Pop 89: Nowhere Is Good Enough for Me
By Madonna Hamel
Usually, it happens after leaving Cadillac, headed South: I remember why I moved “here”. “Here”, all the thoughts crowding my brain like commuters rushing into a subway car at the end of the day just drift away. Suddenly, they either don’t matter or shrink in size—all because they have so much space to get lost in.
“Here” is where, as Mom said, whenever she returned to the prairie, I can breathe. “Here” is, to many people, the middle of “nowhere,” which makes it, at the same time, the middle of “now here.”
Back in the ‘90s, I wrote a song called “I Come From Nowhere.” The musicians in my band wanted a country tune; country is big in Quebec. The song is about my parents, who grew up on farms in Saskatchewan. Here’s the chorus: “I come from nowhere, nowhere is good enough for me. Cuz when you know where you come from, you can go back any time, and that’s why nowhere is good enough for me.”
The wide open, empty space of Nowhere quiets my noisy brain. It also lets in the light. Here, the beer-y light and the long shadows of pre-dusk seem to say: whatever you’re thinking right now, it’s not as essential to your existence as this Superabundance of Light.
In art school I was drawn to painters like Gentileschi, LaTour and Caravaggio who worked with light, hiding and revealing it at the same time. The prairie works the same way - the reign of light brings the tops of hills, the underbellies of clouds, the edge of bird’s wing to the forefront of my perception. Everything else, including my problems and hot messes, fall away.
Not that problems leave entirely. They remain present by means of contrast. There is no appreciation of light without shadow. I have learned that animal trails and, mysterious rock formations and hidden caves reveal themselves either early in the morning or late in the day when shadows and light are at full play.
The darkness makes the light more acute. This is the basic principle behind every crisis of faith, every dark night of the soul. We forget to mention that every mystic who stayed the course understood that lurking in the dark is the great Mystery that is God. “God is not absent,” the darkness says. “Your limited, pinched idea of God is absent.”
But what really brings me back to my bones - what hits me hardest when I leave Cadillac, heading South, is the absence of noise. How could I forget how void of human-made noise this place is? Yes, visually, this land has not changed much in hundreds of years, but it’s the silence that moves me the most. When I’m in cities, the presence of traffic - including sirens, car radios, horns and screeching tires - becomes a fact of life, something my ears are forced to adapt to because, unlike eyelids, I have no ear-lids to shut out the constant drone.
The acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has dedicated his life to raising awareness about the precious species of silence being on the verge of extinction. He tells us that there are already no places in the world where there is no noise pollution; all we can hope for is “the noise-free interval.” And the longest noise-free interval on his list of “the last great quiet places” is only 15 minutes.
Silence, Hempton says, is not “absence of sound.” True silence doesn’t exist. In the natural world, we have weather, oceans, and animals constantly communicating. And our own species sings, laughs, cries, argues, farts, burps and sneezes. What concerns Hempton are the noises that come with our inventions and technologies, be it doors slamming, the boom-boom of the bass-line leaking out of cars at all times of day or night, the low-grade hum of pop machines, generators, lamp posts, air conditioners, etc.
There is an unnatural pace and speed to man-made machinery and technologies we human animals seem to unconsciously emulate when surrounded by them. I know when I’m in the city, I march through streets, rushing to make the walk sign, and when I return to the country, the pace feels robotic, absurd.
I love cities for all the things I can’t get here in the country: concerts, bookstores, coffee shops, lectures and all the debates and encounters that come with mixing with different cultures and histories. It’s dangerous to see the city as full of either neurotics or intellectuals and the country as the home of simple bumpkins. Each offers different things. What the country gives me is the rare and endangered gift of silence.
It’s easy to get caught up in the swirling lights and sounds of the city - the endless excitation. But at night, when I lay down in my little country bed, I can leave my window wide open. And yes, there are sounds: coyotes, owls and lowing cattle, but I will take them over screeching tires and arguing drunks. Last night, I heard a noise outside my window, a rustling in the leaves. Not for one second did I think it was anything other than a deer. Not for a second did I fear for my life.
Silence is the precursor to listening. Silence can be eerie, haunting, but I try to settle into it. Sometimes I go to the middle of Nowhere, sit on a rock and let my body’s energy cycle down. I try to slow the noise inside my head. Then comes the sounds of insects, the wind in grass, the huffing of a bison, the scratching of critters.
Whether it’s the elegant swish of bird wings overhead on a still night, or the gentle splash of a muskrat emerging from the Frenchman River, or the sudden slap of a beaver tail, the aural awareness of the lives of wild creatures is hugely intimate and ultimately world-uniting.