There has been a bit of silence here because my mad wife decided she wanted to go camping. In Minnesota. In the middle of January. I know winter camping is a thing, it’s just not my thing, but I went along. So we headed off to Glacier Lakes State Park yesterday, where she’d reserved a snug little cabin for the evening.
Strangely, the DNR link above advertises the place with lots of pictures of beautiful meadows and sparkling lakes and groves of wild flowers. For some reason, they don’t tell you what it’s like in January. It’s like this.
Skies like spilled milk. The lakes are sheets of ice, covered with snow. The trees are barren and skeletal. Which isn’t unlovely, in its own way, but it’s not how I picture camping (which is more gray, with constant drizzling rain, and bears.)
It wasn’t bad. We settled in, we later went to bed, and we turned off the lights, and discovered something else about the experience.
Total darkness and silence. We were far from anywhere, there were no other campers, the heavy cloud cover meant the moon and stars weren’t shining through at all. I held my hand up to my face, and saw nothing. I waited an hour, for my eyes to adjust…still nothing. There was no wind, and no animals were crazy enough to be out and about, so there was no sound, either. So this is what a sensory deprivation tank might be like.
It turns out I do not cope well with sensory deprivation. I was lying there awake all night, my brain churning away trying to find something outside itself to latch on to, and refusing to go to sleep until it heard a little noise or got a faint glimmering of something. I don’t know whether it was claustrophobia or agoraphobia, but something about being swaddled in dark emptiness was unsettling.
So next time my wife demands that I share her madness, I’m bringing a metronome and a night light. I’m kind of wrecked for the day now, too, and am suddenly noticing more acutely the tick of the clock here at home, the occasional distant swish of a car driving through the snow, and all the clutter in our house.
I have a cabin in Northern Ontario that I go to each summer. I’ve gone there since I was a very small child. It takes a couple of nights to get used to the pitch black (when it’s a new moon) and silence that is deafening. I’m always amazed at how loud absolute silence is.
I remember waking up in a panic when I was a child because of the silence and the pitch black, and you are right, your eyes will not adjust. There is no light to adjust to.
With my kids, we use a battery powered fan all night for white noise and they keep a flashlight under the pillow. You might also find ear plugs helpful. My brain seems a lot cooler about the dead silence when I have ear plugs in since I expect it to be dead silent.
Also, I was thinking the feeling is more like claustrophobia. It feels like the world has shrunk in so close that you are suffocated by the dark and quiet and there is no escape.
No fireplace?
Cabins in the woods should have a fireplace.
Or a stove that you have to feed every few hours to keep from freezing to death.
I dunno, that looks like a nice place for cross-country skiing or snowshoeing.
I sometimes found that if I turned the TV down so much that it was barely audible, that would put me to sleep. Especially if a NASCAR race was on- that would have me down for the count in the middle of the day. Maybe a podcast with some soothing voices would help.
Total darkness is a bizarre experience, isn’t it. I was on a group cave walk that included a short span of sitting in a dead-end chamber with our lights off. I kept seeing phantom lights in my peripheral vision: my eyes just wouldn’t accept that there was nothing there to see with. The darkness seemed like an actual substance. It felt like the thickness that the air gets when a thunderstorm is brewing but hasn’t broken.
Turns out I’m not well suited to experiences like that. I got panicky about being left behind and really didn’t retain much memory of the entire return to the entrance, even though all our lights were on again.
I love still darkness. One of the things I liked the most about Almont when we moved here was how fabulously dark it was – oh the stars! Then some sort of mania set in, and street lights went up all over the fucking place. In a town of 79.
So, when you recruit urban and suburban students to Morris, you can point out that Morris is almost the equivalent of Minneapolis, when compared with the experience of the natural prairie a half-hour away.
Illdoittomorrow @ 4:
I run Sleepy Time app on my tablet, with Rain2 / Distant Thunder 2 / Rain 1 on it, mostly for [getting to] sleep use, as when Mister is home, I don’t have wonderful stillness and quiet.
For fun times in total darkness, wave your hand in front of your face.
In the woods, I usually have to wear ear plugs, it’s so noisy. Animals, wind through the trees, far-away cars. In a cabin it’s much more peaceful.
This sounds awesome. Total silence and darkness? Ahhhhhh. But I have 3 little kids, so I get very little of either. Add in the fact that I could be snuggled in bed with my furnace of a husband, and I’d be golden.
See, the advantage of winter camping in Minnesota is that you won’t have any bears. Bear-free camping!
This is because bears are smarter than humans, and sleep through the Minnesota winter. Except for the very smartest bears, who, unbeknownst to zoologists, actually migrate to Southern California until May or so.
This sounds awesome. Total silence and darkness? Ahhhhhh. But I have 3 little kids, so I get very little of either. Add in the fact that I could be snuggled in bed with my furnace of a husband, and I’d be golden.
For Christmas, my husband got me a pair of super fancy Bose noise-cancelling ear buds. He has a pair that he uses for international flights, and I kept stealing them to reduce my anxiety when sensory overload got to be too much in my house. They are unbelievable.
We have a couple of holiday cottages and its described as a dark sky area here. Never gets that dark as there are a few farms within eyeline and not often totally quiet. It is fascinating to hear people comment on how dark/quiet it is for a couple of days and then they learn not to be frightened of their own heads and start to chill. You can see people drop down two or three gears, sometimes four over the week they are normally here.
Some people are really scared of their own thoughts though!
I did a lot of camping with Boy Scouts when I was a kid, and winter was always my favorite time to go, mainly because there were no mosquitos or other pesky bugs. While spring and fall were best for weather comfort-wise, winter cold was still better than the heat and humidity of summer. There was no escaping the summer heat, but all it took for the winter was dressing appropriately and the cold wasn’t an issue. Even when it got particularly cold (around 0°F where I grew up), you could hang out by the camp fire to warm up. And snow and ice were so much fun to play with (and pretty). Man, now I’m getting nostalgic for the northeast while I’m stuck living down in Texas.
Nit pick question…. is staying in a cabin considered “camping” in Minnesota? To me camping requires the use of a tent.
Back to the point, I love being in remote places and spent a summer in the 1990’s camping (for work) in the absolute wilderness of the Canadian arctic tundra. The nearest town, and likely nearest human was, 140 km away. The only noise was the wind but there was no darkness as the sun never set.
We have a cabin in the California Gold Country, five miles up the Fiddletown Road, with 20 acres of potential firewood. It rarely snows, but it rains, if we’re lucky.
It’s relatively peaceful and quiet, although there are other homes within earshot where people saw logs all day, shoot guns, and so forth.
But at night…it’s rarely quiet. If it’s warm and the windows are open, then the frogs, crickets, foxes, dogs, and coyotes create quiet a din. And any time of year, but particularly the winter, the dusky-footed woodrats and voles who consider the cabin their home spend the night scurrying around. It’s difficult to imagine an animal so small and vulnerable to predators being so noisy.
I periodically drive across the Chilcotin, in British Columbia. I love, especially, driving it at night. Imagine driving for 50 miles without seeing a light, or another car. Just the stars, millions of stars. Stop the car and get out, and all you can hear, once the motor cools, is maybe the distant crackling of the Northern Lights.
Coming back to “civilization” is a huge letdown.
re “dark”???
pfffff, ain’t dark if there’s stars of a night sky. Let me tell you ’bout DARK (emphasis intentional).
I once went spelunking (down in a famous cave near Blacksburg, VA) My spelunker friend, who invited me to this adventure, settled us down mid-spelunk to extinguished our lights. The darkness was absolute, deeper than if blindfolded above at midnight on a new moon night. So dark, can’t even describe it with words.
Regarless, irrelevant. A non light polluted night sky is totally awesome. Possible to see satellites zip by once in a while. (I did so on top of Mt Madison). Given PZ’s latitude, maybe Aurorea are visible. Just recently missed the awesome meteor shower we passed through.
re winter camping:
you know what they say about the size of a campfire for winter camping. (with racial stereotypes), whiteman build big bonfire and stay warm by chopping wood to feed it, bonfire too hot to get near. Indian build small fire and sit very near to stay warm all night, just having to reach behind his back to grab a log now and then to keep it going all night.TL:DR: build small, sit close; or build big, work hard.
regardless; I too preferred winter camping over summer camping. only challenge was finding dead trees for fire. summer’s method of leavelessness is inappropriate for winter. wonder why/snark.
Seconding chigau.
slithey tove @18:
And don’t build under a tree.
rereading Chigau and the OP: I agree, regardless of the heat value, even a few embers glowing in the fireplace would have provided a little relief from sensory the deprivation (including the occasional noise they make during the process).
in reference to PZ’s difficulty with sleeping in absolute silence:
understandable. I experienced something similar when I moved from the city to a little town. Couldn’t sleep, removed from the constant noise of city life. It was not so much the silence itself that kept me awake but by it getting occasionally broken by a passing car. The city noise was relatively consistent so was easy to relegate to “background noise”, to ignore it.
Consistent quiet would be a consistent relief, so I guess I don’t quite understand the inability to sleep in pure quite.
See? You obviously need to fill that hole in your heart with Jebus!
/s
wow I don’t know about “camping” any more since it has meant to me hiking in and sleeping on the ground been many years maybe many many years since I have done that but a cabin and a little walk in sounds doable cold not so much but inside is OK.
What really I miss about “the great outdoors” is the sky and the sounds.
I live very near a modern container port and on a cloudy overcast night it is so bright It is easy to make out true colors of things on the ground from all the reflected light.
on a clear night I have never actually tried to do it but it would be easy to actually count all the visible stars in the sky
silence with ear plugs means it is much easier to hear the pulse and the breathing and the other bodily noises we seldom listen to which can be comforting.
uncle frogy
The wife ran away to a snowy wilderness, the daughter ran away to a different snowy expanse, the son has to deal with a loony threatening to cause a nuclear winter… is there a pattern here? Are the zebrafish also migrating? Has the drone flown away and not come back? Is the evil cat suddenly being nice?
slithey tove@18:
ain’t no stars if it’s cloudy. And if there’s no cities around, ain’t no light whatsoever when it’s overcast.
On the other hand, the other day I was cross-country skiing at night through the woods just with night vision. I can’t do that by moonlight: I needed town lights bouncing off clouds.
I guess the one saving grace of tinnitus is that I don’t have to worry about being subjected to total silence.
This is the real reason bears hibernate — or, as pointed out by others, take a well-deserved vacation in Southern California — easier to get food than waiting for another impaled-on-a-branch skier. Also, sushi skier kebab gets a bit tiring after awhile…
Classic-stroke skiers are too stringy to bother with — bunch of hippy granola types. The skate skiers might be worth it, but they move too fast. Snowshoers. It’s what’s for dinner.
If only there was a graveyard blaring out Christian prayers all day nearby.
I have to disagree PZ, it sounds wonderful out there!
Complete darkness and silence. I love it, experienced.
Just as I love lying in strange rooms,
Cracked ceiling, cars and trucks pass by,
Lights stretching, condensing.
Mist in the city, in the cosy little town,
We’re not a suburb,
Streetlights shine on your mediocrity
As you pass them.
And living by the airport,
2:30 flight
Take off
So slow
I’m calling someone I know,
What sound, oh the jet engine.
And morning comes.
A cockrel.
Why is he always a late riser?
=8)-DX
PZ,
Whl y wr ct ff frm th wrld, sm prtty dstrbng vnts hv bn n th nws. n Grmny, grp f rnd 1000 mn systmtclly sxlly ssltd nd rbbd vr 125 wmn. Th ttcks hppnd n Nw yr’s v, bt (nsrprsngly) wsnt rprtd n th md fr svrl dys.
ls, t pprs tht th prptrtrs wr mmbrs f msgynstc nd ptrrchl rlgs sct. T mk mttrs wrs, th myr f th cty hs nggd n ncnscnbl vctm blmng nd vn prpsd “cd f cndct” fr th wmn t fllw s thy dn’t gt rpd. Th whl sttn s dsgstng.
nfrtntly, t sms lk mst f th gd lls n th fght gnst vrp cltr hv bn slnt bt ths vnt. Snc y r nw bck n th lp, wht s yr pnn n ths dsgstng nd hrrfc sttn? Wll y b dng blg pst n t?
[Fucking liar. –pzm]
So may years ago I would camp in winter with my wife. Neither of us were city people but had to move for jobs so we relished getting away.
The ideal was camping in a truly dark and quiet area when overnight snow would bury our tent. When it’s really quiet you start to hear the rhythmic whoosh of blood circulating in your own ears. A little more relaxing and you hear the heartbeat of your partner. You share each others warmth. What could be better?
@Activist Mike, PC police agent and Social Justice special forces #31
Actually no, they’ve been providing good information, reports and discussion, for instance the video by
Kristi Winters an intersectional atheist feminist YouTuber living in the city. Have to recommend this video, hits all the significant points.
And doubly wrong, since “media” isn’t synonymous with “US public media” or “the English-speaking internet” the relevant media outlets in Germany have been on it as soon as the attacks became known. And local feminist women took to the streets immediately following. Also, it was groups of 30+ organised harassers, among a crowds of 1000s.
Don’t however think this is the thread for this.
Agreed. I’ve camped in the winter a lot, although not very recently. It’s certainly an acquired taste, but can be lots of fun if you ask me. And it gives you a very different perspective about what it means to be out in nature, which you don’t get camping/hiking/etc. in warmer weather.
But if you’ve got a cabin, one that even has electricity apparently (no internet access, right?), I really don’t understand why that would be considered “camping.” I mean, you’re not living in a town like usual, but it’s not as if people who live in a house in a rural area (some remote part of the woods or whatever) are in any sense camping. Maybe we don’t have a distinct word for that … you were on vacation at a state park.
I think a metronome would drive me crazy, and I wouldn’t get any sleep. I don’t like noisy clocks either. Silence (and total darkness) is great for me, but maybe you’d prefer a source of white noise, a portable fan or something like that.
Ain’t it great at the end of the day
When there ain’t no one around
Just me and the fence post
Staring each other down
Nothing but a big bunch of nothing
Driving me insane
Cause there ain’t no voices louder
Than the ones inside my brain
—- John Prine
Aah, pitch black night and silence is an excellent way to sleep. If I blink my eyes open in a semi wakeful moment and there is no change to the blackness, I sleep on. Even my bedside clock radio has a pillow on it, to stop the gentle glow from waking me up. And there is very little noise around my secluded abode at night, apart from the ring tailed possum going out in the evening and back to bed just before dawn. Its little dance of hob nailed boots on the tin roof doesn’t last very long as it wanders off into the bush for a feed.
My wife and kids and I get a cabin up in the Berkshires for a weekend every February. A wood stove for heat, a couple electrical outlets, beds to sleep 5, and a table and chairs. It’s back in a valley away from any roads, and you lose cell service about 2 miles before you get to it. Perfect for time with the family. Real time. A bottle of wine, a crockpot of stew, a good loaf of bread, and hours of conversation and board games. When the weather is clear the sky is spectacular. When it’s snowing and there’s no wind the sound of the blood pounding in your head is deafening.
I would take a weekend there in the dead of winter over any five-star hotel in the world.
Lofty @ 36:
Heh. One drawback to the digital age is every little thing has some sort of effing light. I spent one day with a roll of electrical tape, covering up all the little dots of light. Like you, I have a covering over my clock, a towel rather than a pillow.
Activist Mike, PC police agent and Social Justice special forces
Perhaps you should have gone with the shorter nym of “Gotcha now!”. In the future, if you wish to berate PZ for not covering every single event on the planet, you may post to either of these threads: Discuss: World Politics or Discuss: Interesting Stuff.
Wrd Chrchll wrt:
“Prhps y shld hv gn wth th shrtr nym f “Gtch nw!”. n th ftr, f y wsh t brt PZ fr nt cvrng vry sngl vnt n th plnt, y my pst t thr f ths thrds: Dscss: Wrld Pltcs r Dscss: ntrstng Stff.”
Why wld brt PZ bt ths trgdy? smply wntd t hr hs pnn n ths, snc h s n f th mst thghtfl cmmnttrs tht knw f whn t cms t ths sss.
Yr hstl tn s rlly nt ndd hr. d plgz fr gng lttl ff tpc, bt ssmd PZ ws nwr f th vnt d t hs cblng trp, thrws h wld hv lrdy pstd bt t. dn’t wnt t pst n ths dscssn thrds fr gd rsn. fnd mny f th rglr cmmntrs hr t b rd, nd ny cnvrstn wth thm s nprdctv. ws smply ntrstd n PZ’s pnpn, nthng mr.
Nxt tm ‘ll jst rch t t hm n Twttr.
[Liar. –pzm]
We really didn’t have a choice to use a tent: camping is closed for the winter. It’s too dangerous. The only way you can stay overnight at Glacier Lakes in January if you rent a cabin.
I suppose the park rangers don’t enjoy hauling out frozen corpses.
@quatguy #15
@unclefroggy #23
@consciousness razor #34
@PZ Myers #41
“Camping” is a relative term, just as “tent” is. I went “camping” with a tent on my back and all the bedrolls with my SO twice last year, but we still didn’t consider ourselves “campers”, due to the pubs, restaurants and general civilisation all around, as well as the well-organised, lit, bathroomed and beshoweredd “campsites” we stayed at. Age, experience and comfort are significant inputs. I’m sure PZ also didn’t walk there, nor did he carry all the provisions on his back for kilometer after kilometer.
The prime element in camping is… setting up camp. Saying: “we came here, we are staying here, and we’re sure as hell going to survive here without our usual amenities!”, is the point.
When I lived alone in a house in the countryside for a short period of time and I found the darkness and quietness disturbing, I put on some music (rock, blues or soul/funk) to fill the void when I went to bed. Mostly I fell asleep before the cassette or the CD stopped. I also used the same technique when I worked at night and slept at day to displace the random noise in the city with structured and familiar noise. Prince and A.W. Yrjänä (the lead singer of CMX) have sung me more “lullabies” than my mom.
The music thing may not please some partners, I’d guess.
Activist Mike
Either shut up before you inform yourself or stop lying
+++
PZ
How loud is it in Morris at night?
I think there’s a level of background noise you are used to. Me, I can’t sleep with too much noise, even wind and rain can keep me awake.
+++
re:camping
Tent, caravan or camping car, usually on a campsite (central and Southern Europe are probably too densely inhabited for this US American “go out into the woods and and put up your tent” thing). Also, personally, I’m a spoiled brat who wants a real toilet nearby.
@#6 Caine:
I share your frown. As an avid amateur astronomer it has been a constant struggle to deal with civic authorities to emplace ordinances that stipulate smart lighting that is at once energy-efficient and shielded, both with street light and property lighting. They never understand, and never bother to TRY to understand.
They advance the typical argument that increased night illumination is a public safety measure in terms of motorists, and reduces the ability of scoundrels like ‘peeping toms’ and burglars to conduct their nefarious activities. Never mind the relative rarity of the latter, or that light glare and shadow under night-time conditions actually serve to enhance the very problems they think they are addressing with ludicrous lighting.
40 years of progressive puncuated migration ever further away from urban lights (5 moves so far) has inevitably been triggered at each juncture by utterly thoughtless civic intentions to ‘keep up with the Jonses’ of nearby towns that succumb to the same disease. Its a lightwave of destruction that robs everyone of a beautiful and entirely natural view of a sky filled with stars: If you can’t see the Milky Way on a clear night, you are living in a dead-sky zone.
Several times I’ve had to endure neighbors calling the cops simply because I was outside in the middle of the night quietly observing an aurora or a lunar eclipse! Oooh, suspicious behavior, right?
I was favorably exonerated on the occasion of one big aurora display: when the officers stepped around the house into my backyard to see what I was up to, they started to tell me that they asked me who I was and where I live — I said simply, at the dark figures, “who are you?
They then said they were responding to reports of a prowler and pressed me again for identification and where I live. I said, I live right here, it’s my backyard, and I’m watching the aurora…look up! Take a look! They did, and they were astounded, even startled. (“Oh, my…!” and “WHOA!” were their first reactions…followed by the silence of fascination that always accompanies a great phenomenon in progress). I proceeded to fill them in with how charged particles from a storm on the Sun are arriving to get funneled in by the our planet’s magnetic field, and they were absolutely enthralled by it. (“Gosh, look-at-that!” and “That’s AMAZING!”).
I let the officers take a gander at Jupiter with its moons through my binoculars. They were impressed – one asked me where he could get a pair like them. Those two guys hung around for a full half hour as we watched the sky writhe with colorful streamers, curtains and pulsations. Those officers were as entranced at the disply as I was, and we shared the experience in the silence, in a common wonder. One remarked softly, “God, just look at that!” and then the other said, “We gotta get back to work”.
My policemen friends assured me that they would let the caller know it was nothing serious, nothing to worry about, and i saw them go next door to inform her…she was watching the whole time with what seemed to be all her house lights blazing…which is why we could see her siloutetted in her windows.
We parted on a first-name basis and handshakes. I stayed in my own backyard to continue watching the display. They had no problem with that.They now knew and understood why I was ‘skulking around’ outside in the middle of the night.
Alas, my neighbor didn’t…
She didn’t like the fact that her neighbors could be allowed to mess around in their own backyards, however quietly, in the middle of the night! It simply unnerved her to think that anybody might be doing something outdoors at night when respectable people ought to be in bed asleep! She didn’t like the fact that the police did not ‘do their duty’ and she conducted trivial harassments over the following entire summer. When the town council started to install super-obnoxious lights on our street as a response to her complaints, I decided to move even further afield.
Thus, for this amateur observer, not only does excessive lighting curb observation, but the bright glare of basic human ignorance at times has an even more pernicious effect. But at least I got those two cops interested in the sky!
—
By the way…Pharyngula and FTB has been acting increasingly glitchy over the last year, to the point that almost every visit ends up as a tab-wide crash. Either its the site or my server. Has anybody else noticed this problem?
Chilly Sweden brrr-eaks another winter record http://www.thelocal.se/20160107/sweden-brrr-eaks-another-cold-weather-record
Don’t you complain about winters! When I was a kid, we would have been happy to freeze our assess off in a cozy cabin like you had! And our parents threw us out in the morning to see if we got eaten by wolves or not, in case it was safe for them to go outside. And we had to live in a cardboard box in a pit in the street…
Anchor @ 45:
:Snort: There is no traffic here. Fuck, on the byway, we remark that traffic is high if we see four other vehicles. I don’t know what particular excuses fueled the light mania here, but I’m pretty sure “that’s pretty stupid” covers it. You can wander about at night here, with no one caring (and likely not noticing) – I like to have a wander after midnight in the warmer weather sometimes, and have never so much as had it mentioned. The nearest cops are in New Salem, though, and no one here likes cops, so it would have to be fair serious for anyone to call.
Camping to me is all about basking in the light of the Son … err, sun, that shines out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
I once visited Monument Valley, a Navajo Tribal Park on the border of Utah and Arizona. It was a bright sunny day and the silence was total. It felt like my ears were roaring. Every once in a while the sound of a cow from one of the Navajo ranches would break the slience and it felt like the world righted itself.
No silly, that was the wolf-big-teeth-grandmother staging a diversion so she could get away from those nasty, seriously anti-wolf lumberjacks, and amble down to the village for a nice cup of tea and a whole lamb. The kids only got ate if they wondered into the gingerbread house.
Being from the West, this is pretty much my impression as well, which has (among other things that I won’t get into) kept me from any wintertime camping ideas even though I’m in fairly close proximity to Big Bend National Park, where I’ve wanted to go for some time now. Even if it’s warm enough to camp out in relative comfort and safety, I would still have to contend with the fact that it would get dark around 5:00, which is several hours before my body could allow me to sleep. What then?
Last winter I went to Yellowstone just before the road closed, which turned me on to the idea of hiking/sightseeing in cold weather. It’s that damned night that’s still something to contend with.
Rey Fox
Pfooey, question mark replaced a bracket.
Yeah, but to me it would still be hours huddled around an artificial light source trying to find ways to keep myself occupied, rather than outdoor recreation of any kind.
Rey Fox
Candle-light Croquet.
Set up the wickets however you like and put candles beside them.
Occasional breaks to go huddle with some rum.
Read a big novel, write a big novel, even update a blog, make some snow shoes, eat up all your snacks, go wherever your imagination takes you.
This stay-over of PZ’s reminded me of a humor book from the ’70s. Shut Up and Eat Your Snowshoes. Maybe my mass market copy is worth something now, based on the paperback price.
Nerd
Holy shirt.
I have a copy of that … somewhere …
.
had a copy
.
somewhere