You can close your eyes. There is no such thing as an earlid.

This episode is about the quietest square inch in the United States, and what it has to teach a kid whose ears take in too much. We talk with Matt Mikkelsen of Quiet Parks International about One Square Inch of Silence — the spot 3.2 miles up the Hoh River Trail that Gordon Hempton marked with a small red stone on Earth Day 2005 — and about why a quiet place and a silent place are not the same thing.

We explain how the Olympic Mountains are made entirely of uplifted ocean floor with no volcano anywhere in the story, why no road crosses the middle of this park, and how trees in the Hoh grow new roots out of their own branches to drink from the soil in the canopy. We stand at Cape Flattery, the farthest northwest you can get in the continental U.S. without a boat, and go to  ...