.

“The park needs to offer sites within the park that offer visitors an experience of quiet and stillness,” Bohman said of urban areas. “This includes not only sound but also visual stillness — which means you should be surrounded by nature and not be visually disturbed by buildings, roads, power lines, or other city structures.”

In 2022, Brooklyn writer Xochitl Gonzalez published an essay — “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?“ — in the Atlantic, suggesting that the “sound of silence is gentrification.” The wealthy run off to vacation homes in the summer, Gonzalez wrote, and the “bourgeoisie are safely shielded by the hum of their central air.” Meanwhile, the less fortunate live in a world of open windows, listening to “motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music.”

Gordon Hempton, coauthor of One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet and cofounder of Quiet Parks International, said that’s precisely why the urban parks initiative is so important. Not everyone can travel to the middle of nowhere, but they still deserve quiet. Hempton said he often has conversations with people who claim they “hate” quiet, and while they can love the din of a city from cultural and nostalgic perspectives, it’s simply not healthy.

“There’s no evidence that noise is good for us,” Hempton said.

In June, I traveled west to the Hammersley Wild Area and did a 10.4-mile loop through deep, lush valleys. I didn’t see a soul for four hours and my ears only picked up the leaves rustling above me, birds and chipmunks, my water bottle clanking against my hip, and the natural white noise of water flowing over rocks. I heard a plane once or twice and the bizarre calls of two barred owls, described as someone saying “Who cooks for you?”

In the absence of noise, I found myself filling the void. I pride myself on my barred owl call so I answered them back. I also sang the Grateful Dead’s “Playing in the Band” over and over, possibly breaking Quiet Park protocol. (At least it wasn’t a Bluetooth speaker, the bane of silence in nature everywhere.)

The visit to Hammersley was rewarding, physically and mentally. It was quiet enough, though incomparable to New Mexico or Maine’s Baxter State Park, where I slept in a lean-to with my kids a mile from anyone else. Even Hammersley, as remote as it is, might not meet Quiet Park standards because of air traffic and Pennsylvania’s most ubiquitous hobby: deer hunting and the rifle sounds that accompany it.

My biggest revelation, however, was my last visit to Shofuso, in August. A late text message from Sandi Polyakov, the center’s garden curator and preservation director, dimmed my hopes for deep quiet before I arrived: lawn mowers and leaf blowers were out in force in Fairmount Park.

“I’ve accepted them as part of existence,” Polyakov said of the landscaping crew.

A dozen visitors wandered around the neatly manicured garden, eyeing the large, orange and white koi that swam routes along the pond’s edge. Polyakov wasn’t aware anyone had nominated Shofuso as a Quiet Park but he seemed proud.

“We’re gonna have so much stuff to talk about,” he said.

Polyakov took me into Shofuso’s ceremonial tea room, a simple, traditional Japanese structure with woven rice floor mats and lightweight, sliding “shoji” doors. One open shoji revealed a Japanese maple beyond it, its delicate leaves rustling in the hot breeze. It looked Technicolor, a living piece of art framed by the doorway. The sound of crickets carried in, along with the hint of a broom making rhythmic sweeps on the surrounding wooden walkways.

The Japanese, Polyakov said, thought of every detail to touch the senses, even the different sounds water makes when it’s hot or cold.

“We’re savoring the moment to that level,” he said. “It’s a perfect example. Yes, it’s a sound, it’s also like quietness.”

Shofuso, Polyakov told me, was built in Japan and shipped to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art shortly after, where it became a hit. After its run, cities put in bids to house it and its builders chose Fairmount Park; we’re so lucky it wound up there.

After walking me through another, larger hall, with an even more expansive, perfectly framed view of the garden, Polyakov left me alone to wander. While it wasn’t the quietest place I’ve ever visited, Shofuso’s serenity went deeper than any other location, a calming and much-needed salve for my endless summer. And a much shorter drive.