Imagine a place where the most persistent noise might be the creak of your skis on the wooded trail or the dry rattle of frozen branches in the wind. Imagine ruddy cheeks warming by a fire as the smells of a home-cooked meal waft from the kitchen. Imagine solitude where bright starlight glitters off the snow. Imagine all this just a half-day’s drive from Boston.

We were cross-country skiing the seven-mile trail between West Branch Pond Camps and AMC’s Little Lyford Lodge and Cabins in Maine on a blue-sky January afternoon last winter. The temperature had soared to somewhere near zero, but was dropping, headed for 30 below that night. Brisk even for Maine.

I was out ahead of my companions, skiing fast, eager to see around the next turn in the trail. Truth be told, I was also trying to burn off a few extra calories before tucking into the sumptuous dinner that I knew would be awaiting us at Little Lyford. I’d eaten Rose’s roast pork on a fly fishing trip the previous summer and was hoping that was on the menu. (It was!)

After a mile or so of letting the skis really sing on the packed snow, I stopped at the top of a slight rise to wait for my friends. Though other sections of this trail open up to glimpses of the Pleasant River and gorgeous views across frozen marshes to snow-covered hills, here I was completely surrounded by dense black spruce and white birch trees that almost knitted closed the blue sky above. As the echoes of my skis on the squeaky-crisp snow faded away, my heartbeat slowed, and my breathing quieted.

Then, I heard it, probably one of the rarest sounds in the modern world: Stillness.

Not the blood-rushing-in-your-ears silence of sensory deprivation, nor yet the quiet of a summer woodland with insects humming and a breeze rustling leaves on the trees. But the true stillness of a windless winter world as the feeble sun lowers itself toward the long night. No breeze, no bird calls, no babbling brooks, and, above all, no babbling people, no music, and no internal combustion engines.

I hadn’t heard—and felt—this much pure stillness since standing alone on a frozen lake watching the northern lights on a winter trip to northern Labrador. So I stood, listening, savoring every moment.

It didn’t last long, of course. Stillness rarely does. As the cold started to seep through my gloves and nibble at my fingertips, my companions’ quiet conversation and occasional laughter reached out to tickle my ears through my cap. A moment later, they appeared, and we all skied on happily together through the fading afternoon toward the waiting welcome (and welcome warmth) at Little Lyford.

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