Miles of Quiet
What the outdoors teaches you when you stop filling the silence.
I'm Henry Wilder. I live in a van most of the year, out of Bend, Oregon,
and I spend a lot of time outside, mostly by myself. This is not an
adventure podcast — no summit pushes, no near-death stories, nothing
epic. It's an honest account of what being outside actually does to how
you think: the long boring middles, the rivers that say no, and the kind
of quiet you can't get anywhere else.
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Latest episodes
Episode 9 · 12 min
This morning I woke up on a piece of land that belongs to me. It also belongs to you, and to a few hundred million other people, which is a strange kind of ownership but a real one. I was parked on a national forest road in the Cascades, a few miles up a gravel track, nobody around. I made coffee and watched the light come up through the trees. I didn't pay anyone for the privilege, and nobody could tell me to leave. I've woken up like that thousands of mornings now, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what actually makes it possible. It isn't the van. The van is just the tool.
Episode 8 · 12 min
On the third night of a solo trip last summer I caught myself talking out loud. Not to anybody — there was nobody within probably fifteen miles of me. I was cooking over a small fire and realized I'd been narrating it, out loud, to the fire, to the pot, to no one. Then I stopped and listened to how quiet it was, and noticed I wasn't embarrassed. There was nobody there to be embarrassed in front of. That's a stranger feeling than it sounds like the first time you really notice it.
Episode 7 · 12 min
I pulled up to a river in northern Idaho last fall that I'd never fished before — off a gravel road I found on a paper map, most of a day's drive to get there. And when I finally walked down to the bank, I didn't make a cast for almost an hour. I just stood there and looked at it. To anybody watching it would have looked like I'd forgotten why I came: a man in waders, rod in hand, doing nothing. I wasn't doing nothing. I was reading it.