The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  “How many guns is that?” I asked.

  “Thirteen, I think. Hold on.” He recounted. “Twelve.”

  Bond shot his first deer at age eleven, the age most kids in America got a smartphone. The Pocahontas Times regularly published photos of children beside their first kill.

  “I’ve got videos of me shooting a gun,” he said. “You want to see one?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He whipped out his iPod Touch.

  FORTUNATELY FOR BOND, just as he entered Pocahontas County High School in the fall of 2017, the administration lifted its ban on mobile devices. Previously, if a student took a cellphone out of their locker, the device was confiscated and the student’s parents were contacted; on second offense, the student received in-school suspension. Now, teachers had discretion over smartphone use in their classrooms.

  The policy change was primarily because students had become inseparable from their devices, even if there was no cell signal or public WiFi at the high school. Within a year of the policy change, Principal Joseph Riley estimated that three in four students were carrying smartphones. Math teacher Laurel Dilley put the figure higher. “All of them,” she said without hesitation, “unless they’re really unfortunate.”

  One morning, I swung by Dilley’s classroom to gauge the situation for myself. The white walls were decorated with math and computer science posters. One said “#codeislife.” Another read “No Electronic Devices Allowed,” a holdover from the smartphone ban. Dilley had previously taught in Morgantown, the state’s third-largest city, where she’d witnessed students texting each other test answers. That kind of cheating was less possible in the Quiet Zone, though it was getting easier with the influx of smartphones that could communicate via Bluetooth. Glancing around Dilley’s classroom, I saw that most of the eighteen students had smartphones on their desks. I asked them what was the point of carrying cellphones in a Quiet Zone.

  “I can use it in Lewisburg,” one explained. “I go there once a week.”

  “Is it worth paying for a smartphone data plan to use it once a week?” I asked.

  “Yes!” a bunch of students shouted.

  While the school’s WiFi was only available to administrators, students regularly hacked in and traded the password like a commodity. A teacher said she’d seen students pay up to twenty dollars to get the code, which provided them with a temporary internet fix until administrators reset the password.

  “Does anyone here live in Green Bank?” I asked the class.

  Three hands went up.

  “Do you have smartphones and WiFi at your homes?”

  All said yes. They either didn’t realize or didn’t care that they were potentially admitting to breaking state law.

  “Does anyone know why cell service is limited in Pocahontas?”

  “Because of the big TV dish.”

  “If you had to choose between cell service and the observatory, what would it be?” I asked.

  “Cell service!” a student yelled. “Send that sucker overseas!”

  Staff had also embraced smartphones. A physics teacher had students use their smartphones’ flashlight function to observe how light reacted to polarization filters. The forensics class used the smartphone as an audio recorder. Math teachers appreciated the smartphone’s capability as a graphing calculator, as many school-provided devices were broken. The assistant principal and athletic director, Kristy Tritapoe, told me she was constantly on her iPhone between WiFi at school and WiFi at home. “When I wake up at three o’clock in the morning, I check my phone,” she said. “I’m checking my email, checking Facebook—I’m just checking it.” So much for there being one place in America where you left your work at work.

  I met one student who seemed to share my sentiment toward smartphones: Mathias Solliday, the young man whom I’d run into at Trent’s (and whose Green Bank home not so secretly had WiFi). He didn’t own a cellphone and didn’t see the need for one. He said he was happy with his iPod.

  A typical high schooler in many ways, Mathias ran on the track team, was an officer in Future Farmers of America, and competed with the elite forestry club, which has won eight national championships and twenty-six state championships since 1990. The club had free rein over eighteen acres of wooded school property that abutted the 11,684-acre Seneca State Forest, where Solliday was fine-tuning his skills in agronomy and timber management. Forestry competitions entailed identifying tree species and insects as well as cruising the woods using an old-fashioned compass.

  For one forestry project, Solliday and his classmates teamed up with the observatory to analyze the long-term health of the tall pines planted around the telescopes to act as a natural barrier against radio noise. The students developed a twenty-five-page management plan that recommended thinning old growth and planting new seedlings. They cut, milled, and kilned several hundred trees and sold the wood to a local lumber company, using the funds to purchase a new van for traveling to competitions. It was real-world forestry that would have been inaccessible to most schools nationwide.

  Not that Solliday was only proficient in tromping through the woods. He was also in the school’s STEM club. In early 2017, he and several other members won a statewide competition for a smartphone app proposal to use weather data to warn residents about flash flooding. (The previous summer, twenty-three people had died in floods across West Virginia when ten inches of rain fell over twelve hours.) Their app proposal won first out of 1,800 entries in the 2017 Verizon Innovative Learning app challenge. Solliday personally received a Verizon tablet, and the STEM club got $5,000 in prize money that it used to purchase a 3-D printer.

  “We live in this area with no cellphone service, horrible internet, and we were number one in the state,” Solliday said. “I don’t feel like we’re at a disadvantage at all.”

  Solliday’s team never actually developed the app. Word of mouth and landline calls would remain the primary ways of warning about flash floods.

  “If somewhere is flooding, we’re going to get called,” he said. “Everybody is connected in Green Bank, everybody knows where everybody lives.” His entire house rang to life when anyone called; it had five wired telephones. “Say a cow is loose, we’ll go to that person’s house and tell them the cow is out and help them put the cow back into the field.”

  In the end, Solliday’s stance against smartphones was short-lived. By his senior year, he was also carrying around an iPhone.

  WHILE SMARTPHONES WERE infiltrating Pocahontas, many schools outside the Quiet Zone were instituting phone bans to cut down on online distractions—in essence, trying to make schools more quiet amid studies showing negative side effects from smartphones. The devices cause a “brain drain,” diminishing “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity,” according to a 2017 study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Public school test scores fell in Baltimore after the city adopted a one-laptop-per-child policy. Banning phones in school has been shown to lead to higher student test scores. A survey of ninety-one schools in England from 2001 to 2013 found that classrooms that banned cellphones on average saw a nearly 6.5 percentage point boost in test scores. Low-achieving students’ scores rose 14 percentage points. No single study is definitive, but there have been enough to cause concern.

  Amid research showing ill effects from too much screen time, Taiwan in 2015 outlawed tablets and other electronic gadgets for all children under the age of two, with a $1,500 fine for rule-breaking parents. All Taiwanese under the age of eighteen were ordered not to use digital media for “a period of time that is not reasonable.” In 2015, France banned WiFi in day care centers and established regulations on WiFi and cell towers throughout the country, including mandating that all WiFi hotspots be clearly labeled. France later extended its ban on smartphones through ninth grade. In the United States, the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2016 recommended that children under eighteen months avoid all screens other than video chatting a
nd that children aged eighteen to twenty-four months watch only “high-quality programming” with their parents. The World Health Organization in 2019 issued guidelines of no screen time for children under two and no more than one hour of screen time per day for children ages three to four. The same year, the Canadian province of Ontario banned cellphones in classrooms.

  The alarm bells are even ringing in Silicon Valley, of all places. “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children,” Athena Chavarria, a former executive assistant at Facebook, told the New York Times in 2018. She did not allow her kids to have cellphones until high school. “Facebook is a fundamentally addictive product that is designed to capture as much of your attention as possible without any regard for the consequences,” Sandy Parakilas, the company’s former platform operations manager, told New York magazine in 2018. “Tech addiction has a negative impact on your health, and on your children’s health.” The same year, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president of user growth, was quoted in the New Yorker saying Facebook was “destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no coöperation, misinformation, mistruth.” Palihapitiya said his children were “not allowed to use this shit.” The Twitter engineer who invented “pull-to-refresh” later repented for the feature’s addictive nature. The Facebook engineer who created the “like” button had a parental control set up on his own phone to stop him from downloading apps. Tristan Harris, former design ethicist for Google, left the online search giant in 2015 to focus on what he called the Time Well Spent movement, which led to his founding the Center for Humane Technology to combat the “digital attention crisis.” For Pocahontas, the lack of cell service and restrictions on WiFi were arguably blessings in disguise, allowing for distraction-free spaces that could aid concentration.

  Some parents actually transferred their children to Green Bank Elementary-Middle School because of its proximity to the observatory. Gayle Boyette switched her son from Marlinton to Green Bank because it had a greater diversity of students and educators, owing to the influence of the observatory’s staff. He joined the school’s robotics club, which was coached by the observatory’s director, an astrophysicist, and her husband, a software engineer. In 2018, the robotics club placed first in the West Virginia First Lego League tournament, earning a world championship berth. Another software engineer from the observatory helped teach the high school’s college-credit coding class and coach its robotics club, which in 2020 would place second in a statewide competition.

  Despite making Green Bank seem behind in terms of wireless technology, the observatory brought cutting-edge science into Appalachia and made it accessible to youths. Every year, an estimated five thousand students from around the region toured the telescopes, many for multiday immersion seminars. Boy Scouts came to earn merit badges in radio astronomy. The observatory hosted the high school prom and science fair, gave an award every year to a graduating senior, and sent its staff to assist in the schools whenever possible. When Green Bank Elementary-Middle School got wired internet, the observatory hooked it up. When the high school needed a new sound system, an observatory engineer helped install it.

  Sam Felton, who was a Methodist minister along with being the mayor of Marlinton, praised the observatory’s educational influence. He recalled an eye-opening field trip to see the telescopes when he was in high school. “Talk about broadening your horizons, that’s interesting when you realize there’s something going on in the heavens that we are connected to and have a desire to know more about,” he told me. “We need to look up from time to time. King David said, ‘When I look upon sun, moon, and stars, what is man that thou art mindful of him?’” Felton didn’t have a problem with the astronomers dating the universe back billions of years, even if it contradicted a creationist view of the universe forming in six days about ten thousand years ago (a view held by two in five people in America).

  I found Felton’s perspective refreshing. The observatory had clearly changed local attitudes toward science. It even helped turn local kids into astronomers. Hundreds of high schoolers had interned at the observatory over the decades. A scientist named Ron Maddalena told me he’d overseen the internships of more than forty students, some of whom grew up in log cabins without electricity or running water—or, in one young woman’s case, on a haunted mountain at the southern end of Pocahontas County.

  HANNA SMITH HAD been interested in astronomy ever since her father gave her a National Geographic poster of the solar system. Her mind was further set on space when a middle school teacher showed her the documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan. She developed an intense crush on Sagan and built a shrine to the famous cosmologist in her bedroom, taping newspaper clippings about him all over one wall, with his books lined up beneath. She didn’t learn until later that Sagan had visited her county in 1961 to discuss the potential for alien communications.

  Hanna’s home didn’t have a computer, much less internet or cell service. Her family lived in a rickety cabin atop Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, where her father, Mike Smith, was the park superintendent for three decades. Their house was originally built as a toolshed in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. They were the only people living in the nearly three-hundred-acre park, aside from the ghosts.

  About four hundred soldiers died on Droop in the Civil War, and their spirits were said to haunt the surrounding woods. When Hanna’s uncle visited, he awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of horses jumping over a fence and coming up to the window. He refused to sleep there again. A past superintendent’s son once heard what sounded like a horse clattering down the road, but he could see no horse; he then felt a horse neighing into his face. Years later as an adult, he told Hanna’s dad that he still had nightmares about that horse. According to the county’s history book, two girls once found two battle rifles in the park and carried them home, only to be pelted with rocks flying from all directions until they returned the guns to Droop. So pervasive was the belief that Droop was haunted, I was told that locals opposed a cell antenna in the park because it might disturb the dead.

  Along with ghosts, Hanna was surrounded by some of the darkest skies on the East Coast. In 1996, when sixteen years old, she and her dad camped outside so they could spot the comet Hyakutake overhead. The Green Bank Observatory was also monitoring Hyakutake that night, detecting ammonia and water coming off the comet’s tail. “The comet was real dim, but Mars that night was really bright,” her dad recalled. “She decided then and there that she was going to be the first woman on Mars.”

  In high school, Hanna interned at the observatory. One of her jobs was to transfer floppy disk files onto compact discs—a tedious task, but still a unique opportunity for a high schooler to be peripherally involved with cutting-edge astronomy. At the end of Hanna’s internship, Ron Maddalena wrote her a recommendation for Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the top liberal arts schools in the country. Tuition was more than what Hanna’s father earned in a year, but she qualified for financial aid. She would finish in the top 1 percent of her class, summa cum laude.

  Through college, Hanna dated her high school sweetheart, Nathaniel “Dane” Sizemore, who was majoring in computer science at Westminster College in Pennsylvania. They’d first met in sixth grade, when Dane bested Hanna in the county’s annual math competition. (The Pocahontas Times photographed Hanna standing beside Dane with his first place trophy, looking like a stand-in for the character Will Byers in Stranger Things.) In high school, they’d found they both loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and were interested in astronomy. Dane’s father, Wesley Sizemore, was the observatory’s Quiet Zone cop, and Dane had occasionally joined in the hunt for radio frequency interference. Dane recalled a particularly troublesome electric pole by Green Bank Elementary-Middle School that had to be pounded every few years with a sledgehammer to rattle the connections and stop it from arcing. He and Hanna attended the junior and senior proms together and got
in trouble for having their hands around each other’s waists, deemed too much physical contact.

  They graduated from college in 2001, got married atop Droop Mountain, and moved to Colorado so Hanna could start a Ph.D. program in astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, with a focus on Mars. The first six months in Boulder, they slept on an apartment floor in sleeping bags that were a wedding gift from Hanna’s dad. At the end of the doctoral program, Hanna participated in NASA’s Phoenix mission to Mars, in which a robotic spacecraft landed for the first time in the red planet’s polar region to look for ice. Her research helped determine where the spacecraft landed, and the findings led her to author a number of papers analyzing the Martian landscape for ice and permafrost.

  In 2009, they moved to California so Hanna could pursue a postdoctorate at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View. Dane worked in IT at Google’s campus. It suddenly felt possible for two people who had grown up in the disconnected Appalachian Mountains to make it in Silicon Valley.

  The same year, they had twin boys. Soon they were paying about $30,000 a year for childcare, plus another $36,000 for a two-bedroom apartment. It felt unsustainable. In 2010, they returned to Pocahontas to be closer to family. Both wondered if their careers had been derailed.

  Dane took a job with the state’s office of technology and later joined the Green Bank Observatory as a software engineer. Hanna became an adjunct scientist at the observatory, which provided her with an office and fast internet that allowed her to do contract work for NASA and the Planetary Science Institute. In 2018, she made national news for helping discover “cryovolcanoes” on the dwarf planet Ceres. In support of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, she was also part of a multiyear effort to map subsurface ice on Mars, identify potential water sources, search for signs of life, and establish landing sites for a future human mission. If Hanna couldn’t be the first woman on Mars, she would at least help pave the way for others.