Ears to the Ground

Stalking the Sounds of the Quiet Frontier

Written by Kit Boss

Photographs by Harley Soltes

Originally published in Pacific Magazine, June 20, 1993.
Reprinted with permission from The Seattle Times

ALL COPYRIGHTS RESERVED

The human ear contains the hardest bone in the body. It also contains the smallest bone, one that resembles a stirrup tinier than a grain of rice. The outside of the ear contains no bone at all, only cartilage, and skin, and a pendulous lump of fat. The inner ear contains a round chamber called the vestibule. The actual locus of hearing is called the organ of Corti and is made up of more than 15,000 hair cells.

Recently, an audiologist tested Gordon Hempton's ears and found them to be only slightly more sensitive than average.

How then to explain the amazing things Hempton does with his ears, not the least of which is to hear the difference between truth and lies?

He swears he can do this. The power to become Hempton the Human Polygraph reveals itself most often when he listens to a person being interviewed on the television news and realizes that the person is spewing a line of utter, A-1 hooey.

This suggests lucrative possibilities involving bar bets and appearances as a contestant on "The Hollywood Squares," but Hempton has better things to do than waste his talents on something so base. That would be like Superman using his X-ray vision to see to see through Lois Lane’s blouse.

Hempton prefers to train his ears on the subtle vibrations of nature. He has traveled the globe with a head-shaped microphone named Fritz to record soundscapes with titles like "Coyote Grassland," "Juniperwind," "Desert Solitude at Bushman Fountain," "Receding Tide Reveals Creek," and "Ear of Wood."

On Hempton's business card it says "The Sound Tracker, TM." If personalities also could be protected by trademark, his should be. He is what you might call, at a time when there seem to be fewer and fewer of them around, an original.

"Quiet places," he says, "are the think-tank of the soul."

At age 40, Hempton has emerged as one of the world's premier nature sound recordists, praised by no less an aural expert than avant-garde composer John Cage. Hempton wants to capture the vanishing sounds of nature and, by opening our ears to them, move us to preserve the real thing.

In 1991 he recorded the chorus of dawn around the globe. Last year he hunted down the sounds of the Mississippi River that tuned the ears of Mark Twain, a man so sensitive to sound that he demanded the programs to his lectures be printed on special paper to reduce the rustling. Later this year Hempton will visit Yosemite to prepare to record sounds described in the writings of naturalist John Muir.

After that his plans are fuzzy, though he is intrigued by the writings of Thoreau and Darwin. Also, he would like someday to find and record the Garden of Eden.

"LISTEN TO THAT." The first time I met Hempton was to borrow a few of his compact discs, filled with insects buzzing and wolves howling and brooks babbling. He gave me directions to his office, which is in the basement of an old Ballard building that also houses a nightclub and an answering service. The door to his office is metal, with a padlock. Inside it feels like a bomb shelter, windowless and concrete. Objects useful in the event of war abound: watertight Army surplus ammo cases; canisters of camp-stove fuel; a world map with red dots stuck to the Olympic coast, Hawaii, Australia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Spain and Brazil.

At the center of the room sat Hempton, flanked by a computer and a stack of audio gear. "Listen to that," Hempton repeated. It was one of the very first things he told me after flicking off the buzzing fluorescent lights. I strained to hear something besides quiet. Gradually, I became aware of a faint hum. "It's the building," he whispered. "The building is vibrating."

A lot of our time together over the next few weeks went like that: Him whispering about something for me to listen to; me trying to hear it.

Hempton flipped the lights back on and dragged out a milk crate filled with material he thought I'd find interesting. The contents included: a copy of Sound and Vibration ("The noise and vibration control magazine"); someone's master's thesis, "The Song of the Common Crow (Corvus brochyrhynchos);" "Acoustic Communication in Birds," Volumes 1 and 2; "The Effects of Noise on Man;" a 1992 visitor's guide to Hannibal and Mark Twain Lake, with an aerial photo of the Injun Joe Campground & Waterslide; and a folder of letters from an elementary school class in Elko, Nev.

The class wrote after watching the PBS documentary on Hempton's "Dawn Chorus" project. They asked Hempton things like "Are gaffes part horse?" And, "If you wanted to do you think you could make Fritz talk?" And, "How much sound do you think is left in the world?"

Hempton divides the world into two spheres: quiet and noise. The quiet part is actually brimming with nature sounds: rain falling on skunk cabbage leaves; stones rubbing against each other in a creek; insects beating their wings in the morning to make themselves warm and dry enough to fly. Noise would include cowbells clanging, 8-tracks playing AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" and that beep-beep-beeping big trucks make when they back up.

Unfortunately, our ears are not designed to distinguish between the sounds of nature and noise. The little bones and hairs inside our head pretty much pick up anything between 20 and 20,000 vibrations per second and louder than snow falling, then leave it to the brain to make sense of the racket.

Background noise is Hempton's bane, his nemesis, the stone in his shoe. In the field, with Fritz bolted to a tripod and the digital audio tape recorder rolling, Hempton's day has been ruined by a single mercury-vapor lamp buzzing on a barn an eighth of a mile away.

The nature recordings that Hempton has grouped by theme and committed to CD are subtle, spatial, sensitively balanced things: "Cedar Creek," "A Day in the Life of a Planet" and "Winds Across a Continent." Each selection preserves a symphony of sound, just as Hempton's binaural microphone picked it up. He positions the mike meticulously, using Fritz like Ansel Adams used his camera.

When Hempton was starting out as a nature recordist in 1980 he had trouble finding a noise-free place. So he took a geological survey map of Washington State and marked the major highways, the air traffic corridors, population centers and roadless wilderness areas. To the unmarked areas he went in search of silence.

In 1984 he found 21 locations where he could record for 15 minutes, noise-free. Five years later, the number had dwindled to three. "Nature sound and quietude are not even on the list of environmental assessment criteria," he says. "What does that tell you? When it comes to deciding what to protect, we do a lot of listening to each other but not a lot of listening to the land. And the land is talking."

Hempton bought a pickup truck with no radio, which means there's not much to do in it except ride and talk. We are on our way to a marsh in Southwestern Washington, near Willapa Bay, for Hempton's first recording outing of the year. It is the exact site where he has recorded on the same Sunday in mid-April for all but one of the past nine years. This year It happens to be raining.

I ask Hempton whether his tent is waterproof. "Hahaha-haha! Tent? What tent?" he hoots. "We're all wet from the skin in."

Sentences spill from Hempton and pile up into paragraphs as If they had been floating in his head, perfectly whittled during all those hours of listening.

In Hempton-speak, valleys are "amphitheaters," river rocks are "instruments." He describes the sound of insects awaking in the Kalahari Desert as "the most delicate music.”

"It's like listening to this sweet symphony of violins. It really begs the questions: What is our place in this symphony? Without quiet places, the question is never even posed."

He tells me that the people who filmed the recent movie about an Andes plane crash, "Alive," bought some of his recordings of wind. It can be one of the most difficult sounds to capture, he says, because what you mostly get is the sound of it whistling through the microphone. Hempton found several passages in his 500-hour library of field recordings he thought would be suitable. He asked the movie people: "What's the wind going through - rocks, trees? What time of day is it? What emotions are the characters feeling?"

This is a man who has given much thought to wind. Also to streams, surf, showers and the possibility of navigating a forest by the sound of the trees.

"I'm not a mystic," Hempton says. "I'm not hearing things that aren't there. It's not like Super Ears is headed out into the wilderness to hear things no one else can. You don't need a degree in nature listening. You don't even need five minutes of instruction. You just go out there and open up."

Eventually, Hempton parks his truck near the marsh and makes camp in a lumpy grass field across from a field of clear-cut stumps. Someone logged the field, then burned off the undergrowth - the duff - to promote a new crop of trees.

No duff means more runoff. More runoff means an out-of-tune stream. "A stream becomes more harmonious over time," Hempton says. "It actually tunes itself. Because of the physics of the flow, the rocks adjust themselves. A clear-cut sets the sound of a stream back hundreds of years."

At 4:30 the next morning Hempton's watch goes beep beep beep. Rain falls light but steady. The sun makes a gray suggestion. At 5:20 a bird trills. A frog pipes up 10 minutes later. This excites Hempton, who hears something worth recording in the transition from frog to not frog. He scrambles into the trees to position Fritz. Then he rolls tape.

Sound gushes through the headphones. Burbling water; buzzing saw fly; chirping peepers - enough sound to drown in.

"Western winter wren," Hempton whispers when a new voice joins the chorus. Very nice. But the Eastern winter wren… Carusos, all. I could tell you real embarrassing stories about chasing along a mountainside for an Eastern winter wren that was playing hard to get."

He terminates the recording at 6:41 when a bull starts bellowing in a nearby field. He spools up several hundred feet of cable, retrieves Fritz, dries it and wraps it in a garbage bag.

LINER NOTES for Hempton's life:

He can sit so still during recording that birds have been known to land on him.

He has stopped being surprised to hear underground water flowing, insects chewing or skunk cabbage growing.

One of his eyes is greener than much grass (the other is brown), and his face is so angular that if it were a rock you would not want to climb it.

Caves and other enclosed spaces scare him.

He calls his 7-year-old son "Oogie," because when Hempton and his wife, Julie, were standing by his crib trying to think of a nickname, that's the sound he made. He did not christen his micro-phone Fritz - that moniker was selected by the German manufacturer, who wanted something more euphonious than "the Neumann KU-81i."

He played trumpet until eighth grade, when he grew bored with reading sheet music and began spending more time floating down the Potomac on big logs, like Huck Finn.

He treats Fritz with the same product sold at auto supply stores to preserve tires, vinyl tops and dash boards.

He beholds a few of his fellow sound recordists with the same regard that his father, an Eagle Scout and retired Coast Guard communication specialist, reserves for tent peg stealers and fire cheats. Woe to those - and they are many - who would sell studio-futzed crapola, or pass off crinkling cellophane as a brush fire, or whistling elevator shafts as genuine wind. "It's fakery. Fraud. Looped product. Some of the sounds are totally faked - synthesized. Everyone has this idea that nature needs to be improved upon. If anything, it's a matter of where you're standing and when you're standing there. My job is finding the unmarked seats in nature's symphony halls." (In the growing niche of nature sound albums, tapes and CDs, Hempton's material happens to be the only recordings endorsed by the American Museum of Natural History.)

He lives in a part of Ballard where neighbors can still talk to each other from their front porches without shouting.

His ''hit list of sounds," which he hopes to capture someday, includes wind through pine trees, "the ultimate thunderstorm," and a place he calls Sonesia. It is "The Garden of Eden, almost. That perfect habitat. The actual cradle of human life. I can almost hear it in my mind. I haven't been able to find it, but it's something I know exists. I think it's in Africa." He figures he could find It in a few years of full time searching.

He loves to hear firecrackers explode, and counts himself a recovering pyromaniac.

He has recorded hog roundups and irrigation windmills and Seattle traffic. "I enjoy city sounds, too," he says, explaining his crusade for quiet places. "But they're not in danger."

WRITING ABOUT MUSIC, someone once said, is like dancing about architecture. That is, words fail. So, too, when the music is nature's.

A woodpecker sounds like dragging your knuckle fast over a damp washboard, sort of. Rain on skunk-cabbage leaves sounds like ball bearings dropping on a plastic umbrella, in a way. The fluttering of some bird's wings sounds like a playing card in bicycle spokes, or something. Heard all at once, they sound like nothing else, really.

John Muir - father of the national parks, founder of the Sierra Club, eccentric -knew how to describe nature sounds without falling back on the noises of man. Muir filled his journals with entries like this one, from an August night in 1886 when he made camp near the head of a place called Bloody Canyon, in the Sierras:

"Soon the night wind began to flow from the snowy peaks overhead, at first only a gentle breathing, then gaining strength, in less than an hour rumbled in massive volume something like a boisterous stream in a boulder choked channel, roaring and moaning down the canyon as if the work it had to do was tremendously important and fateful; and mingled with these storm tones were those of the waterfalls on the north side of the canyon, now sounding distinctly, now smothered by the heavier cataracts of air making a glorious psalm of savage wilderness."

Hempton combed all eight volumes of Muir's published journals and books, looking for nature sound descriptions. He found a lot. They inspired Hempton's latest major project, a sonic portrait of Yosemite with the working title "Muir's Music." Hempton plans to begin reconnaissance in the park this fall. He hopes to use the recordings to push for a "National Quiet Places System." Hempton's pet idea, it would designate one square inch in each National Park to be maintained as noise-free.

The repercussion of a single square inch of quiet would ripple through an entire park. Hempton reckons it would affect land use for about 80 miles in every direction, and would stifle the debate about good noise versus bad noise. [emphasis added]

If Muir were somehow to come back to life, he and Hempton would be hard pressed to keep quiet in each other's company. They both attended the University of Wisconsin and studied the same subject - botany. Muir liked to sleep in the woods with no more than a wool blanket, sometimes making his bed on a pile of pine boughs, sometimes in the nook of a tree. He climbed to the tops of trees to better hear the wind. He ran outside in the middle of earthquakes to listen. He built a cabin with a creek running through it. He hiked for days carrying only a few biscuits.

Muir's writings include a few sketchy passages on biscuit dough, which he advised be kneaded to the consistency of one's ear lobe. Hempton spent several days in the kitchen trying to bake a decent Muir biscuit. He emerged with what resembles a pleasant-tasting 10-grain shingle.

Hempton, as did Muir, takes great pleasure in lightening his load. His recording gear alone weighs about 50 pounds; what's left to jettison are creature comforts. He sleeps under a tarp instead of in a tent (to save weight, but also because he likes to feel the wind on his face). He dries his own jerky. To meet both his flatware and dental hygiene needs at the same time, he carries a combination spoon-toothbrush of his own design.

Hempton loves to devise elegant solutions to the problems nature throws his way. To boil a pot of water faster he carved a floating wooden lid. To help keep his balance while hiking rough terrain he built a walking staff he calls a "pole pack": two 3-foot lengths of Boeing surplus titanium tube, connected by a quick-release lever from an old bicycle, and crammed with survival gear (knife and saw, two lighters, two flash-lights, two flares, a tube each of sunscreen and insect repellent, aspirin, fishing line, lures, hooks, weights and a shaker each of salt and pep-per).

For cold weather recording he sewed a pair of head phones inside a hooded sweatshirt. He also spent two days trying to stitch together a hammock that could be slung in his canoe, so he could sleep in the middle of a lake if he wanted to. At some point he will undoubtedly want to.

"He gets obsessed with a certain concept - like hammocks," says his wife, Julie, who bought her husband a heavy duty sewing machine for his 40th birthday. "I think that's how he relaxes."

Hempton designed his sleeping bag, too, an ingenious zipless model with drawstrings on either end. A climber friend took one to the top of Everest. He had hoped to patent the bag, but it turned out to be too similar to an already patented fabric sleeve designed in the '20s for shipping bowling pins.

A LIFE MAKES A BETTER story if it includes an epiphany. Muir's happened in a Indianapolis carriage factory when a file punctured his eye. Soon afterward, he turned his back on the industrialized world and set off on his Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf of Mexico.

Hempton's particular Damascus Road experience visited him just off a highway in Iowa, somewhere between Waterloo and Prairie du Chien.

Driving from his summer job as a foreign fisheries observer out of Seattle back to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Hempton pulled off to the side of the road. He was tired so he decided to take a nap. He lay down in a field. The stars twinkled down on the rows of corn. The sound of quiet crickets, songbirds, mosquitoes, a thunderstorm touched the hairs in his organ of Corti as if for the first time.

Before the end of that academic year, Hempton quit school and moved to Seattle. After a summer spent on a halibut fishing boat, he bought a decent tape recorder and microphone and started recording the sounds around him. He listened to the tapes over and over. "I knew I had a tool to explore a world that had been all around me and I knew nothing about. It was like going swimming and all of a sudden having a face mask"

He had in mind to find work in botany but interviewed for a job as a Bucky's bike messenger on a lark. Then he took the job on a lark. Having spent his ration of larks, he soon realized there was money to be made as a serious bike messenger, leaving weekends free to pursue his true calling. He rode like a man possessed and sunk most of his earnings into better sound recording equipment: a $10,000 Swiss reel-to-reel deck; his $3,500 microphone, Fritz, designed to duplicate human hearing for testing the acoustics of concert halls.

He learned to use his gear in the urban wilderness: outside bars, at poker parties, alongside the railroad tracks in hobo jungles. His first commercially available recording was a cassette of the clickety-clack of railroad tracks; Hempton convinced a local hobby shop to stock it.

Meanwhile, the audio experts he peppered with technical questions mostly ignored him or treated him as if he were a bit flaky. John Cage, though, listened. "I wrote pages-long letters and Cage would reply with a paragraph or two of advice. Which I never did really understand," says Hempton. "The most important message was that what I was doing was important. Everyone else was saying, 'Why are you doing this?' I needed someone to tell me I wasn't crazy."

After seven years in the saddle as a bike messenger, Hempton dismounted to track sound full time. A short while later, when his tape deck was in the shop for repairs, he hopped back on his Bucky's bike to make some quick cash; as a bonus, he met the woman who would be his wife. Another bike messenger, she had been hired to fill the opening he left. Six weeks after their first date (a walk along the railroad tracks; campfire-roasted rabbit; harmonica music) they eloped. For a wedding announcement they sent postcards with a photograph of the two of them hopping into a boxcar.

Subtracting all the time Hempton has been out in the field recording, they have probably spent only six of those nine married years together. A few weeks after their daughter Abigail was born, Hempton left on the Dawn Chorus project; that project alone consumed more than four months in the field.

"Everybody thinks it's easy," Julie says. "They picture him sitting around the campfire drinking a cup of coffee with the tape recorder running. They don't imagine him at 3 a.m., cold and wet, under a bush."

He caught pneumonia once waiting for a herd of elk to snort by in the Hoh Valley. Other times he has come close to hearing the hot pant of death: a jaguar in the Brazilian Rain Forest; crocodiles in an Australian billabong; a Felis leo on the African savanna, accompanied by a translator whose only English was "lions" and "no lions."

He survived, eventually to record 15 compact discs collected under the Earth Sound series and Quiet Places Collection, along with other recordings not commercially available. In 1989, for instance, aided by a $10,000 Lindbergh Foundation grant, he celebrated the state centennial by recording "The Washington Wilderness Soundscape," based on pioneer diaries.

He made an even bigger splash the following year. His proposal for the Dawn Chorus project - a 70,000-mile odyssey to record the morning songs of birds around the earth - won honorable mention from the Rolex Spirit of Enterprise Awards.

"I wanted to hear the world as an endless song of hope and promise for the future, and I could picture it as dawn circling the globe," Hempton wrote.

Up until a few years ago, Hempton's expenses have drowned out his income. He financed $15,000 of the dawn chorus budget out of his own pocket, for instance. He and his family live simply, in a rented house with a large vegetable garden. "I'd rather make memories than money," he has said, and life so far has taken him at his word.

He did not win any money from Rolex, but did receive a fancy watch. "Which helps with your credibility when you go to the bank," Hempton notes, "to explain why your check bounced."

HEMPTON WANTS TO introduce me to a creek named Ellen. Her mouth opens from the Olympic Peninsula into the Pacific Ocean at Rialto Beach.

"Rialto, the musical beach," Hempton says wistfully of the shore he has recorded 60 or 70 times. "It has never disappointed me. It has never repeated itself."

Ellen Creek is more of a casual acquaintance. Hempton wants to record the entire length of a stream that flows into the Pacific, one short enough to hike in a day and with a completely intact watershed. Ellen Creek appears to meet the profile. A soil survey map shows the creek originates in a forest a few miles from the beach, but it's an old map.

We drive west from Kingston past fields of clear-cut trees posted with MANAGED FOREST signs. Outside Sequim we pass a Magic Mic Teen Night Karaoke club and a tavern with a giant wood hand outside, its middle finger raised. We stop at a store that sells camping gear - including a campfire espresso maker -in one half of the store, and hi-fi equipment in the other half. A salesman listens to a portable CD player playing one of Hempton's discs. "Something wrong with this CD," the salesman says. "Sounds like thunder."

When we get to the beach we walk north. Hempton points out a few of his favorite driftwood logs. Some of them look like giant bleached femurs, with hollow chambers at the root end big enough to hold Fritz. At the mouth of Ellen Creek a bald eagle flies over carrying a dark limp bird. Hempton rigs up his tarp, starts a fire, and breaks out some squid jerky and Muir biscuits. He tells about the time in the desert when the only liquid at hand was a half gallon of prune juice and how after he drank it it became impossible to record nature sounds.

It rains all night. By morning, Ellen Creek has turned the color of rusty coffee. Hempton frowns at it. "You know what it says? The headwaters are clear-cut. Not recordable. Not for my purposes. No use at all."

The rain stops long enough for Hempton to lug Fritz to the beach and record some surf. It clatters in on the rocks, then makes a sound that Hempton likens to hands dragged across piano keys as it rakes back across the shore, then it makes a completely different sound as the leftover foam fizzes through the rocks and into the sand below. Hempton points Fritz at a half-buried rock. He listens for a moment and says, "Oh wow."

Walking back along the beach to the parking lot we meet a man with a tiny dog and a cap with some sort of military insignia. Once, years ago, this same man noticed Hempton sticking his head in a driftwood stump and asked him, "What are you doing?" Hempton told him; then the man asked "What do you do for a living?"

Then a skinny kid in high-tops runs down the beach with a log across his shoulders in the manner of Christ carrying the cross.

Driving out of the park Hempton stops at the ranger station. A maintenance man with an embroidered name tag "M. Terry" confirms that the land where Ellen Creek originates has been clear-cut. M.Terry goes over to a map of Washington that hangs on the wall. He sweeps his hand south, along the red border of the national park that stair steps steeply down the coast.

"Mmmh-hmmm," M. Terry says all somber-like. "It's all been logged. All been logged. It don't look purdy. Don't look good at all."

Hempton asks: "Is there a creek that goes from the headwaters to the ocean without logging?" M. Terry doesn't say anything for what feels like a long time. "No," he says finally. "I was gonna say the Cedar, but no. My mind's still flashin' all down the coast, but no. Unhuh."

Hempton climbs back into his truck and doesn't say anything for what feels like another long time. When he does, it is: "We have a Forest Service, but it's not a forest. It's a corn field, is what it is."

We drive to Forks and eat Logger Burgers at a coffee shop named The Coffee Shop. A bulletin board is covered with snapshots of men posing with big fish. In the men's room of The Coffee Shop, the wood paneling above the urinal is bleached several shades lighter than the rest of the paneling owing to the repeated removal of graffiti. Then we stop at a laundromat to dry our sleeping bags and listen to a man in a shingle company cap tell his friend about the qualities of a good boss.

"He's only got three rules: The workers gotta get along; number two, no cussing; number three, no fighting or you're down the road." You don't feel like you're eaves-dropping in a laundromat, because people talk so loud to be heard over the washers and dryers.

Back in the truck Hempton says: "You know, I don't blame the people of Forks. They're not the ones who cut the old-growth forests. It's people in downtown Seattle and Tacoma. In office buildings. They're the ones who cut the trees."

The rain picks up, mixed with hail the size of corn kernels. Hempton tells me that John Muir considered himself a connoisseur of spring water, preferring some varieties to the finest champagne.

"Yeahhhh,. I wish I knew Muir. Personally. I wouldn't want to ask him anything. I'd just want to hang out with him. Go for a walk with him. I'd want to hear his voice. Was it round and smooth? Or was it tense and worn out? Was he discouraged by the fact he saw the wilderness being destroyed under his feet? His voice would tell you."

Visit Official Website of Gordon Hempton, The Sound Tracker at www.soundtracker.com