[Scan-DC] Green Bank, West Virginia

[Alan Henney]

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The Truth About the Quietest Town in America

The National Radio Quiet Zone limits wireless communications. But a journey
to its center in Green Bank, West Virginia, reveals a town at odds with
itself.

This story is adapted from The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town
Suspended in Silence, by Stephen Kurczy.

SEVENTEEN ANTENNAS PROTRUDED from Chuck Niday’s Dodge Ram 2500. It reminded
me of the wraith-hunting vehicle from Ghostbusters, and its aim was
similar. Ghosts are all around us—at least in the form of invisible waves
of electromagnetic radiation emanating from power lines and Wi-Fi routers,
flying through walls and zooming across the sky—and Niday’s job was to
track them down. His truck’s main antenna picked up signals from 25
megahertz to 4 gigahertz, while smaller antennas operated as a
direction-finding array. “Through some method, which I believe involves
witchcraft,” he said, “it comes up with a direction for the signal we’re
looking for.”

Niday was heading out on patrol of Green Bank, West Virginia, to keep tabs
on radio noise that might interfere with the half-dozen giant, dish-shaped
telescopes looming behind us at the nation’s oldest federal radio astronomy
observatory. Operating electrical equipment within 10 miles of here was
illegal if it disrupted the telescopes, punishable by a state fine of $50
per day. Further safeguarding the observatory was a surrounding
13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone—an area larger than the
combined landmass of Connecticut and Massachusetts—which limited cell
service and all kinds of wireless communications systems. Theoretically,
you couldn’t turn on a smartphone in town without alerting Niday.

We hopped in the truck. Wiring snaked from the roof down to a stack of
electronics and computer monitors in the cab. “Footloose” played on an
AM/FM radio. Niday adjusted the dials on a computer to look for signals in
the 2.4 gigahertz frequency: Wi-Fi. He shifted into drive.

As we exited the observatory’s parking lot, the truck’s computer monitor
started bleeping angrily. Before we reached the main road, we picked up 13
wireless signals. Within a half mile, we found 66 signals. Niday’s gadgetry
was going berserk. But instead of jumping out of the truck to ticket Wi-Fi
offenders, he simply took note of the sources of radio noise and kept
driving, unfazed.

Within five miles, we tallied more than 200 signals, some coming from the
homes of staff living on the observatory’s own property—a blatant violation
of the facility’s regulations. As I observed from the backseat, I wondered,
How is this called the quietest town in America?

I HAD FIRST come to Green Bank a few months earlier, in March of 2017, on
something of a pilgrimage with my girlfriend (now wife), Jenna.

Driving into town, we passed the area’s quiet authority: the Robert C. Byrd
Green Bank Telescope, a 485-foot-tall tangle of white beams holding a giant
dish the size of two football fields. This washbasin for Godzilla sat at
the bottom of a 4-mile-long valley surrounded by mountains nearly 5,000
feet tall, which created a natural barrier against the outside world’s
noise and helped isolate this remote area. Three-fifths of the surrounding
county was state or federal forest, thick with mountain laurel and, in
warmer months, teeming with mushrooms, ramps, ginseng, goldenseal, and
sassafras. Its 941 square miles had a total of three traffic lights, one
weekly newspaper, one high school, and a couple roadside pay phones.

The population density of about nine people per square mile was the lowest
in West Virginia and one of the lowest anywhere east of the Mississippi
River. Going to Walmart was a hundred-mile round trip that required
traversing some of the Mountain State’s tallest peaks. Outsiders were
considered “flatlanders” or “come-heres.” Locals were “mountain people” who
lived in evocative-sounding hamlets such as Stony Bottom, Clover Lick,
Thorny Creek, Briery Knob, and Green Bank, with that last name holding an
almost mythical allure as a place where the grass was greener and life
fuller. Four hours from Washington, DC, Green Bank sounded like a
modern-day Walden that could free Jenna and me from the exasperating
demands of being always online and reachable. Visiting was to be a respite
from our digital lives.

In fact, the quiet had attracted a number of outsiders over the decades.
The early astronomers’ ranks had included Frank Drake, who in 1960
conducted humanity’s first formal search for extraterrestrial intelligence
using a Green Bank telescope. Secretive military operations also found
fertile ground in the Quiet Zone, enabling the National Security Agency to
eavesdrop on radio communications from a nearby station in Sugar Grove.
During the counterculture revolution, hippies and back-to-the-landers
flooded the county in search of a quieter way of living, among them a
long-haired doctor named Hunter “Patch” Adams who purchased 310 acres with
the stated mission of opening a free medical hospital. Up the road, an
infamous white supremacist named William Luther Pierce would also find
refuge, purchasing a 346-acre mountainside to build a combination country
retreat, business headquarters, and militia base from which to inspire a
“white awakening.”

The area had also attracted a sex cult, a racist serial killer, and, most
recently, people with a mysterious illness called electromagnetic
hypersensitivity who described feeling ill when exposed to iPhones and
smart meters, refrigerators and microwaves. (At the start of the Covid-19
pandemic, some people similarly claimed that cell towers and 5G cell
service were somehow linked to the outbreak, particularly in cities.) In
essence, they were allergic to modern life. Many were convinced they had
nowhere to go but the Quiet Zone.

My own journey to the Quiet Zone had begun in 2009, when I got rid of my
first and last mobile device, a silver Samsung flip phone. I had been
working for the Cambodia Daily, a scrappy rag in Phnom Penh, and my cell
phone had come to feel like an extension of myself. I slept with it. I ate
with it. It was a social lifeline. It was also a source of anxiety.
Desperate for a callback from a source, I would stare at the device,
willing it to comply. I heard phantom rings and felt phantom vibrations. I
was as dependent on my phone as a baby on a pacifier. The day I left
Cambodia, I dropped my phone in a garbage can.

Back in the United States, I put off getting a replacement. It was a
decision initially based on frugality, then fueled by stubbornness. I don’t
like when people tell me what to do, and everyone was telling me to get a
smartphone. Weeks without a phone turned into months, then years. I worked
for the Christian Science Monitor in Boston, then moved to New York City to
report on finance, then relocated to Brazil as a foreign correspondent, all
without a phone. I signed up for a free Google “phone number” to make calls
using my laptop. I used Skype. I got an iPod for podcasts. In emergency
situations, I borrowed others’ cellphones, using them in the way people
once used roadside pay phones. I recognize mobile devices can be useful—I
just think they should be used sparingly.

I’ve come to see my phonelessness as a matter of personal liberty, a kind
of Fourth Amendment fight for privacy and “the right to be let alone,” as
phrased by the Boston lawyers Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in a famous
Harvard Law Review article from 1890. The two railed against “recent
inventions and business methods,” such as “instantaneous photographs” and
“numerous mechanical devices” that “invaded the sacred precincts of private
and domestic life.” What would they think of smartphones and their abuse of
our attention and privacy? I saw myself as a disconnection crusader, a Don
Quixote for the digital era, toiling against the tyranny of always-on
mobile devices. (Never mind that Don Quixote was delusional.)

My mission was as futile as fighting windmills. Cellphones hardly existed
two decades ago. By 2019, eight in 10 American adults owned a smartphone;
in my own demographic of Americans aged 30 to 49, 92 percent owned
smartphones. Whenever I walked into a public restroom, a guy at the
neighboring stall held a device in his free hand. A colleague so vigorously
swiped and typed on her iPhone that she injured her wrist and came into the
office wearing a brace. My mother, a teacher, was encouraged to tweet from
the classroom. My father, a minister, contended with congregants answering
their phones during services. Jenna carried two smartphones, one personal
and one provided by her employer so she could be reached any time of any
day. “You can’t miss nobody in 2017,” the comedian Chris Rock said during a
stand-up routine that year. “Not really. You can say it, but you don’t
really miss the motherfucker, because you’re with them all the time.
They’re in your fuckin’ pocket.”

This loss of radio quiet has coincided with a loss of audible quiet. In
2000, the director of the US National Park Service passed an ordinance on
“soundscape preservation and noise management” that called for parks to
document and work to preserve natural sounds. The directive expired in
2004. Three years later, when the iPhone debuted, Science reported that
human-made noise pollution was “pervasive” in America’s protected areas.
The acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton believes a dozen places remain in the
United States where a person can hear no man-made sounds for 15 minutes.
More than annoying, such noise has been shown to increase the risk of heart
attacks, strokes, diabetes, and even cancer. The concurrent rise in radio
noise has also had deadly effects, with heavy smartphone usage tied to
depression, anxiety, sleep deprivation, teen suicides, and, unsurprisingly,
motor vehicle accidents.

Wouldn’t there be fewer car crashes and deaths if it was impossible to
drive and text at the same time? Wouldn’t all of us sleep better if we
lived in a place without constant connectivity? Wouldn’t our lives be
richer and our communities stronger if we weren’t always online? And if all
these benefits of a less digitized life were true, wouldn’t Green Bank and
the surrounding Quiet Zone be a kind of utopia?

Those questions led me into Appalachia, over snowy mountain passes and down
steep switchbacks, into the rugged backcountry of Daniel Boone and
Stonewall Jackson, to the heart of the National Radio Quiet Zone, in search
of an alternative to our tech-obsessed, phone-addicted, attention-hijacked,
doomscrolling society. When I first arrived in 2017, the observatory was
hosting some 30 media visitors a year, with a regular stream of articles
being published about the so-called Quietest Town in America. Busy days
could see three film crews crowded atop the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank
Telescope, all competing for footage of that most endangered of things:
quiet.

AFTER MY INITIAL visit to Green Bank with Jenna, I returned about a dozen
times over the next three years for a series of extended stays, popping in
so frequently that people asked if I’d moved there permanently. I joined a
book club, helped build a house, foraged for ramps, and went target
shooting with a 7-year-old. I frequented a small country church where the
wall-mounted “Register of Attendance and Offering” was never updated; it
always said there were 11 attendees and $79 in tithes, contributing to the
feeling of time standing still, of being drawn into a quieter dimension.

It was also a place of contradictions. Soon after my patrol with Chuck
Niday, CNN’s medical journalist Sanjay Gupta drove into Green Bank for an
episode of Vital Signs. “National Radio Quiet Zone,” Gupta said to the
camera, “that means there’s no cell service, there’s no Wi-Fi, there’s no
radio. It’s just really quiet.” On his heels, Katie Couric visited for a
National Geographic series. “Green Bank is a town where technology is
almost completely banned,” she said in a bright voiceover when the series
aired, later opining, “People here seem happy to follow the law of the
land.”

Even the state’s highest-ranking officials fed into the quiet hype. “All
people within a 20-mile radius of the facility cannot have any device that
emits a noticeably high amount of electromagnetic radiation,” Senator Joe
Manchin would write in a 2018 op-ed. “This includes WiFi routers, cell
phones, and even microwaves. Yet, these faithful West Virginians have
sacrificed all of these luxuries for the advancement of science.”

Teresa Mullen rolled her eyes at such language. The Green Bank resident and
high school teacher had a microwave. She had a smartphone. She had Wi-Fi.
She knew where to get a cell phone signal. “It’s not like we’re living some
bohemian lifestyle,” she told me. Such was hardly a secret. A house across
the street from the observatory had Wi-Fi with the network name “Screw you
NRAO,” an unsubtle middle finger to the observatory’s calls for quiet.
Green Bank’s health clinic had Wi-Fi. So did the senior center. “We’re not
supposed to,” said John Simmons, the county’s director of senior programs
and a former county commissioner, “but I think all that stuff about the
noise levels is fabricated.”

As I dug into the issue, I found myself wading into a legal debate.
Observatory staff and scientists initially told me in no uncertain terms
that the facility could push back against any source of radio interference
in town, be it Wi-Fi or a smartphone, a microwave or a malfunctioning
electric blanket. But when I raised the issue with scientists and officials
in the greater radio astronomy community, I was told that West Virginia’s
law against radio noise was essentially toothless, meaning Niday had no
power to crack down on Wi-Fi, smartphones, microwaves, and other reportedly
“outlawed” electronics.

I would eventually bring the debate to Anthony Beasley, director of the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia,
which oversaw Green Bank’s operations from 1956 until 2016, when the two
entities split. The NRAO still operates telescopes around the world and has
a vested interest in maintaining the Quiet Zone. Beasley agreed there was
ambiguity to the Quiet Zone regulations. But he said the argument was
somewhat removed from reality. Even if the state and federal laws could be
interpreted in their strictest possible way, it still wouldn’t make
financial or logistical sense to hunt Wi-Fi up and down the valley. For a
cash-strapped observatory fighting to merely stay open, why hire lawyers to
prosecute Wi-Fi-users when that money could go toward scientific equipment,
staff, and research?

“You’ve got to decide which hill you’re going to die on,” Beasley said.
“Taking someone to court and potentially getting some kind of class action
lawsuit going would be an incredible waste of time, in my opinion.”

On that point, everyone agreed. It was impossible to stop the wireless
revolution.

During my patrol with Niday, we would have found even more signals had we
driven a few miles toward his house. Even the Quiet Zone cop had Wi-Fi.
“Technically” it wasn’t permitted, Niday admitted, “but I know how to break
the rules.”

By 2019, Niday would tally about 175 hotspots within two miles and more
than 350 within a 5-mile radius—more Wi-Fi signals than homes, if that was
even possible. The 2.4 gigahertz frequency band had become so polluted that
astronomers had lost access to that window into the radio universe. Rather
than a clean reading of cosmic radio waves, a chart would show an
imperceptible scribble of noise from the town’s Wi-Fi.

The Quiet Zone was being breached. I felt that I’d stumbled into a pivotal
place in the world and, perhaps, in the history of humanity: an area
endangered not by climate change or gentrification but by the Fitbit on
your wrist, the iPhone in your hand, the anticollision sensor in your car,
the human desire to have what everybody else has. Would Green Bank be able
to preserve the quiet? And if it couldn’t, what did that mean not just for
my own quiet fight, but for anyone’s hope of finding refuge from the noise?

Updated 8-4-2021, 11:30 am ET: This story has been updated to correctly
refer to a 2.4 gigahertz frequency band, not 2.4 megahertz, as previously
stated.

Adapted from the book The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town
Suspended in Silence, by Stephen Kurczy. Copyright © 2021 by Stephen
Kurczy. From Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Reprinted by permission.