Tolkkinen: Just when I was starting to lose myself in nature’s grandeur, along came a motorcycle

CARLTON, MINN. - The St. Louis River foamed and frothed as it raced over rocks toward Lake Superior.

I paused on the Silver Creek Trail at Jay Cooke State Park to admire it. I was thinking all the thoughts you do when confronted with such wild beauty: How ancient travelers crossed it, what would happen if you fell in, the power of water molecules when they unite.

Then something fractured my reverie.

b-b-b-b-BRRRRRRR bahhhhrrrRRRRRR BRRRRRRR!

If you guessed a motorcycle, you’re right. It was tearing up some nearby road you would never suspect existed near this rugged landscape. It was like having a cellphone blare “Bad to the Bone” during your wedding vows. Or a kazoo band bursting into a meditation class.

At first I suspected I-35 which passes a few miles north of the park. Now I think it must have been Minnesota 210, which requires slower speeds but is much closer to the park. As the motorcycle’s racket faded, what sounded like a pair of big trucks rumbled in its wake.

I shrugged, mentally. What can you do? We are a noisy breed; no doubt the noisiest people to ever inhabit the planet. Sirens! Helicopters! Chain saws! Lawn mowers! Big noises that tear through neighborhoods and trespass into beautiful parks. Little noises that accompany our persons like tiny courtiers, amusing us with music and podcasts, alerting us to new messages.

All this noise makes it challenging to find places to hear the natural world. Insects humming, the breeze stirring the leaves, water lapping against rock. And it’s doubly hard to find a place where you can sink into these sounds without being jolted back into the modern world before you’re ready.

Even where my family lives, in the middle of nowhere in Otter Tail County, you sometimes hear the gravel crusher down the road, tractors in nearby fields, military aircraft, and medical helicopters thumping in the skies. As I write this, air conditioners thrum in the bedroom windows of our house. Even my laptop is not quiet, its fan steadily whirring.

The uninterrupted sounds of nature are just as endangered by artificial noise as the night sky is by artificial light. But the movement to save natural quiet is getting a late start. DarkSky International formed in 1988 to combat light pollution and recognize places that still enjoy dark nights, but Quiet Parks International began only in 2019.

Quiet Parks International sends people around the globe with monitoring equipment, and it issues this warning: “Quiet places are quickly becoming extinct.” It catalogs the potential harms of man-made noise, including stress, hearing loss, and sleep interruption.

So far, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is the only place in Minnesota it has designated a Wilderness Quiet Park, although several other locations have been nominated, including a trail along the Canadian border, a retreat center in Isanti, and Voyageur’s National Park.

I don’t mean to suggest anyone avoid Jay Cooke. There are plenty of reasons to visit, if only to cross its famous Swinging Bridge and perch on its boulders and contemplate how swiftly each water droplet passes each rock, maybe never to return. Immediately next to the St. Louis River, its thundering waters block out any road noise.

It also offers miles of trails that lead deep into the park.

As I continued to hike along the Silver Creek Trail, the quieter it became. Birds called. Rain spattered lightly. A red squirrel rustled across a fallen tree.

Jay Cooke State Park Supervisor Lisa Angelos pointed out that there are many quiet places in the 8,125-acre park. It gets even better when the trees leaf out, creating a deadening effect that muffles sounds, she said.

More than 10 million people visit Minnesota’s parks each year, according to the DNR. I would wager that most of us are looking for the same thing: A respite from the human-made world. A place you can set your hand on the bark of a tree as you skirt a muddy spot in the trail. A place you can tune out the big noises and the little ones, where for an hour or a day you can listen to the sounds our ancestors once heard all the time.

A few years ago, I rode in a covered wagon in west-central Minnesota. The thing that struck me most was how quiet it was. The horses started forward with no fanfare, no engine turning over, just the squeak of wood and the slight jostling of the bumpy ground, and we were moving forward across the prairie, their hooves landing softly on the earth.

Noise is a byproduct of the combustion engine. Maybe someday we will all start using electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and tools, and our world will become quiet again. It won’t be as much fun for the glasspack crowd, but maybe our children and grandchildren will be more in tune with the natural world.

And have better hearing.