Silence

The summer I was twelve our family packed the ’61 Chevy and wound up the lushly forested highway to the snowy summit of the Cascade mountains and then down their eastern slopes to Lake Chelan. A thin blue ray of sparkling water piercing the North Cascades, Chelan is fifty miles long, just a mile wide yet nearly a mile deep cradled between the precipitous mountain cliffs. The only way up the slender lake past the 10 mile point where the road ended in those days was the Lady of the Lake ferry. From the vessel’s deck we saw eagles drifting amidst the rocky spires. A bus now carried us from the ferry dock just shy of Stehekin up steep switchbacked roads to Holden Village, an old mining encampment converted into a magical summer camp amidst the peaks and forests, our home for the week.

Silence. I walked out into the night amidst these mountains and every loft and space was bursting with silence. Stars by the hundreds of thousands burned white overhead in silence. The peaks rose glowing in starlight into a great vast sky whose very substance was silence. The forests breathed silence. The silence in these mountains was so enormous it thundered. I remember walking up the trails in the darkness. There were night sounds of crickets and creatures and running water, but they were all held and overwhelmed by this big encompassing silence.

Far from mountains now, I seek silence in the course of my days whenever I can find it. Dewdrops if not lakes of silence. Morning is best, waking just before dawn. Out of the silence order proceeds: solutions to issues and challenges bubble up out of the silence, a reassuring quietness fills me, provisioning me for a day of intense activity.

A walk or run at the end of the day in the quiet hills lets me shake off the swarm of noisy complications that have been buzzing and whirring and beeping and alarming me all day. I breathe in deeply, let it all go, offered to the silence of the hills, and come back to that part of me that is still. The physical exercise does me good. Somehow after exertion, my body can rest better, come into its own quiet well-being. I try to carry the silence with me as I return home to prepare for the next day.

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