The Quest for Quiet
A three-day paddle on the (kinda, sorta, but not really) silent Niobrara River
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The Quest for Quiet
Their names are Mary and Sue. I blame them for blowing up my Quest for Quiet. They sat there in lawn chairs at their campsite, all friendly and gregarious and such, laughing and carrying on so loudly I could hear them 100 yards away as I cooked dinner and watched the Niobrara River flow by from my right to my left.
I ached to join them, to find out what in the world was so funny. But I was on the very first day of a three-day silent mission along the Niobrara National Scenic River in northern Nebraska.
My assignment was to ruminate on the quiet, to contemplate it, and if all went well, to exult in it. It seems ironic, looking back, that I even bothered to try. Somewhere, every teacher I ever had, every coworker I ever shared a cubicle with, every person I ever sat next to on a plane is cracking up that I, of all people, attempted to be quiet for three days.
I tried. Honestly, I did.
And then I heard Mary and Sue laughing, and laughing, and laughing.
Screw being quiet! I’d rather laugh!
I got out of my camp chair and walked toward them, pausing only to ask myself if I was really going to torch my goal on the very first day just to blab it up with two strangers.
Yes. Yes, I was.
In doing so, my Quest for Quiet took an unexpected turn. I didn’t find what I was looking for, and I realized I didn’t want it. But I found something better: peace.
So I changed the assignment. Out was the Quest for Quiet, in was the Quest for Peace. And that was a smashing success. While also being pretty quiet.
—
In the spirit of the Quest, I drove the 10.5 hours from St. Louis to Valentine, Neb. in silence — no radio, no podcasts, no nothing … until my rental car screeched and displayed a dashboard message I had never seen: it was out of coolant and demanded that I shut off the engine and add some.
I was far from anywhere I could do that. My only option was to hope the engine stayed cool long enough for me to exchange the car at a rental car office 70 miles away.
For a too-long hour full of “is this car going to break?” anxiety, I had quiet but no peace.
Later, after getting a new rental car, I barreled straight north through Nebraska’s sandhills. It was like driving across a giant green golf ball. To my left, a pink line glowed on the horizon. Above it, lightning bolts, one after another, screamed at the ground.
I rolled down the window to smell, feel, hear that storm.
Wind ripped through my car.
The stress of that afternoon faded like echoing thunder.
For a too-short hour, I had peace but no quiet.
—
My river journey started the next morning near Valentine, a tiny town just south of the South Dakota state line. It was June, but I had to layer up against high 40s that felt much worse. Wind blew in my face as I put my canoe in the water just north of the Cornell Dam. In the first five minutes I was sure my plan to cover 56 miles in three days was already toast.
Soon enough, though, the sun cooked off the morning chill, the wind turned in my favor, and the temperature jumped from early spring to a more fitting midsummer. As the weather changed, so did the scenery. Over the next few days, I paddled through forests, gaped at golden cliff faces and drifted along a prairie. The languid river popular for leisurely tubing trips frequently gave way to rapids I had to portage around, and even more often, sandbars that forced me to get out and walk.
The Niobrara River runs through a biological crossroads, where plants and animals from six ecosystems converge. Sandhills, mixed-grass and tallgrass prairies, plus western coniferous, eastern deciduous and boreal forests live near each other there and nowhere else in the country. In a real-life split screen moment, I saw cattle (foreground) and deer (background) running past at the same time. I’ve never seen that before and I’ll probably never see it again.
While the Niobrara overflows with ecological diversity, what it doesn’t have is very many humans — or the noise we bring. In 2023, Quiet Parks International, a nonprofit dedicated to identifying and protecting quiet places, named the Niobrara National Scenic River a Quiet Trail. It was the second region in the world to receive that designation; the first is in Taiwan.
Quiet Parks officials paddled 76 miles here, taking qualitative and quantitative measurements of human-made sounds they heard, or more to the point, didn’t. “We came around a couple of bends, and we were only seeing natural environment, trees growing along the river, and we wouldn’t hear anything other than the soft ripple of the water,” says Nick McMahan, Quiet Trails director for Quiet Parks. “This is what we look for—that peaceful experience in nature. And it happened time and time again.”
I had the same experience. In three days, I heard almost no sounds produced by people. I’m tempted to say I had hours of quiet, but it wasn’t quiet at all, what with wind, waterfalls, birds chirping, birds whistling, birds smashing their faces into trees, etc. But that noise had a stillness, a serenity, a smoothness that’s missing from modern life. And that smooth, serene stillness descended on me on day one, soon after I joined Mary and Sue at their campsite.
The fire warmed my shins. The river lapped through sand behind me. The sun set to my left. Mary petted her hound-Lab mix, Mickey. A pile of yellow-white hair gathered at her feet.
We talked about the world and how loud it is, and the Niobrara, and how it’s loud, too, but it’s not the same. Mary made an observation I’ve been thinking about ever since: It’s not so much the noise as the uninvited noise, the ever-present noise, the noise that chases us. “You are not in charge of the noise,” she said.
In the wee hours that night, I woke up to a coyote howling. It sounded beautiful.
—-
I crawled out of my tent early on day two, said good morning to my new friends and eagerly slurped the coffee they offered. Too soon, I lugged my gear across soft sand to the river, where I met my guide for the day, Gordon Warrick, a retired wildlife biologist who spent most of his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
We put in the river.
The sun lifted over the trees and basked our faces in warmth.
I paddled left.
Mary, Sue and Mickey disappeared behind us.
I paddled right.
Tall grass on shore swayed to a beat I felt as a whisper on my arms, neck and face. The sky was so you-got-to-see-this blue that I lamented that only Warrick and I were under it right then and there.
I thought about the noise, literal and metaphorical, that engulfs me daily. I live in suburban St. Louis, and even in my upstairs office I hear a constant cacophony— garbage trucks, delivery trucks, pickup trucks, the neighbor kid narrating walk-off home runs, the beeps of golf carts in reverse. My ears adjusted to the lack of all of that immediately. I looked up in response to the dull throb of a plane. I never would have noticed that at home.
I’m the father of two teenage girls, each (occasionally) a gale-force storm all her own. I work as a freelance writer, which is like trying to catch confetti with tongs while doing trigonometry on a merry-go-round. Add in garden-variety stress, and I live a noisy life.
As Mary said, I’m not in charge of the noise. But I am in charge of what I listen to. We can find peace among the din. Warrick, who has been a birder for more than four decades, knows all about that. At my request, he called out the names of every bird he saw and heard, sometimes pointing river right, sometimes river left, his head on a swivel as his ears chased the music. “Put your paddle deeper in the water,” he told me.
“What?” I said. “Why?”
“I’ll be able to hear better.”
Our Niobrara bird list ballooned to more than 40. They were common (robins), majestic (bald eagles), ominous (vultures) and what’s-that-doing-this-far-south (a common merganser). I heard only a bare fraction of them, and they all sounded alike to me. Warrick picked them out because he blocked out distractions.
After a long paddle, Warrick and I climbed ashore in Meadville, Nebraska. He left, and I sat in the shade to escape the late afternoon glare. I ate candy, drank a Gatorade and read a novel: C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet.
One section jumped out at me as uncannily fitting. “A pleasure is fully grown only when it is remembered,” Lewis writes. “What that makes in me all the days till (I die), that is the real meaning.”
Lewis writes that moderns think of an event and the memory of it as separate when we should consider them one thing. I understood what he meant in the months after my Niobrara trip when I couldn’t stop thinking about the peace of befriending Mary and Sue, the peace of birding, the peace of sitting in the shade next to the Niobrara.
When the sun started to drop, I closed my book, moved my chair close to the steep bank and watched the Niobrara roll by. This was my last night on the river, and I wanted to sear it all into my memory, as if I were filling a peace reservoir I could later dip a ladle into when I needed it. I delighted in the brown ribbon of water, the faint gurgle as it drifted by, the way the details of the trees on the other side disappeared as the shadows grew long. I knew I would miss nothing if I turned away, and yet I watched intently anyway to catch every last drop.
Cars rumbled over a bridge. A plane growled overhead. A farmer drove by in a tractor. I waved. He didn’t wave back. Mary and Sue would have been appalled.
That campsite wasn’t quiet, and I didn’t care. I had found peace all the same. For a few hours, at least, the noise was not in charge of me.