Square inches

In a brief piece in Sunday's New York Times Style Magazine, Alex Kuczynski described the work and philosophy of an "acoustic ecologist" named Gordon Hempton. In 2005 Hempton selected a spot of land (a square inch, to be precise; this was a gesture; not an investment) in Washington, and decided to do everything that he could to eliminate any and all human-related sources of noise audible on his plot. Those overhead jets, whose roar fell like a veil on his land? He wrote to several airlines, asking them to reroute their flight paths, so that they spared his land and that of nearby Olympic National Park. And so on.

With the weather in Baltimore quite pleasant of late, Cleo and I have had a few chances to spend some serious time outside. Yesterday, because the legendary Memorial Stadium playground happened to be locked up, we wound up on a quilt on the grass of nearby Clifton Park. A few golfers puttered by, completing rounds; some schoolkids ambled, slowly, towards a school. And as Cleo practiced standing, I simply listened to the ambient noise.

A steady stream of cars, on nearby Harford Road, was most obvious. There was the sound of a mower, as well, and the occasional beat of a recorded snare drum, from a nearby tool shed. The voices of workers, every few minutes. And, beneath, that weird and constant hum of any city. In all, an insistent symphony: so strong, in fact, that when a jet actually did pass overhead, on its way to BWI, I couldn't even hear it. Its noise was lost in the steady rush of the city.

Obviously, no one expects cities to be quiet. But, as Hempton argues, it may be possible that the constant need to tune out ambient noise has led us, on one level, to become insensitive listeners. We spend so much energy, he says, ignoring extraneous sounds that we also repress the sounds of our community and our children. So for a few minutes, I simply listened to the drum, to the cars, to the wash of noise. And then I listened to Cleo: to her tiny but persistent huffing; to the slight rattle in her chest that's the residue of a cold; to the arc of her juicy raspberries. Is there more? Obviously. Is it often lost? Sure. Inch by inch, though, we fight to retain what's important.