The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  CNN and National Geographic were hardly alone in failing to scratch beneath the quiet facade. “This Town Lives Without Cellphones, Wi-Fi,” the Today show reported in 2016. “Inside the U.S.’s ‘National Radio Quiet Zone’ Where There’s No WiFi or Cellphone Service,” a Washington Post headline read in 2018. I could somewhat understand how the media kept getting it wrong: strapped for time, unable to spend longer than a day or two in the area, a reporter might come with an assumption about what life was like and seek evidence to support that conclusion. But even public officials who should have known better played into the 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.”

  Green Bank resident Teresa Mullen, who taught at the high school, rolled her eyes at such language. She had a microwave. She had a smartphone. She had WiFi. “It’s not like we’re living some bohemian lifestyle,” she told me. Such was hardly a secret. Even before joining Niday on his patrol, residents were admitting to me that they had all the supposedly banned electronics—and none said they’d been reprimanded. To be sure, some neighbors chose to not install WiFi, and a few even reached out to the observatory to seek approval before using any wireless equipment. But I found the opposite view far more prevalent.

  A house across the street from the observatory had WiFi with the network name “Screw you NRAO,” an unsubtle middle finger to the observatory’s calls for quiet. Green Bank’s health clinic had WiFi. Green Bank’s senior center had WiFi. “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.” Frontier Communications, the largest internet provider to the area, was egregious about installing WiFi routers, sparking frustrated phone calls from the observatory asking for the company’s cooperation in protecting the Quiet Zone.

  But it was useless. “At some point it becomes difficult to deny the local population the luxuries that other people have,” as Sizemore put it. Trying to stop WiFi was like pissing in the wind.

  Before retiring, Sizemore proposed getting more aggressive about wireless tech by reminding the community through newspaper ads and other public notices that the observatory had legal standing to request radio quiet. He considered the Quiet Zone the foundation upon which the telescopes were built; if the foundation eroded, the observatory would collapse. Management even considered prosecuting individuals who installed WiFi. But officials at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory headquarters nixed the idea. There was a reluctance to test the law or spend funds on litigation, as well as a desire to keep peace in the community. In the Quiet Zone’s six-decade history, the observatory had never asked the county prosecutor to fine rule-breakers.

  Sizemore’s retirement led to a policy shift. Whereas he had hassled people to turn off WiFi and other electronics, his successors were instructed to merely take note of what they found and report back to the observatory’s Interference Protection Group, co-led by business manager Michael Holstine. Sizemore had responded in real time to astronomers’ complaints about radio noise and sometimes jumped into his car late at night or on weekends to chase down the source of interference. Now, the job mostly entailed passive monitoring.

  “If they find a house that’s particularly bad, then they’ll bring that to my attention and I’ll take care of it,” Holstine told me. By that, he meant he might initiate a conversation with the offender and politely explain the observatory’s need for radio quiet. “We lean on education to the community. We don’t have the staff to do any further enforcement.”

  The lack of strict enforcement had led many people to believe WiFi was harmless. A mile away from the observatory, Rudy Marrujo and his wife, Jan Cozart, had installed both WiFi and a mesh network to boost the signal into every room. Having moved to Green Bank from Silicon Valley, they had high expectations for tech connectivity. But they’d also hardwired their entire house with cable internet, on the chance they were ever told to turn off their WiFi. Once, around 2013, Marrujo spotted Niday pull up in his radio-tracking truck and point his gadgetry toward their house, but nobody ever said anything about their WiFi, which made them believe it was permitted. If it was really a problem, I was repeatedly told, why doesn’t the observatory do something about it? “You can have WiFi in your home,” said Oak Hall, owner of Red Oak Realty, which regularly sold homes around Green Bank and was a first point of contact for many newcomers. “You can have WiFi that reaches over to your neighbor’s home. That’s not something that’s restricted, to my knowledge, in the Quiet Zone.”

  Another time at Trent’s, I met a man named Daniel Solliday, a lay minister at New Hope Church of the Brethren. He was with his son, Mathias, who had already told me he didn’t mind the lack of cell service or the rules against WiFi.

  “You don’t have WiFi at home, right?” I asked Daniel. I was learning to be skeptical.

  “Right,” Daniel said.

  “Why are you holding out?”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “Well, actually, we do have WiFi,” Daniel admitted sheepishly. He’d installed it in 2016.

  I had to laugh—even a minister had lied to me about whether his home had WiFi. The Sollidays’ internet was incredibly slow—far too slow for video streaming, for example—but they still wanted the convenience of WiFi.

  “Why didn’t you want to tell me you had WiFi?” I asked.

  “It’s a difficult thing because the observatory is important to our community,” Daniel said. “Officially, you’re not supposed to have it, right? But when the fast lane is going seventy-five miles per hour, that’s the lane you have to be in.”

  If the Sollidays had been willing to lie, feeding into the quiet veneer around Green Bank, how much more tech might there really be?

  “What the heck?” said a woman named Kathryn Stauffer, as if I myself had lied to her. “People come here thinking there’s no WiFi because of the media . . . It’s hurting people.”

  We were speaking at the observatory’s Starlight Café, one of the “101 Unique Places to Dine in West Virginia,” though we couldn’t talk for long because Stauffer said she felt bothered by machinery in the kitchen. An electrosensitive, she had arrived in Green Bank in 2016, having traveled hundreds of miles from her home in Illinois, and the last thing she’d expected to find was WiFi, smartphones, and an occasional cell signal. She still believed Green Bank was quieter than most other places, though she had created a Facebook page called “Radio Quiet Zone, Green Bank” to warn people about the noisy reality.

  Some electrosensitives were taking matters into their own hands, hunting down WiFi and demanding it be turned off. The sheriff’s department had received dozens of 911 calls from one woman who complained that a neighbor’s WiFi was killing her. In 2016, she walked into a county commission meeting wearing a full-body nuclear radiation suit, warning of the health dangers from WiFi and requesting the commission address it. She had a legal argument, too. The West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zoning Act made it illegal to operate any electrical equipment within ten miles of the observatory that interfered with the telescopes. The commission thanked the woman for her input and moved on to other issues. She left the county soon afterward.

  As I dug into the issue, I found myself wading into a legal debate. Upon my initial arrival to Green Bank, Holstine had told me in no uncertain terms that the observatory could push back against any source of radio interference in town, be it WiFi or a smartphone, a microwave or a malfunctioning electric blanket. To me, the state law sounded clear enough: “It shall be illegal to operate or cause to be operated any electrical equipment within a two-mile radius of the reception equipment of any radio astronomy facility if such operation causes
interference with reception by said radio astronomy facility of radio waves emanating from any nonterrestrial source.” That act extended protections to a ten-mile radius, with a fifty-dollar daily fine for violators. Jay Lockman, the principal scientist and former site director, flatly said of WiFi: “It’s illegal.”

  Then I spoke with Ken Kellermann, who’d been on staff with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory for a half century. He believed the state law applied only to “incidental, non-intended radiation,” such as from a neon sign or electric fence. WiFi was an “intentional” transmitter and thus governed by the Federal Communications Commission and National Telecommunications and Information Administration. “State and local governments have no power to control intended radio transmissions,” Kellermann said. “That includes WiFi.”

  While the federally designated National Radio Quiet Zone gave the observatory oversight over the installation of “permanent fixed location” transmitters, WiFi was not fixed—meaning the observatory had no legal power to restrict its use, agreed Harvey Liszt, spectrum manager for the NRAO and chair of the international Scientific Committee on Frequency Allocations for Radio Astronomy and Space Science. WiFi and other FCC-licensed transmitters, including microwave ovens, fell solely under the FCC’s purview, he added. Moreover, Liszt and Kellermann questioned the very legality of West Virginia’s law, as it infringed upon the FCC’s jurisdiction.

  I brought the debate to Anthony Beasley, director of the NRAO, which operated telescopes around the world and had a vested interest in maintaining the Quiet Zone. He agreed there was ambiguity to the laws. But he said the argument was somewhat removed from reality. Even if the laws could be interpreted in their strictest possible way, it still wouldn’t make financial or logistical sense to hunt WiFi up and down the valley. A house with WiFi 10.1 miles from the observatory would cause the same interference as a house 9.9 miles away, so why crack down on one if you couldn’t legally stop the other? For a cash-strapped observatory fighting to merely stay open, why hire lawyers to prosecute WiFi-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. Outside of the ten-mile radius, but still within Pocahontas County and the National Radio Quiet Zone, even the hippies were going wireless. Yew Mountain Center had WiFi, and its director, Erica Marks, carried an iPhone, allowing her to manage what was essentially a gig economy in the backwoods, juggling the center with parenting, teaching, and leading yoga classes. Lobelia was far enough from Green Bank for the technology to not interfere with the telescopes, but was it hypocritical to offer WiFi at a place that advertised itself as a way to get back to nature?

  “It’s been incredibly liberating to have a smartphone,” Marks told me. “I could check out the trails and still be in contact with my family. It allowed me to stay out for longer periods of time knowing that things were fine.”

  There were downsides, however. Marks admitted that her two-year-old had developed an “opiate-like addiction” for watching Peppa Pig on the smartphone, and the toddler became enraged whenever the device was taken away. She later emailed me that, upon further observation, her daughter was equally furious upon losing access to a Sharpie. “It was somehow comforting.”

  DURING MY RIDE ALONG with Chuck Niday, we would have found even more signals had we driven a few miles farther toward his house. Even he had WiFi. “Technically” it wasn’t permitted, Niday admitted, “but I know how to break the rules.” By that, he meant he was fairly certain that his WiFi wouldn’t interfere with the telescopes because he lived far enough away and behind a hill, though still within the sacred ten-mile radius.

  In fact, many observatory staff had WiFi at their homes. An employee in staff housing was once discovered to have WiFi and was told to turn it off, per the terms of the rental agreement. The employee refused and was subsequently fired. WiFi was apparently more important than the job. Even Wesley Sizemore, the famed curmudgeon of quiet, had installed a wireless router before retiring from the observatory. He argued that his house—though only eight miles from the telescopes—would not cause radio interference, according to a propagation study that he’d conducted. And anyway, why should he sacrifice WiFi if the observatory wasn’t going to crack down on a router across the street?

  There was more. Since retiring, Sizemore had taken up a new profession as “senior RF designer” for the engineering firm TRC Solutions, with a role of “coordination of radio transmitters with the National Radio Quiet Zone,” according to his LinkedIn page. He was helping wireless providers enter the area. He’d turned to the dark side.

  On one of Sizemore’s final patrols in 2011, he counted more than seventy WiFi hotspots within two miles of the observatory. Given that the 2010 census put Green Bank’s total population at 143, it already begged the question: Who didn’t have WiFi? In late 2017, Niday would detect 117 WiFi hotspots within two miles, a 70 percent increase over six years. The 2.4 megahertz frequency band had become so polluted that astronomers had lost access to that window into the radio universe. Rather than getting a clean reading of astronomical radio waves, a chart would show an imperceptible scribble of noise from the town’s WiFi. “If E.T. calls on that frequency, we’re not gonna hear him,” Sizemore said.

  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 anti-collision 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 for my own quiet fight?

  My objective had changed. Rather than finding a place where I might fit in, I was charting whether the quiet could survive for the sake of the astronomers and electrosensitives—and, rather unexpectedly, whether that same quiet was giving cover to white nationalism’s reemergence.

  Part Two

  Quiet Discovery

  * * *

  I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble comes.

  —JOB 3:26

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  “Local Nazi Diaspora”

  QUIET IS RELATIVE. Once I adjusted to life in Green Bank, I could find myself distracted by a single vehicle passing outside my window, since my dead-end road was otherwise so untraveled. Back in New York City, I thought nothing of police cruisers, ambulances, and fire trucks blaring by, because it was all ambient noise. Quiet itself would have been disquieting.

  I found it beneficial to reset my expectations by getting out of Green Bank. It was also necessary for maintaining a relationship with Jenna, who still lived and worked full time in New York City. And I had to scrounge up cash to fund my next visit to West Virginia. I was freelancing articles as well as substitute teaching at a Connecticut high school where students carried school-issued iPads; whenever I walked into the classroom, I’d find them streaming YouTube or playing video games. It was a helpful juxtaposition to Green Bank, where people were at least more discreet in their usage of devices on WiFi.

  Jenna accepted my nomadic location-hopping and occasionally joined my forays back to the Quiet Zone, though she was growing skeptical of my aims. I’d pitched Green Bank as a kind of Walden, a disconnected place where we might “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” in the words of Thoreau. Then I started coming back with stories of electro-allergies and illicit WiFi hotspots, secret government hideouts and neo-Nazi terror plots. The place was less and less Walden and more and more weird.

  Back in Pocahontas County for another monthlong visit in the fall of 2017, I overheard a librarian in Hillsboro say she’d been seeing “th
e Nazis” a lot lately. They came to read the newspapers and magazines. More white supremacists had been spotted driving into the county, their identities revealed by their overtly racist bumper stickers. And there had been other signs of something bubbling below the surface. One person told me he’d found a neo-Nazi pamphlet shoved into a six-pack of beer. In 2015, “Nigger Lover” had been spray-painted on a restaurant in Hillsboro owned by a biracial couple. It all seemed to clue to a national trend, especially when hundreds of white nationalist protesters descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, for a Unite the Right rally that left one person dead in August 2017. An avowed neo-Nazi deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a thirty-two-year-old woman and injuring twenty-eight others in what was deemed an act of domestic terrorism.

  David Pringle, the chief of staff at the National Alliance compound in Pocahontas, tweeted an image of the car at the moment it struck several people. He included the line “meep meep . . . lefties make great bowling pins! Look at the bounce on a couple of those fools! #2010DodgeChallanger #TakeTheDodgeChallange.” (He apparently forgot to spell-check “challange.”) In making a joke out of violence, just as he’d joked about the Holocaust when I’d met him earlier that summer, Pringle was being deadly serious about his embrace of a racist agenda. The Charlottesville clash came amid a 57 percent surge in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States that year, a 17 percent jump in hate crimes, and a doubling of murders attributed to white supremacists to eighteen.

  I scanned photos from Charlottesville, looking for Pringle among the faces, unable to shake the idea that the roots of America’s modern white supremacist movement traced back to a mountainside hideaway in the Quiet Zone.