y favorite musical moments of 2003 involved silence. That's not because I thought the music that was released in 2003 wasn't great—some of it really was. But silence, true silence, is such a rare thing in cities that its appearance is a memorable experience indeed. In cities, there's always some noise floating around, be it a computer's fan, a refrigerator's hum, a car's roar, or the thumping bass of a neighbor's hip-hop album. Of course, you ignore these sounds as best you can, but they never disappear completely unless you leave the city and its noises behind and journey to places where human beings have yet to kill nature. I did just that on several occasions this year, and here are the two most memorable:

In August, I spent a week with my wife and her family at their cottage on the shore of Lake Huron, at the tip of the "thumb" in northern Michigan. The family part was anything but silent, but most of the time was spent sitting in chairs, looking out on that mammoth lake, watching sailboats or motorboats glide from one horizon to the other, and relax. There was the sound of wind, the buzzing of mosquitoes (not too many, though), the clinking of wind chimes, and the crashing of waves. And that was it. It was as peaceful a spot as I've ever encountered.

In November (actually, it was Thanksgiving weekend in the US), my wife and I visited Joshua Tree National Park, which is located east of our home in Redlands, California and north of Palm Springs. It's a beautiful park for a lot of reasons, but the thing we like best is its emptiness (both the emptiness of desert spaces and the lack of other visitors). On this occasion, however, there were quite a few people from all over the world (we heard German, Spanish, Japanese, and French, and that was just in the gift shop), so the people part of the park was anything but empty. Still, we were determined to take a walk, and we didn't let the crowds stop us. We parked along the road near Skull Rock (which does, in fact, look just like a skull) and took a hike along a three-mile trail. Now, mind you, there were cars parked everywhere, and the trail was right next to a large campground. There were hundreds of people all around us. However, these people were not hiking. As we walked along the trail, into a gully and over some rock formations, parallel to the main road, we didn't see or hear a single person, a single car, or a single boom box. Somehow, rock formations and the gully muffled external sounds, drowning out all but the whisper of wind against our faces and the crunch of our shoes against sand. It was the most relaxing three-mile walk my ears have ever had.