Deafening silence

Have you ever been to a remote place, where noone else is around for miles and miles? Or those who are around are part of your "party" and they are indoors while you are outside. And everything is so quiet that you think you've gone deaf?

Well, I have. In 2002 my parents and I was on vacation in the USA. We finished our trip by going to Minnesota to visit relatives in St. Francis, north of Minneapolis.

A few days later my parents, our relatives and I drove to their cabin located at one of Minnesotas many lakes.

It was Easter time and there was snow outside. The lake was frozen solid (we had driven past a few lakes with cars "parked" on them), the plumbing in the house was frozen, so we had to use the outdoor toilet located behind the cabin. I guess they kept that building for situations like that - seems strange to have one, when your cabin have a beautiful modern indoor toilet.

Anyway my point is, late at night, I needed to use the toilet and had to go outside. Just me and mother nature. There was no street lights and there were no clouds. So right outside the house I stopped. Tilted my head back and gazed at the stars.

And it was soooo quiet. No wind, no sound of cars, people, animals. Nothing.
I honestly did think I had lost my ability to hear. Until I moved my foot and the snow under my foot made the noise of snow compression  :)

This photo is from that day - naturally not from that night. I was using my analogue Olympus (OM10) and back in 2002 I didn't think of having a digital copy made. So this is a scanned version.