It’s a little silly, this need to be alone once in a while. After all, my day job has evolved into mostly solitude with brief moments of actually talking to someone. My business is 90% solo. And exactly half the time, I come home to my dogs and my cat and a quiet house. What more quiet do I need, really?

But I find that the background noises never really go away when you’re immersed in them. Sometimes it’s a stadium full of cheering people, almost deafening, and sometimes it’s whispering folk in a library, but it’s almost always there. You learn to tune it out in self defense, but if you listen for it, you can hear the noise in your head plain as day, and once you start hearing it, it’s really hard to turn it back to neutral.

So you take yourself away. Other surroundings can make a huge difference. Your place might be the beach, listening to the waves roll in, or the mall, finding the perfect shoes. Mine’s the mountains, as I believe that I might have mentioned a time or two.

You wake up early, having told yourself to get up without the alarm. 4:50 in the morning might be a little ridiculous, but it seems to be what your subconscious wants, so you roll with it. You get in the truck, pop in a favorite CD, and just drive. Dawn finds you still driving, and you haven’t seen another person, even at a distance, for over an hour. You deliberately take the long road, and throw your destination to the wind. You stop when you want, and go when you want, and don’t have to worry about another living soul at that moment.

You start to relax, and eventually turn off the music as just one more source of noise. Sooner or later, the background noise subsides completely, something it only does as a gift now and then, and that’s when things start to get really good. Your mind is free now to work on the things that it wants to, which might or might not be what you think they are. And it might or might not do its thinking out loud; sometimes you can drive for miles just keeping your eye out for deer and admiring nice bear tracks, not consciously worrying a problem, only to realize on your way home ten hours later, that it seems to have been laid to rest. Then again, sometimes it hasn’t, but with your mind swept out, you feel that it’s not insurmountable now and setting it aside until an answer becomes clear is just fine, thank you very much.

Eventually you might find yourself cackling with glee at having made it through that puddle of ice and mud, but what’s really entertaining you is the chance to be your own company for a while, and finding again that you like it.

Five hours into the drive, and you might find yourself to be decent company for other people again, so driving in the back door to Yosemite seems like exactly the right thing to do and at the right time. You wave to a lady at one of the cabins, and she waves back, thinking you’re a local, because who else uses that road?

You follow your nose, saying to hell with the maps, and find yourself at the bottom of one of the most famous waterfalls in the country. You walk up the short path, slipping on the ice, and take the time to really look at it, sitting through several cycles of tourists who pop in, snap a picture, and are gone again. But that’s OK; that’s their thing. Your thing is to find the quiet, and now that you have, to hang onto it just a little longer.

You’re not ready to give it all up quite yet, so on your way out, you circle through another of your sacred places. And somehow, it’s fitting and complete that you find your way back to your driveway twelve hours to the minute after you left it, but you’re a subtly different person. The voices have started back up again, started on the way home, in fact, but they’re muted and tolerable now, and should be for weeks.

Aren’t you lucky that you can find this place, this peace? People who don’t know might think that you’re crazy, a woman going out into the edge of nowhere and for no obvious reason, but they don’t know, do they? Either they’re deaf or just a little stupid, or else they’re there for the same reason you are, but those aren’t the ones wondering.

Those are the ones nodding as you pass.