As I was snowshoeing on the trails at Norskedalen near Coon Valley, the silence that surrounded me was very welcome after a hectic week. I was the only person in the whole place on a beautiful Saturday morning when hoarfrost covered the trees and transformed everything into a winter wonderland. As I hiked uphill and down, across streams, and watched deer watching me, I started thinking about how much our world has changed in the last 100 years.
Lets time travel back to the early 1900s and visit the average home in America. It was a much quieter world. Most people had never seen or heard an automobile. The Ford Model T didn’t arrive on the scene until 1908. Only five years before that, the Wright brothers flew the first flight of their airplane at Kitty Hawk. Think how much those two inventions changed transportation around the world.
The first commercial radio broadcast didn’t occur until 1920, only 90 years ago. Before that time, people couldn’t sit around and listen to the radio to get the latest news and listen to entertainment. There wasn’t a radio in most homes until many years after that. When do you remember first listening to a radio?
The first talking movie, “The Jazz Singer,” came out in 1927, 83 years ago. Does anyone remember the silent movies or seeing this first talking movie? If you’re in your 90’s you may have seen it as a child. The movies have come a long way since then.
Television didn’t arrive in most homes until the 1950’s. I think we got our first TV around 1954. Before that time, the evenings were relatively quiet in the house. There was conversation, reading books, and playing games. Evenings in the summer, after chores were done, were spent sitting on the lawn under the maple tree because it was too hot in the house. Air conditioning wasn’t invented until 1932, and I don’t remember anyone with an air conditioner in their home, even in the 1960’s. When was the first time you encountered air-conditioning and what did you think? Now we even drive in the air-conditioned comfort of our cars. Our ancestors must be rolling in their graves when they see what wimps we’ve become.
Another invention that has changed the world is the computer. The first one (ENIAC) was built in 1945. I’m older than the computer age! I probably got my first computer around 1989. It completely changed the way I did my business. It must have been like a farmer going from farming with horses to using a tractor.
The Sony Walkman came along in 1979. Then we could not only listen to music in our homes and cars, but we could carry it with us everywhere we went. Now we have iPods, cell phones, and other devices that we carry with us. Instead of listening to the music of the wind in the trees and birds singing, people are tuned into the latest music blasting in their earphones, while out walking.
Think about all the items I’ve mentioned. Most have injected artificial sounds and noise into our daily life. Before the advent of radios, televisions, iPods, Walkmans, stereos, phonographs, Boom Boxes, telephones, cell phones, and numerous other sound devices, what did most people do? Perhaps they talked to each other. Can you older, or should I say, “more mature” crowd remember back to what it was like before television? Maybe some of you even remember when you didn’t have a radio in your home.
Think what a difference the addition of all these items that make noise have made in your home. I’ll bet that in most places, the television is constantly on when people are present. I notice the difference when I’m trying to write this column. Noise, and even music, can be a distraction. I can do some of my best thinking while on a walk or sitting someplace in nature where only natural sounds are heard.
Author Jerry Apps and I share a fondness for the words and thoughts of Henry David Thoreau. Jerry wrote in a recent blog, “Though his writing is sometimes difficult to grasp, these words by Thoreau, written in 1854, continue to resonate with me: ‘In wilderness is the preservation of the world.’ Those words were important in Thoreau’s day; they are even more important today. So I sit and read and ponder the layers of meaning in Thoreau’s writing, and their application to today’s frantic world.”
I also ponder those things whenever I get a chance. They came to the forefront as I hiked through the silent, snow-filled woods at Norskedalen. Snow softens everything, even sounds. Snow rounds off the sharp edges of the world and adds light to the dark places. There’s a peacefulness found in nature that’s hard to find in the world we’ve created with all the man-made sounds. Granted, not everyone likes the solitude of the small areas of wilderness that remain. Maybe that’s why I found myself alone in the woods in Norskedalen on a beautiful winter day when I thought more people would have been out enjoying the day. I like to think that this is the world my ancestors found when they came from Norway, a quiet, peaceful, picturesque world. There are still pieces of that world left if you look for them.
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