Outside, a young person drives by with his car stereo booming a relentless ear-shattering boom, boom, boom. You wonder how long he himself will be able to hear it.
A cellphone rings. A lawn mower fires up. Somewhere people argue.
They are the common noises of modern life and they obscure sounds of nature: A breeze rustling the leaves. Water flowing from a creek. Birds chattering in flight. A bee buzzing by.
But there is one place in the continental United States where you might not hear anything except nature.
In Washington's Olympic National Park a small red pebble marks the quietest inch in the country. It's a place supposedly devoid of ambient human noise, what acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton calls a 'sanctuary of silence.'
You aren't going to stumble upon the area. The spot is accessible only by a three-mile rainforest hike down the Hoh River Trail near Forks. It was designated noise control project on April 22, 2005.
The idea is that to keep One Square Inch of Silence in silence forces the surrounding forest to be preserved in silence, and Hempton hopes, encourage the practice of silence to spread.
Only one human sound routinely interferes with the square inch of silence: The US Navy flies growler jets above the Hoh Forest on training missions.
