increased 25 percent since just 2002, and 30,000 commercial aircraft
fly overhead per day. In 2012, the Federal Aviation Administration
predicted an astounding 90 percent increase in air traffic over the next
twenty years. Human activities in general increase background noise
levels by about 30 decibels. The official word for the human-made
soundscape is the anthrophone.
Stats like those above dismayed Gordon Hempton, a sound
engineer based in Washington State who decided to travel the country
in search of the few remaining quiet places. By his count, the entire
continental United States has fewer than a dozen sites where you can’t
hear human-made noise for at least fifteen minutes at dawn. That’s a
pretty ridiculously low bar. But it is still so out of reach. The quietest
place in the country, Hempton discovered, is a spot in the Hoh
Rainforest at Olympic National Park. If you want to hear the earth
without us, it’s marked by a red stone on a moss-covered log at 47-
degrees 51.959N, 123-degrees 52.221W, 678 feet above sea level. But
get there early; by midday, even there, you can hear overflights a
dozen times per hour. Noise may well be the most pervasive pollutant
in America.
I never thought much about airplane noise until I moved to D.C. I
grew up on the eleventh floor of an apartment building in New York,
where the sounds of the city were mostly muted and charismatic: a
flash of mariachi, a distant ambulance, a summer storm. Out West,
the planes were fewer and farther away. But my neighborhood now is
one of the loudest in the city thanks to flights following the Potomac
River as they roar in and out of Reagan National Airport. Jets fly
overhead at a rate of about one every two minutes starting early in the
morning, with average decibel levels between 55 and 60 but
sometimes spiking much higher (60 decibels is high enough to drown
out normal speech; over 80 can damage hearing).
I knew this moving in. Neighbors assured me I would learn to
ignore the planes. “After a year or so, you don’t hear them anymore,”