The Silence


Old Mojave Road
The Mojave Desert, California


I have taken this back road on the edge of the Mojave, and stopped near a desert dirt trail. I've driven miles away from the Interstate to a place where my cellphone offers "no service," and my radio is only a mute, crackling reminder that civilization is out of reach from where I stand. I've done this on purpose, one of those spontaneous traveling moments that sometimes possess you, that won't let you go until you give into it, edging past your good, common sense.

Inspired by a sudden memory of something once read and stored away, I wanted to experience a certain desert phenomenon—to stop along a deserted road and listen for something rare:

Silence.

Not a 21st century silence—a seventh day of genesis silence, the music of geology. The kind inside planets and stars, not the pallid kind inside me. A high hissing sound to the ears, like some empty, earthy recording tape. Edward Abbey, that literary guru of the desert, described the sound not so much a silence as a great stillness.

What would it be like to hear, to feel, the stillness of the earth?

What would it be like to feel stillness at all? I wanted to hear the sound of the earth empty of all movement, and, for a still moment, just a moment, the sound of myself empty of me.

I make myself settle down, calm, quiet. I take a step away from the snap, crackle, pop of the heat on my car's hood. And then another.

And another.

Standing now on the dirt road headed due south before me, I listen for the hiss of nothing.

The wind whips, then dies; I close my eyes...
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A longhaul truck breaks the trance, barreling from a long way away.

I open my eyes, turn toward the sound, and it is suddenly by me, hard enough to blow my sunhat and my stillness away.