Kathy & I value quiet as much as just about anything there is to value.  By quiet I don’t just mean sound, although that certainly accounts for a lot of it.  I mostly refer to the kind of quiet that means the absence of noise, both physical and mental.  By that I mean the constant background chatter, the incessant televisions that keep us “entertained” while we try to shop or have a meal, or the impatient and distracted “me first” drivers.  It can mean also mean something as simple as having to call the bank or the cable company for the eighth time about some problem that can never quite seem to be resolved.

We go to great lengths to make our home as peaceful as possible.  We don’t have a television.  It’s amazing how much difference that makes.  When we did have one we found that even when it was not on, it begged us to turn it on, to find something – anything – to watch.  That’s noise.  We love to listen to music, but when we do it is often smooth jazz or classical, with no words and no blaring horns or guitars.  There’s a time and place for the big band jazz and the vocals, but we save that for working in the garage or cleaning the house.  Our favorite play list on Spotify is called “Shhhhh!” (I made it up myself)

On our recent weekend with our friends Earl & Bonnie Moore, we found ourselves spending some quiet time at Swan Quarter Wildlife Refuge.  At the end of a mile or so long dirt road is a good-sized parking lot.  Why the parking lot is so large I have no idea, because in all the times we’ve been there I think we might have encountered just one car.  The parking lot was established for the Bell Island Pier, a beautiful fishing pier that extends perhaps 200 yards or more into Rose Bay Creek, which is an inlet of Rose Bay, the Pamlico River and eventually the Pamlico Sound.

Despite the sound of the wind and surf, this is truly a quiet place.  We enjoy spending time there, and enjoyed sharing it with Earl & Bonnie.  It’s a place that reminds us that there can be quiet anywhere, we just might need to work a little harder to find it.  There are a lot of spots like that everywhere.  A few of them I like to keep to myself, although they aren’t exactly a secret.  With others the key is to know when to go there and when to stay away.

Kathy & I have often discussed the possibility of relocating to eastern North Carolina.  There’s a lot to like out there.  It’s close(r) to the Outer Banks, we have made friends in Belhaven and Washington, and we’ve found that it’s just a great destination for a quiet weekend, whether I photograph or not.  There’s a noticeably slower and more relaxed pace out there.  It’s a pace we enjoy because it comes very close to the way we like to live our lives.

One of our objections to moving so far east is that it is so far from the other places we like to go.  It’s a good 5-hour drive from Charlotte, and another couple of hours or so to the mountains.  But at some point we realized that, being so far from everything might just be the point.  Maybe escaping the hustle & bustle, the traffic and congestion, might be worth the price of having to drive a little farther to get to some of the other places we love.  It’s hard to say for sure, but we may be on to something.  It’s possible that being farther from some things might bring you closer to others.

For the foreseeable future, home is where the jobs are, since it’s those jobs that allow us to have the house and travel to all of the places we like to travel to.  Down the road it might be another story, although I suspect the finally getting to the point where we can kiss the corporate world goodbye might lessen the need for escape.  That’s a hard scenario to predict.  But in the mean time, you can be sure that we will continue to seek the quiet places, whether they are close by or farther away.

Along the Pamlico River waterfront in Washington, North Carolina