You Have the Right to Experience Silence

It is 2am and I am awake. This is because a few sites over, some 17 to 22 year old white males are whooping across the campground at a site a bit up the road from us where another group of 17 to 22 year old white males are whooping back. This is a frustrating situation. On the one hand, I want to shout at them to shut the hell up, it is 2am, already, on the other hand, they are 17 to 22 year old white males and they are drunk, they have been drinking for hours, since we returned to camp after dinner in town. Any complaints I make will fall on intentionally deaf ears. I fish around for my earplugs and thankfully, fall back asleep.

The campground which was empty save for a handful of Germans, over there, in rented motor homes and a few clusters of Japanese kids, just that way, with brand new tents from Wal-Mart, has transformed over the course of the Friday into a parking lot slash frat party. This is because there is a huge festival of mountain bikers in town and some of them are our neighbors. They are bad neighbors, inconsiderate and noisy and temporary, so it doesn’t matter. Plus, at 6am, another noise wrestles me from my sleep, a wailing baby, delivering ironic justice after a mere four hours of deliberation.

I like pretending that I’m better than this. I like driving away from an immaculate campsite, leaving no visible trace of my stay, but truthfully, there’s a digital trail of where I was before – the supermarket and the gas station and that small town diner. There’s a smudgy path of carbon – we’re driving, after all, and throwing away wrappers and to go cups and those empty cans of propane we use to fuel the camp stove. There’s a lot of gear, an old tent and some sleeping bags and an ice chest and a big plastic jerrycan that we use for water. In the commercial campground, the lights are always on, there’s hot water showers and wifi broadcast across the tent pads and motor home hookups.

Let’s face it. Camping is kind of a weird pursuit.

I’m not talking about backpacking, where a sturdier- than-I individual shoulders all the necessaries for three days or a week of back country exploration. I’m talking about car camping, the “Oh, it’s a short walk between you and an RV” kind of camping. (I tried the grand RV lifestyle, and while I can see the appeal, it isn’t for me. My aspirations run more along the line of a VW camper van.)

This morning, while I write (on battery with no wifi) a three generation Indian Canadian family is packing up. There’s a baby crying, cousins scampering up and down the gravel road to the pit toilets, and Bhangra pouring from the car’s audio system. This is taking place a ten mile drive down a forest service road from the nearest arterial – it’s another 25 miles or so to the nearest town, a little logging burg turned into one of those outdoors junction towns, last stop for bait and ice and beer. We tried, but we are not, as the song goes, getting away from it all.

The Birkenhead Lake campground costs 16 CDN a night; on other trips I’ve paid up to 30 USD for a patch of muddy grass on which to pitch a tent. Amenities have varied from spectacularly clear restrooms — at a place somewhere in Montana run by a retired gent who referred to himself in third person as “The General” — to glow in the dark mini-golf to, well, this, an outhouse and a tap every 500 feet or so. We pay for a level spot, a sense of security, a location known for either proximity to or its own beauty. Or sometimes, we pay for a way station, a place to rest because darkness is falling and it is time to stop driving.

Silence is a luxury, I have learned, the most expensive hotels are the quiet ones, with good insulation between the rooms and footstep muffling carpets in the hallways. Silence in campgrounds is rarer than you’d expect – that same family with the Bhangra and the cousins also had a new baby who, every four hours gave me an excuse to get out of the tent and look at the stars.

In this forest, there is no ambient light, no washhouse with all night fluorescents, no floodlights over the RV pads. At my house in Seattle we almost never notice the stars; there is a streetlight nearly in the backyard, another outside the bedroom corner of the house. There is always light, of some kind. In this forest, when I tumble out of the tent into the night, it seems black as the inside of a cave, but then, there is a bluish glow from the direction of the crying baby, the light filtered by the dense trees. When I look up I see the blanket of the sky is full of backlit pinholes, all different sizes.

But there is no Walden here. Maybe Henry David Thoreau would ask why a 32 foot RV, already a rolling exhibition of excess, would need to run a generator. Maybe John Muir would see the flattened gravel sites, the cardboard wrapper from a 12 pack of Heineken discarded into the gully, and tear at his beard in frustration. What would he make of the noise – the Bhangra now replaced by Hip Hop – spilling out into the swamp cabbage and wildflowers?

I come to places like this looking for quiet. I want the birdsong as music, the whisper of the creek. I want to overhear the chipmunks discussing the issues of the day. The rattle of the diesel engine on that extended cab pickup that circles the campground isn’t why I’m here. I’m here to listen, to fill my eyes with green, to watch that tiny white moth move in and out of the ferns like a miniature ghost, and to hear the sound of her wings. Where is the stillness? Do we have a right to silence?

There is a car alarm, the thump of the bass, a dog barking, a harmless but oh so annoying group of 17 to 22 year old white males, drunk at midnight, howling at the moon. There is no silence here, and if it is a right, I am denied.

Finally, on our fifth day of camping, it happens. It’s Sunday night and nearly everyone has cleared off. I sit in the tent reading my book and I hear a noise, something between a clucking and a grumbling. Out the mesh I can see three blue jays, hopping along the gravel. They are digging for bugs, maybe, and talking to each other as they do. The closest one is just a few feet away from me and I laugh, they are so funny. I startle them and they fly away. And in the morning, I hear the wind through the tree tops, the swish of a bird’s wings as it flies over head, and the creek, polishing stones as it makes its way to join the waters of Birkenhead Lake.

Our travels — transportation expenses and accommodation — are sponsored by the generous folks of Camping BC.  Check out BC Parks, too, to learn more. The photo of Birkenhead Lake is by my eagle-eyed sidekick, UJ Sommer, aka Mr. NEV.