The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  Back in the United States, I put off getting a replacement. It was a decision based on frugality—I was reluctant to sign a contract that would lock me into a payment plan. Weeks without a cellphone 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 cellphone. I signed up for a free Google “phone number” that allowed me to make calls using my laptop. I used Skype. I got an iPod Touch for podcasts. In emergency situations, I borrowed others’ cellphones. Once, on a 150-mile bicycle ride, I used a stranger’s device to notify my family that I’d be arriving hours late and after dark, using it in the same way that people once utilized roadside pay phones, until they disappeared because everybody but me got a cellphone. I recognize that mobile devices can be useful. I just think they should be used sparingly and mostly in emergencies.

  Family, friends, and colleagues began to question whether I was disconnected from the modern world or from reality. Employers grew irritated. “Get a cellphone and get on Facebook,” an editor once told me. I declined both directives, but I agreed to at least open a Twitter account to “promote” our stories. My mother was frustrated that she couldn’t keep tabs on me the way she did my smartphone-toting sisters. “I just worry about you,” she’d say, in the way that mothers do. The more pressure I got, the more I dug in my heels. Why was the onus on me to change? After all, I was the normal person, by measure of how long humans had lived without cellphones. Wasn’t I free to not have a cellphone?

  I started to see it 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. Back then, the two lawyers 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 systematic abuse of our attention and invasion of 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 ten American adults owned a smartphone; in my own demographic of Americans aged thirty to forty-nine, 92 percent owned smartphones. By 2020, 5.2 billion people worldwide owned a cellphone. Whenever I walked into a public restroom, a guy at the neighboring stall held a smartphone 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 public school teacher, was encouraged to tweet from the classroom. My father, a minister, contended with congregants answering their phones during church services. Jenna carried two smartphones, one personal and one provided by her employer so she could be reached any time of any day. Seven decades after Congress set the workweek at forty hours through the Fair Labor Standards Act, it seemed time to establish new rules to prevent our jobs from pervading our lives via smartphones. “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.”

  My refusal to swim with the digital current made me an outsider, a fringe character unable to accept the inevitable march of technological progress. Without a smartphone, I couldn’t use Uber, Venmo, or WhatsApp. By choice, I also opted out of Instagram and most other social media. When I started a fellowship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2016, I was instructed to join a Facebook group to stay updated on school events. When I told a vice dean that I wasn’t on Facebook, she rolled her eyes and asked how anyone expected to be a journalist if not on Facebook.

  Even access to basic needs has started to hinge on having social media and a smartphone. Cities have been swapping out traditional parking meters in favor of mobile pay-only zones. In 2018, San Francisco began requiring a download code to use some public bathrooms. The same year, credit reporting companies began using cellphone plan payments to determine credit scores. I was once refused take-out service because I couldn’t call in my order, even though I was standing at the restaurant’s door. I felt like a recluse, a modern hermit in plain sight.

  If I were to try to psychoanalyze myself, I might say I was reacting in part to growing up in a conservative Christian home and feeling pressured to be “always on” for others. I had to attend my father’s church every Sunday and sit in the front pew beside my mother, an intensely upbeat woman who wanted her children to set an example. Rebelling against the cellphone was, perhaps, a belated way of cutting the cord with expectations for how to behave. I also remember a father who fell asleep in front of the television most nights. I grew up to resent the screen. In college, after reading Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information, I vowed to never own a TV. One summer, I unplugged all the wires from the back of our family television to enforce a cold turkey detox. (It only worked because our parents were traveling for a month.) And what is a smartphone but a demonic iteration of a TV screen?

  It’s not that I want to return to the nineteenth century. I appreciate the death of corded phones; in my childhood kitchen, the curly cord of our wall-mounted phone was always running across the room like a clothesline, threatening to behead passersby. I know to be wary of rose-tinted nostalgia for a “simpler time.” I just don’t understand why carrying a smartphone should now be a prerequisite for living. I don’t want to give others access to every minute of my life. I don’t want all my information to come from screens. I don’t see the need to be constantly connected and reachable. I am already online enough, on my computer. I don’t want to be a person who looks down at a phone midconversation. And I don’t want others to be that way, either. So much of the digital world was designed to make us feel dissatisfied, to mine our thoughts for marketable content that can be sold back in the form of Google ads and Amazon one-click purchases. I don’t want to live in that world, even if it means I occasionally get lost driving (or bicycling).

  I’ve come to find that I’m not alone in this crusade. Having lunch at a café a block away from Columbia’s leafy campus in early 2017, David Helfand and I were the only patrons without smartphones resting in front of us. “I’ve occasionally met other people like me, but not many,” said Helfand, an astronomy professor and former president of the American Astronomical Society. He had a laid-back demeanor—with white hair and a thick beard, the astrophysicist had literally played the part of Santa Claus—but he expressed zero tolerance for smartphones. His refusal to get a cellphone nearly got him into a legal fight with the federal government.

  In 2016, the Social Security Administration announced that senior citizens would henceforth need a cellphone to access their Social Security accounts; entry to the website would require a two-step verification involving a passcode sent to a cellphone. “I write to register my outrage at your new policy,” Helfand wrote to the administration.

  Has it not occurred to you that some people in this country cannot afford a text-enabled cellphone? Has it not occurred to you that some people live in areas without cellphone service? And has it not occurred to you that some people, with plenty of money and access such as myself, might actually choose not to partake in the toxic cesspool of social media, and might value the ability to manage their own time, deploying their mental resources on topics with more substance than tweets and the rest of the superficial banality that passes for “conversation” today?

  Two ranking leaders of the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging called for reconsideration of the policy. The Social Security Administration backtracked. Helfand had prevailed—for the moment.

  “I believe that access to me should be at my discretion
and not at someone else’s discretion,” Helfand told me. He maintained that life without a cellphone was more efficient. It gave him “freewheeling” time to let his mind wander. It allowed for uninterrupted focus. It created quiet.

  That said, Helfand did have a Twitter profile because a student had encouraged him to use it to promote his book, A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age. The student tweeted whatever Helfand approved over email, a setup reminiscent of how some Orthodox Jews, to honor the command to rest on the Sabbath, hire others to do certain labors. Helfand’s quasi-religious opposition to social media and cellphones set the stage for tensions. He had walked out on meetings if people were distracted on their smartphones. He had also walked in the rain because he couldn’t call his wife for a ride home from the train station. Similar challenges arose when flying. Rather than saying, “I’ll call you when my plane lands,” Helfand had to say something like, “Meet me at pillar thirty-two at 4:20 P.M.”

  Helfand may sound like a stubborn crank, irrationally unwilling to make his life (and others’) easier, and only the latest in a long line of misguided Luddites. Socrates had opposed the written word because he thought it would undermine memorization. Thoreau had dismissed the telegraph because he thought far-flung places “have nothing important to communicate.” There is inevitably pushback to any new technology. But aren’t smartphones fundamentally different? Rather than being a tool of the owner, the smartphone controls the user with addictive apps that allow third parties to mine data and sell ads. Amid a wave of social media-undermined elections, smartphone-enabled erosion of in-person conversations, and an infuriating loss of quiet due to always-on devices, what kind of cultural shift could happen if we all started acting a bit more Helfandian?

  I once mentioned my decision to live phoneless to the hyperconnected founder of an online news start-up valued at $30 million. (It later sold for multiple times that amount.) He had two smartphones stacked by his side. His business depended on news consumption on mobile devices. Yet he said that if he could live in a world with or without cellphones, he would choose the latter. Then he shrugged, because that was not a real option.

  But what if, somewhere, living cellphone-free was an option? What if there was a place where people weren’t constantly talking on their phones or distractedly scrolling—not during dinner, not during work, not in bed? A place where forest hikes and sunset vistas weren’t tainted by a ringtone or the obnoxiousness of a person yapping on a phone? Where getting lost meant really getting lost, because a gadget wasn’t going to rescue you? A place where GPS apps went haywire, and people floated above the digital currents that glued the rest of America to a screen?

  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. After my initial visit to Green Bank with Jenna in early 2017, I returned over the next three years for a series of extended stays that would total about four months on the ground, popping in so frequently that people asked if I’d moved there permanently. I was hoping to discover a better way of life, perhaps one that I would want to adopt. I joined a book club, helped build a house, foraged for ramps, and went target shooting with a seven-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 eleven attendees and seventy-nine dollars in tithes, contributing to the feeling of time standing still, of being drawn into a quieter dimension. A technician at the Green Bank Observatory would tell me that the Bible actually referenced radio astronomy in Psalm 19:4: “Their line is gone out through all the earth.” To him, this was a nod to the radio frequencies given off by all things, making the observatory’s work a spiritual endeavor, and Green Bank a godly place.

  Others believed fantastical things happened in the Quiet Zone, that it was a transcendent realm where space-time cleaved open and spirits from another dimension entered our world. That it was on one of the so-called ley lines that demarcated Earth’s mystical energy fields. “This area is on a node, an intersection, Twilight Zone shit,” a ginseng hunter named De Thompson would tell me with a throaty laugh, lips curling over his toothless gums. There was a beguiling confluence of supernatural and provincial, of conspiracy and reality, swirling in the thick fog that enveloped the radio telescopes at dusk.

  At the start of my journey, however, it did not occur to me that a community bathed in quiet could be anything but idyllic.

  Chapter Two

  “One of the Science Capitals of the World”

  THE FLURRY OF A BANJO’S TWANG kept time with the moan of a fiddle and the strum of several guitars, all of them speeding along to an old-time standard. I sat in the music circle holding a guitar, but my hands were frozen. I’d naively thought I could play along with a bluegrass band called Juanita Fireball and the Continental Drifters, whose fiddler was the principal scientist at the nearby astronomy observatory. Turned out, he was also a state champion banjo player. The group plucked and strummed with such speed and intuition that I gave up after a few songs, red in the face. Green Bank was no place for a mediocre musician.

  I slinked off the porch and grabbed a beer from a cooler, mingling with several dozen people at the backyard party. I overheard someone say, “If my cellphone was working, I’d look that up.” But she couldn’t, because of the radio quiet. As the sun set, the brightest thing in the sky became the blinking red light atop the mammoth Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope looming in the distance, as normal to everyone there as the moon rising overhead.

  It was late May 2017, and I’d just arrived for a monthlong stay at the observatory, renting an apartment typically reserved for visiting scientists. My room key came in a white envelope with a piece of paper titled “We have met the Enemy, and He is Us,” followed by a list of Quiet Zone regulations. The message was clear: I was the enemy of quiet, tolerable only if my electronic inclinations were kept in check.

  “Prohibited devices include cordless telephones and wireless networking devices,” the regulations stated. “A good rule of thumb is, if it uses RF [radio frequency] energy to communicate, it almost certainly exceeds the ITU-R RA.769 limit, and we ask that you please don’t use it here.” That meant my iPod was to be kept on airplane mode and my laptop turned off when not in use. Other types of electronics with strong electromagnetic emissions, such as air-conditioning units and microwave ovens, were confined inside shielded enclosures. All electric cables were buried underground. A plan to install automatic toilet flushers had been nixed after the observatory realized the sensors emitted radio noise. Even the autonomous driving capabilities of an employee’s Tesla were disabled.

  The rules were strict, but I had to wonder: Who was enforcing them? I had expected a military-style debriefing and thorough inspection of my belongings. But all I got was that letter. After reading through the regulations, I’d changed into running shorts and jogged down a wooded trail that wound around the 2,700-acre federal property and looped by the Green Bank Telescope. Beyond it, past several fields, I could see a white farmhouse. I was later told that it was the residence of Bob and Elaine Sheets, who lived at the very heart of the National Radio Quiet Zone—though they were far from the “quietest” household in town. In fact, they were hosting the biggest party in Green Bank—and likely the biggest thing for fifty miles in any direction—that Friday. Which was how I ended up in their backyard with a beer in hand.

  Green Bank didn’t have a mayor, but if it did, Bob would likely have been elected. Tall and trim, with a long face that easily broke into a wide grin, he had a youthful energy that belied his sixty-eight years. He wore two rings: a wedding band and a large gold ring from being on the Fairmont State University basketball team that made it all the way to the NAIA championship game in 1968. (Fairmont lost by three points.) After college, Bob re
turned to Green Bank to teach high school English and coach basketball for thirty-five years, the kind of person whom students called “Coach” both in and outside the classroom. Gregarious and personable, he served on various community boards and regularly hosted events at his farm—including the following morning, when more than one hundred people would be coming to tour one of Green Bank’s original settlements. Bob was distantly related to William Warwick, an early settler whose property in 1774 became the site of a colonial militia fort. The fort’s exact site was unknown until Bob—with the help of two professional archaeologists and aided by oral tradition—began digging it up in his hayfield. With the use of a metal detector and magnetometer, which Bob got approval to use from the observatory (as the devices threatened to pollute the radio quiet), he’d unearthed a trove of artifacts: a soldier’s cuff links, a glass watch fob bearing the image of King George III, and a fragment from a bottle of Turlington’s Balsam of Life, a potion for treating “inward weakness.”

  The area’s history also decorated the inside of Bob’s home. In his living room was a framed box of several dozen arrowheads dating back as far as ten thousand years, some likely left behind by the Shawnee who once hunted on the Sheetses’ ninety-seven-acre property. A confusing point about the area’s indigenous history was the county’s name, Pocahontas, as there was no record of the Native American woman having ever visited. According to Bob, Pocahontas had descendants who lobbied state legislators in Richmond to name the county after her in 1821, back when West Virginia was still part of Virginia. In any case, Bob said it was because of Pocahontas that the high school’s sports teams were known as the Warriors. At the school entrance, a life-size, bare-chested, headdress-wearing “warrior” was poised with a bow and arrow, ready to shoot enemies at the door. Outsiders beware.