News & Articles

I was recently in the Twin Ports for a day of doctor visit with enough time left for worship at several of my favorite big box places, where near-religious awe at their contents led to sizeable contributions  left at the checkout plate. Seeing how I don’t make the trip in a flit, as was once so easy, I now stay overnight—a cost to me but a slight benefit for the Ports economy. It was there I noticed something almost too obvious to note: you are a lot noisier than where I live. But maybe it’s better saying it this way. The sounds of an urban area are a lot noisier than wind in tree limbs or the soft rhythm of the big lake. It’s quiet but not dead still in rural places. Outside the screens, mosquito drone and spring peeper embellish the silences of night with threads of sound.

A much-remembered joy of my youth involves nights spent in tents outdoors, where rich, earthy odors came with each breath and the moist air was alive with small sounds of a toad bumbling in the dark or skeeters frustrated by the curtain of net keeping them from me, spread out like an X atop my sleeping bag in the sultry night. Real quiet is much wealthier than an absence of sound. Quiet is qualities of silence we feel as much or more than we hear them. A bass popping the black surface of a night lake a hundred feet offshore is no more than a plash of water, but in the breaking of bond between depth and surface so much conveys. The mind sees the unseen drama of fish and doomed prey. Our inner listening hears the unheard expansion of ripples on the glassy surface. The spirit attends the unvoiced tale old as human awareness of moon specks chasing the receding ripples, as one circle of life flows melting into another.

There are qualities of sound and silence that are above ordinary worth or value because they soothe the soul with the soft signals of circle after circle being completed. In a somewhat out-of-the-way place such as my home, I’m so accustomed to sweet silences and organic sound that the ordinary hubbub of an urban night was so much I had to mask it with low-volume radio white noise.

In rural places, the alive quiet of the night is a touch place between worlds of human experience and the organic activity of the earth. A quiet night is precious. It is a sacred silence. Peace that has no armed defense of its own is a condition requiring defense and defenders. Sadly, as is too often true, the defense comes late: after the river is polluted, after the bodies are cold, after the quiet is dismembered. And sadly, too, once a thing is shattered, its mending may not be possible or will prove far less satisfactory than the unspotted gift before its breaking.

I still have some peace-of-night, but it is less intact and heavily injured by the Minnesota Highway Department installing centerline rumble strips along rural 61. The strip nearest me is approx. one-quarter mile away, but I can hear it in the night as distinctly as you’d hear “Math-You” and “Miss Kitty” from a TV and know without doubt a neighbor blocks away was watching a rerun of “Gunsmoke.” The strips are loud, very loud, and they disturb the quiet in precisely those places where stillness is a precious value. I know “saving lives” is precious as well. I’d be well onboard if rural 61 had a record of accidents where a rumble strip in the midst of nowhere would have made a difference. From this perspective, it makes as much sense as if another MHD (Minnesota Health instead of Highway Department) required everyone to be vaccinated for Kangarooitis as a safety measure to make sure we’d never get it. I’d warrant the vaccinations would be 100 percent successful, as was NOT having them.

I dislike being critical of public programs because they do (or should) look after our common interests and attend to things we individuals can’t handle on our own. But it is also the case that good programs and fine intentions can have unhappy or excessive results. A problem I see too frequently is that of programs focused too narrowly and then applied too broadly. It seems to me a narrow fix on highway accident statistics led to a too-grand application of those numbers applying everywhere. Head-on collision is not a major rural safety issue. But to administrators, engineers, and the like, a bigger program is always more impressive and rewarding than a small one; and there it is. The public gets more than was bargained for or needed.

It’s interesting how narrowly a program can gallop forward with its fixed focus the center of a universe. Up the shore, we’ve had Soil and Water handling the Flute Reed River Project to reduce the results of erosion through clay areas (quite common along much of the shore). There were scoffers who said that unless the clay was carpeted, it would erode and the river run red. And there were those who said the improvement was necessary and worth the cost. We’ll see. Could be an absolute success story, a “nice try,” or a “Whose dumb idea was that?” (For some it will always be one or the other.) But one thing the project did accomplish was final removal and effective obliteration of the CCC headquarters adjacent to the project area. Just how that demolition helps save the river is unclear to me, but it was done, and I suspect done without much thought to any resource but the river and the river project. Well, the old CCC site is part of a cultural and heritage resource. It at least deserved to be properly recorded before being dozed and covered in straw. A person could ask. I also think it worth asking the MHD to give us back what was taken. Restore the silences torn up by the mile.