Montana Days: The Three Silences

Due to a technological glitch, I haven't been able to publish the interview I'd intended. I was twenty-two years old and had just had my first play produced at Morgan. I'll keep working on it. In the meantime, here's a piece about silence in the woods. 

        Maybe it's happened to you. You're out in the woods poking along, enjoying the day, driven by no particular goal when, suddenly,the forest becomes as quiet as an execution. Noise stops. You stop. You listen carefully. You wish your ears were as powerful as those receivers deployed to pick up transmissions from deep space. Silence in the woods is heard only rarely during the cycle of a natural day. Dawn and dusk rather, the hour preceding light and that preceding darkness are two times you can depend upon. These are the hours when the beasts of the day and the beasts of the night take each other's place – some to prowl, some to sleep. One can sense the creatures passing each other through a kind of ceasefire zone as they exchange positions in the forest, so it is nearly, but not absolutely, a silence. There is still movement. Time goes by. 

        The second silence is death. You may never be caught by this silence, yet, in the woods, its presence is undeniable. If you are fortunate, you have watched predators stalk their prey. They carry the possibility of death - death on the way, death to come - and so they carry it with them in silence. Animals desert the area or stay still. This silence has a palpable presence of its own, one that takes sense beyond the other six to detect. It is how a man can feel (though he might never see) an animal watching him.

        Downed prey is death in fact, and this final silence is deeper than any. Suddenly, there is an absence of a life in the forest. The void will be filled eventually, even quickly, but, while it is there, every being in its presence is commanded by it. Neither is this final silence one of peace. There is an edge
to it, an air of uneasiness, a sense of mortality and danger. Peace obtains only when the forest is filled with the commotion of its creatures as they go about their lives. This "noise" is what most people love about the woods, and what they accept as quiet.