The silence felt good.

 I still couldn't believe I was here. After growing up in an orphanage in the 1960's in eastern Pennsylvania, I thought college was not even a possibility. I was working as a machinist toolmaker when my boss came up behind me one day and said, "Rob, your left hand sure knows what your right hand is doing". He had no idea, but that funny comment gave me the courage to think I might actually be able to go to college. You see, engineers would come into the shop often, and I sometimes had to correct their designs. I started to believe I could be one myself if I could only find a way. Penn State turned me down, but miraculously, I received an acceptence letter from Ohio State!

I had a heavy schedule in the fall of ‘82: two labs, differential equations, and a chemical engineering class. My engineering class professor gave a quiz every day before class. I usually had an hour before class to study, but one day my car wouldn’t start, and by the time I rode my bike to the far side of campus, he was handing out the quiz. Shit. Sometimes there was just one question,and damn, wouldn’t you know this was one of those days. “Define ‘Piezo Resistance.’” Hmmm…might as well go for

broke.

I wrote, “When Dominos is reluctant to deliver pizza to your house. Piezo Resistance!” Then I apologized, explained that I was working two jobs, going to school full-time—including two tough labs, which no one in their right mind would do—and my car had broken down that morning.

I turned in my paper, then quietly walked over to the lab tables to work on a lab assignment with those who had finished the quiz. I had always used humor as a child when I didn’t know what else to do, and I hoped it might work in this situation. I was watching the professor out of the corner of my eye, and peeked over just in time to see him jerk his head up and look quickly and curiously around the room. I was grateful he had no idea who I was—it was a large class—and thankfully, he didn’t call me out. After class, we picked up our quizzes. He gave me a C for my goofy joke of an answer! After class I really should have gone home to get some sleep, but instead decided to find out where a “robot” that all the engineering students were talking about was being built. I found it in one of the engineering buildings, surrounded by a bunch of students. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.

“What the fuck?” I said a little too loudly.

“Yeah, I know,” answered one of the students. “Pretty cool.” There in front of me were two super-tall, maybe seven feet high mechanical “legs,” topped by two huge boxes holding computers, and between the legs a steel “cage” of sorts where a single operator would sit at the controls. It looked like something straight out of Star Wars.

“It’s an Adaptive Suspension Vehicle,” the student informed me. “We’re building it for the US Army!” He went on to explain that they were volunteers—science and engineering students—working with Professors Robert McGhee and Kenneth Waldron. “It will have six legs when finished, be able to step over obstacles as tall as seven feet, and traverse trenches as wide as twenty-three feet,” he explained.

Damn. I just had to get on this team. Then reality set in. I simply had no time. I was already behind in my schoolwork, and couldn’t afford to cut back my work hours.

I was a bit down as I left the group and was heading out when I noticed a door at the end of a short hall to my left. What caught my eye were the words “ANECHOIC CHAMBER,” and “KEEP OUT, DOOR LOCKED.” I turned and walked down the hall. I had read about these chambers and didn’t realize the university had one. No one was around, so I tried the door. It opened.

I was surprised to find a very large room with a smaller—maybe twenty-foot square room—within it. A kind of room within a room. So this must be the anechoic chamber. The door to the chamber was very large, like a big walk-in safe. I moved closer and pulled the door open. It was very heavy and about two feet thick! The room was dark, so I felt for a light switch, found it, and turned on a dim ceiling light. The room was surprisingly large, with a single chair in the middle. I turned to see that no one was around and went in, closing the door behind me.

I sat down in the chair, closed my eyes, and listened. After a few minutes of silence, I thought I could detect the slightest sound from the light fixture above. I got up, turned off the light, then walked carefully in complete darkness and felt for the chair. I sat down again, eyes open, and listened. Nothing. And I mean deafening silence. It was very strange at first.

But after what I guessed was only a few minutes, I felt something. The silence felt good. I started to experience a detachment from the world and a heightened sense of reality. I felt a strange sense of what I can only describe as completeness. I once read that a fractured thing craves wholeness. That when you break a bone, healing begins in seconds. The body needs to feel complete. I sat in this delicious completeness maybe fifteen minutes more, then thought I better leave before I was found.

The next time I visited the campus library, I looked up anechoic chambers and read that they are indeed the quietest place on earth. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota is so quiet that the longest anybody has been able to bear it is forty-five minutes.

I left the library thinking that surely I could stay longer than that. I felt my younger self had been there before me. The silence and safety of my childhood pine tree forest that bordered my orphanage was my anechoic chamber.

And about that robot Ohio State was building, years later I learned that after spending ten years and millions of dollars, the government decided it was too slow and cumbersome and abandoned the whole project. The robot is rumored to still be in storage somewhere on campus, dejected and forgotten.