Hildegard Westerkamp, Contributing Writer.
Copyrighted, 1996.
E-Mail: westerka@sfu.ca
Fri, Dec 27, 1996

This commentary first appeared in Geist :The Canadian Magazine of Ideas and Culture. No. 24 (Winter 96/97). Please reference this publication when quoting from this sound journal entry.

A few years ago a Brazilian colleague recounted to me his first experience of a Canadian winter: the extraordinary silence of winter, the silence that descends onto a landscape when the snow falls. I sensed a yearning for that type of silence from him, something he will never get in his own country. He called it a treasure, the season of winter snow silence, a guaranteed reprieve from throbbing life.

It started snowing a few days before Christmas this year. More snow is falling now, a few days after Christmas. This is unusual, as we normally have mild, rainy weather around this time of year. Whenever it snows in Vancouver, the city grinds to a halt. Noone seems prepared for it, most people seem unpracticed in driving in the snow, and snowplows are a rare sight. The rest of Canada, which knows winter for at least five months of the year, simply mocks our inexperience.

When I step out of my house on Christmas Eve, I hear a truly "silent night" for the first time in many, many years. There is no traffic sound. The usual urban throb from downtown and the nearby busy roads has disappeared completely. I hear someone's crisp footsteps a block away. I hear a faint 60 cycle hum from a streetlight, the hiss from the gas meter at my house. My own breath and footsteps are the loudest sounds. The Christmas lights in the fir tree sparkle in the snow and I suddenly notice the unusual shape of the tree across the street. Someone is carrying a garbage bag full of empty bottles. I hear him walking through the nearby park bottles clinking, the bag rustling. He stops to rest for a minute and I wonder where he is going to find a shop on this evening that would give him refunds for the bottles.

It feels as if my ears are reaching out into all corners of the city, across the silenced soundwalls of streets and buildings, through the windows of houses, into the deeper silences and sounds of our culture. The tiniest sounds in my snowy vicinity create a place of intimacy in the middle of this large city. No sound is anonymous now. Every sound has its clear identity, a clear place. There is no broadband sound that could devour our smaller sounds and with them all sense of place. There is no urban throb to mask the truth of the man's life who had to search for empty bottles on Christmas Eve. I breathe in deeply and listen to the silence of the nearby giant looming over our neighbourhood: the new hospital building that normally exhales all sorts of sonic garbage. I cannot get enough of this quiet. It starts to snow again and the two-tone call from the distant Point Atkinson foghorn reaches me through the white silence. Hildegard Westerkamp