Star Tribune
I spent an hour in the quietest place on Earth with four strangers – in the dark
It’s so silent inside the quietest room on Earth that you can hear your eyelids shut when you blink.
Tucked away in Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood, Orfield Laboratories has made a name for itself in the business of silence.
Ordained by Guinness World Records as the quietest place on Earth, the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs is measured at an average of -13 decibels and a record of -24.9 decibels. Zero decibel is the threshold for human hearing, meaning -24.9 is a whole lot of nothing.
Yet the emptiness of the chamber feels heavy when you spend an hour inside with four strangers and the lights off. I went last Friday to the first of a series of group tours offered by Orfield Labs. The tours cost $75 per person and are nearly sold out, though more may be offered. I jumped at the opportunity.
A group session inside the chamber isn’t the quintessential quietest-room-in-the-world experience, but it’s the closest most people will ever get to perfect silence, said Steve Orfield, founder of Orfield Labs.
A long corridor snakes through the interior of the building, with a set of heavy doors leading into the chamber and an outermost wall of 12-inch-thick concrete. Emma Orfield Johnston, granddaughter of Steve Orfield, assured us that we wouldn’t be trapped in the room.
The first thing that surprised me is the imposing otherworldliness of the 3-feet fiberglass wedges jutting from the chamber walls at varying angles. The smallness of the room became apparent as four strangers took seats around me. The platform we stood on was suspended over a net of aircraft cables with vibration-dampening springs below.
The lights would be turned off to ensure a fully immersive experience. Luckily, the four strangers sharing the dark were friendly. Two flew from Arizona just for the tour.
People with hearing loss tend to hear ringing in their ears while inside the chamber, Orfield Johnston said. To my horror, tinnitus was waiting as soon as the chamber door closed and the lights went off.
The loudest sound inside the chamber would be a creation of my own mind, a mistranslation of the distorted vibrations my ears were sending to the brain.
My group followed the no talking or phone use rules. Still, our bodies seemed in communication as disembodied rumbling and squelching of stomachs rose from the darkness. Anxiety creeped from within as I worried my bodily machinations were the loudest – I had skipped breakfast that morning.
The sound of swallowing was so loud I convinced myself my throat was drier than the Sahara. The slightest shift of the body created an embarrassing cacophony for my comrades in silence. At one point, I staunchly resisted a burp only for it to transform into an even stranger sound. I’d be dead last if this was a competition.
With little external stimuli, I needed to think of things to think about. My grumbling stomach, my poor sleep habits, my brother’s first day at his new job, a long-gone golden retriever named Autumn, hours spent lying on my grandma’s patio swing set and staring up at the tree canopy scattering the light like a kaleidoscope.
I thought of a line from the science fiction novel “Cloud Atlas” that hasn’t left me since I first read it: “the mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.”
And provide phantoms my mind did.
Inside the pitch-black chamber, the only difference between your eyes being open or closed is the phantoms your mind creates from the emptiness. There was a white glow here and there and a pink blob floating across my vision like a strange object drifting across the expanse of a starless night sky.
I lost nearly all sense of time. I knew it had been longer than five or 10 minutes, but had it been 20, 30 or 40? I had missed the bus and time had moved on from this realm I now shared with faces and bodies I could no longer picture.
Anxiety returned as I doubted whether I could last another 30 minutes. I started to feel itchy in random places, scratching like a game of Whac-a-mole.
Just as I managed to calm down, a glimpse of light appeared in the corner of my eye and slowly widened. The door was open. It was over. I survived.
My group exchanged thoughts in hushed tones, only beginning to return to the loudness of our world. Some said they could hear their heart beating, but I missed that. As we parted ways, my mind felt clear in a way it rarely does.
When I got home, I collapsed into bed and Googled “hearing loss.”
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
