You know who you are.

You’ve got the guitar strapped to your pack. You’re sitting on a rock at the Drinking Horse trailhead. You’re playing Wagon Wheel. You’re playing it in a key that doesn’t exist. You’re singing with the confidence of someone who has never been told no.

I didn’t hike twenty minutes through the mud to hear an acoustic rendition of a song I’ve already heard 400 times at every brewery in the Gallatin Valley. I came here for quiet. I came here for the birds, the wind, the sound of my own labored breathing. Nature doesn’t need a soundtrack, and if it did, it wouldn’t choose Wagon Wheel.

The trailhead is not an open mic. The parking lot is not a venue. The flat rock by the creek is not a stage, even though it does kind of look like one, which I suspect is the problem.

I’m not saying music is bad. Music is wonderful. Play at home. Play at a bar. Play at the farmers’ market, where people are expecting it and have the option to walk to the kettle corn booth to escape. But the trailhead? The one place in this valley where we’ve silently agreed to leave each other alone?

Play the guitar there and you’ve violated the social contract. Not a legal contract. Not even a spoken one. But the kind of contract that holds a community together — the understanding that my peace is not your performance space.

Donna Sprucetip hikes four mornings a week and owns noise-canceling headphones that she shouldn’t have to use outdoors.