The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  Once young math rivals, the Sizemores now found themselves returning to the county’s annual math field day as parents, encouraging students to integrate math into their careers. Dane would say, “Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do anything you want. Anybody from any little town or farm in Pocahontas County can go off and be a doctor or lawyer or businessman.” Or a Mars scientist. Hanna would show a slideshow of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from West Virginia, telling the students, “Look at these luminaries who are from here!”

  THE SIZEMORES SENT their twin boys to Green Bank Elementary-Middle School, which fell into an ambiguous area with the Quiet Zone regulations. The administration wanted to be a good neighbor to the observatory and not emit radio interference toward the telescopes looming beyond the playground. But WiFi was already so pervasive in town that it arguably didn’t matter if the school installed it. Along with an educational argument for WiFi, sometimes the technology was medically imperative. For a time, the observatory permitted the school to broadcast a weak WiFi signal for a diabetic student’s glucose monitor, considered an emergency exception to the Quiet Zone regulations.

  Ruth Bland, the tech director and former school principal in Green Bank, would have loved to make strong WiFi available to the entire school, and she had discussed it with observatory officials. One idea was for the school to install LiFi, which emitted low-range WiFi through lightbulbs, but that was prohibitively expensive. Another idea was to pile an enormous dirt mound behind the school to essentially shield WiFi from radiating toward the telescopes.

  “The only thing is, we’d lose our soccer fields,” Bland said.

  “What’s more valuable,” I asked, “a soccer field or WiFi?”

  She sighed. “Why make me choose? I’d like to have both.”

  There was another thing.

  “I don’t know what to do about the electromagnetic sensitive people,” Bland said. “They’ve entered their children into Green Bank School. They came in with this vision that there would be no electromagnetic activity. But you still have hardwired computers, printers, and all sorts of electronics that make the school run. We can’t take it out and do papers and pencils.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Behind the Curve”

  FOR EVERY ELECTROSENSITIVE who wanted radio quiet, there were probably one hundred residents who wanted WiFi and cell service, and they elected the county’s officials. In early 2018, the Pocahontas County Commission passed a resolution in support of cell service throughout the county, a challenge to the very notion of a Quiet Zone. The commission assigned its attorney, Robert Martin, to contact all major telecommunications providers asking them to invest in Pocahontas.

  “I’m doing my level best to get another company in here,” Martin told me in the spring of 2018. He’d invited me to his house to discuss the new cell service ordinance, and we were swigging Bud Lights at his kitchen table.

  “How many cell companies have you written to?” I asked.

  “All of them,” he said. “I promised the companies that we’ll get everybody in the damn county to sign up with them. I’ll sign up first! . . . I wrote a letter to everybody and said, ‘We have shit for cellphone service here, we want you to come in here, we’ll partner with you, we’ll help you however we can. Come in here.’”

  At our feet were two boxers and a basset hound. In the adjacent mudroom was a 250-pound Vietnamese potbellied pig named Pig, who was snoring. Pig knew how to open the front door and pull a blanket over himself. “I’m the true image of West Virginia, aren’t I?” Martin laughed. “I got a pig living in the house.” Despite his home literally being a pigsty, Martin was always the best dressed at county meetings, usually wearing tight designer jeans, leather boots, and a crisp dress shirt, top buttons undone and a few chest hairs curling out. A blustery guy, Martin was once jailed in Marlinton for contempt of court for arguing with a circuit judge. He had a history of getting into fights at West Virginia University football games. For years, he’d also operated a hotel in Belize, paying “tens of thousands of dollars in bribes” and putting the payments on his tax returns so the U.S. government could see the corruption he was dealing with (even if he was admitting to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act). Martin came across as a dogged lawyer who knew how to get things done. And he wanted cell service.

  “You seen that commercial saying Verizon has more coverage than anyone else?” he asked me. “Pause and look at it real closely, and you’ll see right where Pocahontas County is because almost the entire Eastern Seaboard is all yellow [signifying cell coverage] and right there in southeastern West Virginia there’s this hunk about this big—it’s Poca-fucking-hontas County. I swear to God. Right fucking there we are on Verizon’s commercials.”

  Martin knew well what connectivity was like outside the Quiet Zone. He had earned his law degree from West Virginia University in 1979, married a girl from Marlinton, and started his career in Pocahontas County before becoming a well-heeled insurance defense lawyer in Charleston. He’d gotten his first cellphone in 1986—it was the size of a beer bottle, with a three-foot-long antenna, and it went to bed with him every night. That attachment ended in 2012 when he moved back to Pocahontas, where he only carried an iPhone so he could listen to music in his truck. I asked if he was concerned about the impact of cell service on the electrosensitives.

  “Wackos that are afraid of their brains getting fried and all that?” he responded. “Yeah, I know about them.”

  “They see Green Bank as a haven,” I said.

  “So? So?” He said he wasn’t going to let the electrosensitives keep Pocahontas “behind the curve” for cell service.

  “But I’m here because you’re behind the curve,” I said. “That makes this place unique.”

  “You think we want to deal with stone knives and axes for the rest of our existence? You’re like these fucking people who move in here and don’t want it to change, that it? We have people who have moved here in the last five to ten years and they don’t want anything to change. They’ve ‘discovered’ Pocahontas County and now nothing can change. Well, fuck, that ain’t the way of the world. We have limitations because of the observatory, because of our topography, because of our insignificant population. But we need to do what we can as government entities to make things available to people.”

  “Of course,” Martin added, the cell service would have to comply with the Quiet Zone.

  “We believe in the observatory, we don’t want to fuck with them,” he said. “Right now, as you and I are sitting here bullshitting, they’re up there looking for fucking E.T. And I want to give them every opportunity to do that. But I’ve got emergency services I’ve got to render in this county.”

  In addition to trying to bring in cell service, Martin was assisting the county’s emergency services director, Michael O’Brien, to improve communications. The 911 center in Marlinton had difficulty broadcasting any emergency radio communications toward the northern end of the county, where Green Bank was located. O’Brien found a partial solution by installing an internet-controlled radio system just north of Green Bank in the town of Durbin, but it had minimal range and failed altogether when internet or electricity went down. Pocahontas was also one of the only counties in the state unable to adopt a “smart radio system” that integrated radios with smartphones.

  On the off chance that someone made an emergency 911 call from one of the county’s few pockets of limited cell service, authorities had an especially hard time pinpointing the person’s location. “We had a dispatcher spend two and a half hours on the phone one night with a lady that was trapped in her car in a creek,” O’Brien told me. “She didn’t know where she was or how she got there. We were just keeping her calm while we sent the department to look in all the areas that had cell service.”

  ACCORDING TO DELOITTE, a 10 percent increase in mobile penetration increases total factor productivity—a key component of economic growth modeling—by 4.2 percentage
points over the long run. In Pocahontas, businesspeople like Kenneth “Buster” Varner felt they needed all the help they could get to keep the county’s economy puttering along, which meant bringing in cell service.

  I first met Varner in early 2017, while eating breakfast at the counter at Station 2. A heavy, jowly man, he had leaned over and asked, “Do you think the gravy is too salty?” As we shoveled down heaping plates of biscuits and sausage gravy, he told me about his various businesses. Aside from owning Station 2, he operated a half dozen enterprises involved in logging, excavation, towing, septic pumping, and auto repair. He was also a fire chief. I told him that I imagined a lot of headaches trying to manage all those things within the restrictions of the Quiet Zone.

  “You have to realize that we never had cellphone service when everybody else had it, so it wasn’t anything to us,” Varner said. “It’d be more convenient, of course, if it was so you could use your cellphones all the time. But it’s a unique place to live where you don’t have them, and we take a little pride in that.” He noted how the observatory provided jobs and shared its resources, such as lending one of its diesel generators to a funeral home during a recent power outage. “That to me means a lot,” Varner said. “And having the largest telescope in the world out your back door, that’s a pretty neat conversation piece.”

  “People can get ahold of me the old-fashioned way,” he added. “Call me on the landline or come look for me.”

  Spending more time with Varner, however, I realized that he was hardly a Luddite. When we met again months later in his cluttered office, I found it hard to keep his attention. He kept glancing down at his iPhone to check texts and alerts he was receiving over WiFi. When he took a call, I was left to stare at a poster of a busty woman in a red bikini and firefighter helmet. When he finally put down the iPhone, I told him I was confused. Hadn’t he said he took pride in not using a cellphone?

  “I thought it was rude to have a smartphone,” Varner said of his “old” perspective, apparently from just a few months earlier. “I do a lot of business on that phone, more than I ever thought in my wildest dreams that I would do.” I asked if he could ever go back to living without one. “Wouldn’t want to. It’s so handy.”

  Varner had an AT&T data plan. He used Siri. He wished all his employees and volunteer firefighters could always be connected through smartphones. Instead, because of the Quiet Zone, he’d invested more than $30,000 in a specially approved radio repeater system to allow his workers to communicate via low-band radio. “I don’t want the observatory to close and for people to lose their jobs,” he said, “but it’d be more convenient for everybody.”

  BY ITS OWN ESTIMATE, the Green Bank Observatory contributed about $30 million to the local economy—a calculation based on the ripple effects of fifty thousand annual visitors, one hundred full-time staff, and forty seasonal workers. But the county’s far bigger economic driver was tourism.

  Snowshoe Mountain Resort, which boasted the best skiing south of the Mason-Dixon Line, employed 150 full-time employees and hundreds more part-time seasonal employees. A half million skiers descended on Pocahontas every winter, turning the county into Airbnb’s biggest market in West Virginia. The ski village could sleep up to ten thousand people a night, more than the population of the entire county, and all those overnighters made up the majority of the county’s one million annual tourist visits. Snowshoe contributed about $1 million annually in hotel/motel taxes, whereas the Green Bank Observatory, as a tax-exempt federal property, paid zero taxes. (The observatory’s 2,700 acres factored into the federal government’s payment in lieu of taxes to the county, which totaled around $850,000 a year for all 310,950 acres of federal land in Pocahontas.)

  Tourism funded the county. And tourists wanted cell service and WiFi, according to Cara Rose, director of the county’s tourism bureau. She had an intimate understanding of the Quiet Zone, since she’d previously worked for fourteen years at the observatory in marketing. After becoming tourism director in 2011, she created a handout titled “Welcome to the Quiet Zone,” which listed places in Pocahontas to find cell service and WiFi. She also turned the tourism office into a workspace where anyone could connect to free WiFi. While Rose personally appreciated the area’s radio quiet—and even unplugged her house’s WiFi to force her daughters offline—she said tourists felt anxious if disconnected for more than a day or two.

  And it wasn’t just tourists. Young adults who moved back to Pocahontas County found it challenging to readjust to the quiet. Chelsea Walker, who had taken a job in the tourism department after graduating from West Virginia University in 2016, recalled a camping trip when she was so desperate to get online that she scrunched herself in a rear corner of the family SUV, straining to hold her device in just the right way to get a bar of service. “That’s when I had a gut check and said, ‘This is ridiculous, I have a problem,’” she recalled. Returning to Pocahontas, she deleted her Tinder account. Beyond the lack of cell service, there were so few people in Pocahontas that she already knew everybody who might appear on Tinder within her geographic radius. Her classmate Makinsey Cochran faced a similar period of reckoning when she returned in 2016. She once insisted on leaving a square dance early so she could check whether her boyfriend had texted her. She worried he’d be mad if she was out of contact for too long.

  Friends from college couldn’t understand why Cochran and Walker had gone dark. The idea that cell service would be restricted by the presence of a world-renowned astronomy observatory didn’t fit traditional stereotypes of the area. In a memoir titled At Home in the Heart of Appalachia, which was partly set in Green Bank, author John O’Brien (another of Bob Sheets’s brothers-in-law) noted that outsiders often acted like they “knew all about Appalachia—strange, backward people struggling with grinding poverty in a devastated landscape; feral hillbillies; Hatfields and McCoys, black-bearded moonshiners murdering one another. That or quaint folk in strap overalls and granny dresses playing fiddles while they clogged around.” Many visitors had no knowledge of the Quiet Zone and simply assumed the area’s limited connectivity was because it was a backwoods forest of uneducated hillbillies who simply didn’t need cell service or WiFi.

  Some visitors canceled their hotel reservations or left in a huff upon realizing they would be without cell service, according to Nelson Hernandez, who operated the Old Clark Inn, the county’s longest-running lodging (open since 1924), down the road from the tourism office in Marlinton. Visitors were so habituated to being constantly connected that they were hesitant to explore or bike along the Greenbrier River Trail without cell service. As a solution, Hernandez invested in a GPS device for visitors to borrow. It acted as a kind of emergency beacon, allowing the user to send preset messages like “Help!”

  Oscar Martinez, one of about two dozen migrant workers employed at a lumber mill just north of Green Bank, recalled the grim shock upon realizing that he’d landed at the one place in America where cell service was outlawed. “We have cell service everywhere in Puerto Rico,” he said. “We came here and we’re like, ‘What the fuck is that shit?’ All the Puerto Ricans come and think they’re going to the city, a nice place with discos and parties. But there’s nothing anywhere here. There’s one bar, and you go and they all look at you like they want to fight with you.”

  George Nader, another migrant worker, said he used to watch Supernatural, CSI, and House on his smartphone back in Puerto Rico. “Here, I cannot even watch one episode!” he said. “I started calling back home to ask my friends what happened in the series.”

  ONE OF THE AREA’S FEW cellphone antennas was in Marlinton, where a low-range AT&T transmitter was hidden in the steeple of City National Bank. Mayor Sam Felton considered it his responsibility as an elected official to bring in another cell carrier. He was sympathetic toward the electrosensitives, but they represented a minority view.

  “Maybe Pocahontas County is not remote enough for their situation,” Felton told me when I stopped by his wood-panel
ed office. “I understand they moved to the county because of the Quiet Zone at Green Bank. Well, we’re already being sensitive to the requirements of Green Bank, and to do any less is to keep the majority from being serviced because of a very small population.”

  A round-faced man with a thin mustache, Felton’s religious beliefs permeated the mayor’s office. A pocket-size copy of Gideons New Testament sat on his desk, along with the book God Bless America: Prayers & Reflections for Our Country. His business card had an image of Jesus. On the wall was a framed copy of Luke 16:10: “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.” He opened town council meetings in prayer. He believed the Bible held “the answer to all our problems.” I once heard him start a sermon with a solo rendition of the hymn “Love Lifted Me,” which was moving, in a simple and sincere way, though also awkward because I was one of only four people in the church. Felton appreciated the supernatural, the mysteries of life, the unseen powers that govern the world. But that appreciation didn’t extend toward the unproven illness of electrosensitivity.

  “I don’t want to go backward,” Felton said. “I want to keep going forward.” Forward meant keeping the lights on and bringing in more cell service.

  When I got up to leave, Felton motioned to a piece of paper taped by his door. It was a computer-printed photo of clouds.

  “Don’t you see anything?” Felton asked me.

  I was at a loss. “Um, are they cumulus clouds?” I said.

  Felton told me to step back. He pointed to a shadowy spot in the cloud. “That looks just like the face of Jesus,” he said with utter seriousness. He pointed to another cloud and said, “Now look there, doesn’t that look like a woman’s face? This really got me thinking of how the Bible says we’re surrounded by a cloud of witnesses.”