The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  I saw a person sitting on a couch, then realized it was a mannequin wearing a National Alliance trucker hat—mannequins suddenly being a distracting theme. Hess popped out of a side room. He wore a heavy brown jacket, as it was chilly inside. His skis were propped in a corner. Rock music played over a stereo. It took him a moment to recognize me, but then he didn’t seem surprised that I was back. He introduced me to the other man as “the journalist who went into the cave.”

  “I heard you sold some land?” I asked.

  “We sold off some property up top of the mountain,” Hess said, trying to downplay it. “The reasons are, basically, we’re not using them and why pay taxes on property that you’re not using?”

  Actually, it was a major land deal. According to the assessor’s office, the National Alliance had sold 267 acres in September 2018 for $215,600 to WV Coastal LLC, a real estate company run by the local realtor and property developer Oak Hall. Hall had been slowly acquiring surrounding land, and this purchase brought his holdings to about one thousand acres, including the land where De Thompson parked his RV. (Hall’s parents, by coincidence, had been the real estate agents on Pierce’s original land purchase in 1984.) The National Alliance and its nonprofit Cosmotheist Community Church still owned around seventy-five acres, including all the buildings, though Hess said they were also on the market. His role had changed from caretaker to real estate agent, as he was tasked with trying to sell the remaining land.

  I realized that my role had also changed. Instead of monitoring the revival of one of America’s preeminent hate groups, I was witnessing its last gasps in Pocahontas County. The National Alliance was planning to move entirely to Tennessee, near the home of the chairman.

  Hess said he’d come to Pocahontas County to “honor” the memory of William Pierce. “I hated to see this place go under if I didn’t at least make an effort,” he said. “After one year, that’s obviously not happening . . . Young people have to support themselves, and it’s tough to get work here. The only people who will come out here are old people that are retired like me. I’m sixty-five and collecting Social Security.”

  I’d always been hard-pressed to find much local support for the National Alliance. Hess and David Pringle had declined to give me the names of their allies in the community, and the only Pocahontas-born resident who ever admitted to me that he’d been involved was a man named Shawn Kelly. He worked at a local prison and had run for county sheriff in 2012, placing third in the Democratic primary. I’d heard him referred to as “Nazi Shawn,” owing to how he’d been spotted often at the compound over the decades and had once operated a nearby bar called the Eager Beaver, which came to be known as “the Nazi bar.” His body was covered in provocative tattoos, which I first saw when he walked shirtless into McCoy’s Market in Hillsboro. “Caligula” was tattooed across his chest, with a crowned skull on each of his pecs, all below an image of an AK-47 assault rifle. Six-foot-five and broad shouldered, he also had a tattoo of the date 3/23/1933, which was when Germany’s government granted Hitler dictatorial powers. The names of John Wilkes Booth, Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochet, and Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) were scrawled across his skin. Amid it all was a tattoo of his wife’s name and their wedding anniversary. When I asked why he didn’t have a tattoo of William Pierce, he responded, “I only have so much skin.” Kelly invited me to go skateboarding with him (not what I’d expected from a forty-year-old dad), and I watched as he sped at 35 mph down a stretch of the Highland Scenic Highway through the Cranberry Wilderness with a beer in hand. He told me he’d gotten involved in the National Alliance when he was in his teens. He’d spoken with Pierce a number of times. (“Dude typed a lot,” Kelly said.) In recent years he had occasionally gone four-wheeling with Pringle, but he didn’t visit the compound anymore, and he dismissed any notion of the National Alliance having a local following.

  According to Hess, the only people who showed up at the compound now were squatters and drug addicts. He said the recent marijuana raid had ensnared not just Thompson but people who had in recent months moved into the compound’s abandoned buildings. A few had tried to build a meth lab. “That’s why we’re trying to keep the locals at arm’s length,” Hess said. “And since we can’t get people from our organization to move up here, it’s time to shutter the place and move on.”

  A book on the table caught my eye. The title was Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, by Eli Saslow of the Washington Post. Hess said he was reading the book because he was friends with the family of its subject, Derek Black. “I’ve known him since he was swaddled in diapers growing up,” Hess said. Black’s father was Don Black of Stormfront. Hess had lived near the Blacks in Florida and been a longtime contributor to the radio show. He proudly added that he’d personally come up with the name Stormfront in 1990, a detail that Don Black would later confirm. Hess had originally intended it as the name for his rock band.

  Hess said he was enjoying the book because the author was “very objective, the way a journalist should be”—not what I expected him to say, given how the book traced Derek Black’s disillusionment with white nationalism. The godson of David Duke, Derek was seen as the heir apparent to the white power movement until he disavowed the ideology in his twenties. In a November 2016 op-ed for the New York Times in which he renounced white identity politics, Derek called Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric “destructive to the entire nation.”

  Perhaps seeking to change the subject, Hess suddenly asked, “Have you ever seen our secret underground bunker?”

  My eyes lit up. For two years I’d been picking up rumors about secret tunnels and caves at the compound. I’d heard there was a massive bunker underneath a warehouse, and a pit so deep that light couldn’t reach the bottom. Jerry Dale, the former sheriff, said an informant once told him of caves where Pierce created a water collection system that could provide a clean drinking supply should he need to retreat underground during the collapse of civilization that would lead to a race war from which he would emerge victorious (or so he envisioned). Mystery swirled in the community around the neo-Nazi camp, just as it did around Sugar Grove and Green Bank, with people passing rumors about a system of bunkers and tunnels under each property.

  Hess stood and peeled back the carpet, revealing a trapdoor in the floor. His friend grabbed a screwdriver to wedge up the hatch. A hole dropped down about eight feet. Hess said I was welcome to go inside. I had a headlamp because I’d figured I’d be walking in the dark, so I strapped it on and climbed down a wooden ladder into the hole—perhaps a rash decision, as entering a dungeon at a remote neo-Nazi compound deep in Appalachia was an easy way to disappear.

  At the bottom of the ladder, I stood on dirt and looked around. There was some fresh gravel scattered on the floor, as if the hole had been filled in at some point. The entire “bunker” was about the size of a closet. It wouldn’t even function as a root cellar.

  “It’s nothing,” I called up.

  I heard Hess and his friend laughing.

  “Well anyway, you got to see the only bunker that I know of,” Hess said.

  The entire organization was like that trapdoor to nowhere. The National Alliance presented itself as a shadowy force with power and influence that reached throughout the community. In reality, the Alliance was more like this shallow pit, underwhelming and unimpressive. The neo-Nazis could certainly be dangerous. Their ideology was despicable and their aims criminal. But in many ways, they survived on an illusion of evil grandeur.

  Hess said law enforcement had seen the bunker while inspecting the building after Pierce died. “They cleared out a bunch of chemicals from the laboratory upstairs,” he added.

  “There’s a laboratory?” I said.

  “Well, we might as well give you the full tour,” Hess said.

  I climbed out of the hole. Hess dropped the hatch and rolled down the carpet. I followed him upstairs. A door labeled “Laboratory” opened to a room filled with chemistry equipment and bo
oks, including a hardbound multivolume set of Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. The shelves were lined with beakers, microscopes, glassware, capacity resistors, an autoclave, bottles of sinister-sounding chemicals, and bags of rock salt. It looked like an ideal place to make a bomb.

  I asked why the National Alliance would need a chemistry lab. Hess mentioned how a member named Harry Robert McCorkill, who lived briefly at the compound, had earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Manitoba and briefly taught at Harvard University—as if that explained the point of having a chemistry lab here. Upon McCorkill’s death in 2004, he bequeathed a $250,000 estate (including a collection of ancient coins) to the National Alliance. The Southern Poverty Law Center said the gift could have been a “lifesaving financial lifeline” for the National Alliance, but Canadian courts blocked the transfer on the grounds that McCorkill’s beliefs ran counter to public policy.

  I poked into another room labeled “Business Manager.” On the floor was a pile of clunky keyboards, printers, scanners, and monitors, all more than a decade old. Balanced atop a pile of papers was a letter, still sealed, addressed to Pierce. I opened a random drawer of a tall filing cabinet, spotting folders labeled “Canadian Intelligence,” “Tax Returns,” and “Publishers.” There were a pair of snowshoes, an amateur telescope, and paper star charts. Hess said he might auction it all off as an estate sale.

  The other half of the upstairs once held the National Alliance’s recording studio for its radio show. Hess had turned it into a living quarters for himself and his cats. An AV closet was packed with hundreds of video cassettes and DVDs, including of the sci-fi flick The Thing and the 1935 Nazi propaganda reel Triumph of the Will. The odd collection, like the organization itself, was somewhere between despicable and dopey.

  Back downstairs, I spotted a Geiger counter on a table. It had been purchased decades earlier in case of a nuclear catastrophe, Hess explained. Pierce and the National Alliance had retreated to the mountains of Appalachia for reasons not too different from the U.S. government when it surveyed the area for bunker sites in the 1950s. “If there was some major crisis in the world, like nuclear war or some sort of catastrophe like an influenza outbreak, this would be a good place to get away from the chaos where a remnant could survive,” Hess said. “People have been talking doomsday for the fifty years I’ve been involved in this movement. At some point . . .” His voice trailed off. He seemed tired of living for the apocalypse.

  I later emailed Pringle to ask about the land sale. He was still in Nebraska managing a gun shop, though he’d run into controversy with the state chapter of the anti-fascist group Antifa, which had publicized where he worked. He said he opposed the property sale, but he acknowledged that it was near impossible to recruit people to live in Pocahontas. It was too far from a Walmart, he said.

  “All the legacy NA members are now gone—the hive of activity, brotherhood, and attachment to The Land is now gone, too,” Pringle wrote back. “I recently saw the NA referred to as a ‘book club for old men.’ When I read it I had to agree.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Don’t You Forget This”

  IT WASN’T EASY CONVINCING JENNA to spend a two-week holiday in Green Bank. “I feel like you’re stealing Christmas from me,” she’d said when I proposed the idea, expressing particular concern about food. We couldn’t expect an invitation to the Sheetses’ table every night, and procuring fresh groceries in Green Bank was a challenge. The Sheetses, among others, took a two-hour drive every few months across the state line to Harrisonburg, stocking up on food from Costco and Sharp Shopper. So we packed a two-week supply of hardy fruits, vegetables, and coffee beans. Knowing we wouldn’t have WiFi, we also packed several ethernet cords.

  When we unlocked the door of our apartment at the observatory, however, we found a single internet jack, meaning all our extra ethernet cords were useless. I usually went alone to Green Bank, so I hadn’t thought to bring an ethernet splitter that would allow multiple laptops to get online simultaneously. Within minutes, we were bickering over who needed internet more. Jenna was busy with her biggest work project of the year, and I was communicating with local people by email. I sped over to Trent’s, where Bobby Ervine sold me what he thought might be an ethernet splitter. It was actually a landline phone splitter. The thing was practically an antique. I remembered the old adage “If Trent’s doesn’t have it, you don’t need it,” which in this case meant we were wrong in thinking it necessary for two people to be online simultaneously.

  I’d also underestimated the challenge of finding a Christmas tree. I’d figured we’d pass a tree farm on the drive to Green Bank, which didn’t happen. So I asked Bob Sheets where we might buy one. He seemed confused by the question. Buy a tree? Who in their right mind pays for a tree when surrounded by forest? Precut trees in New York City were selling for $25 a foot, making a typical eight-footer $200. Bob said he’d happily take our $200 if we wanted to stop by, borrow a saw, and cut down any tree on his hundred-acre property. He added that he wouldn’t actually charge us.

  After an hour of tromping through the Sheetses’ woods, we realized that perfectly conical Christmas trees rarely grow in the wild. His property ran up to a barbed-wire fence with a wooden sign that read “U.S. Govt. Prop. No Hunting. N.R.A.O.” On the other side, we spotted a shrub that could, with some imagination, pass as a miniature Christmas tree. So I hopped over the fence, cut down the shrub, and drove it back to our guest apartment. The gangly evergreen had about six branches, just enough to hold a dozen ornaments.

  Our simple tree could have been an analogy for our time in Green Bank. Everything was pared down. There was one main road, one ice-cream brand at Trent’s, and, at best, one activity every couple days, be it a trivia competition, live bluegrass, or a holiday party. Jenna and I went skiing once at Snowshoe, dined out once at the Elk River Inn, and attended a party at Jay Lockman’s home, where he and his band played in a music circle. (I knew better than to try to join along this time.) Those few social events became more meaningful amid the quiet of our days, as if the quiet—the radio quiet, the audible quiet, the social quiet, all of it—enhanced our ability to listen, to hear, to appreciate companionship.

  “There’s something about being here that forces you to live simply,” Jenna said, “and that creates headspace to want to read and write and do things I normally find taxing or a chore.” Our New York City life was a daily bombardment of choices: Pizza or Thai? Whole Foods or Key Food? Bicycle or subway? R train or N? It was a paradox of choice, an anxiety-provoking number of decisions involved with almost every activity and task, with pervasive connectivity enabling a constant flow of alternate options and changes in plans, almost causing a kind of paralysis, like a child unable to make a decision in the cereal aisle. “You have to make so many choices to even make a choice,” Jenna said of our “normal” life. Getting away from the bottomless options of Amazon and Google was freeing. It was a relief to be restricted to the basics.

  Even such short visits to the Quiet Zone could be perspective altering, shocking outsiders like us into realizing, or perhaps just remembering, a less connected way of life. I once spoke to a young man named Greg Barber who was touring the observatory as a side trip to a ski vacation. His time in Pocahontas was causing him to reconsider a habit of sleeping with his smartphone. The Quiet Zone forced him “to live in the moment, like, I’m here on planet Earth and this is where I’m at and this is my world right now, versus in the digital world of where your friends are at, what information you want to look at, what game you want to play, what Facebook feed you want to be on.” The quiet was a jolt, a shake of the shoulders to look up from the screen.

  Just hearing about Green Bank could be powerful. When I told a friend in New York about the Quiet Zone, he locked his smartphone in his apartment for a month, using it only at his desk, just to prove to himself that he could go without it. Seemingly everyone whom I told about Green Bank responded, “I want to go there,” because many pe
ople see the value of taking a break from tech. But because of the purposeful addictiveness of smartphones and social media, we often revert to default mode, which is to be always connected, always online. “People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy,” as the computer scientist Cal Newport writes in Digital Minimalism, “but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.” How many times had I vowed to take a break from the internet for a day, only to still find myself online?

  There’s a cliché that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but Jenna didn’t find that she appreciated cell service more by being away from it, and I never reached a new fondness for WiFi after all my time in the Quiet Zone. Instead, we regained an appreciation for being a bit disconnected. Despite the fact that Jenna spent most days working on her laptop, we each found ourselves enjoying unprecedented stretches offline, unplugged. It was liberating.

  It was also temporary. We were both too busy to feel bored or lonely. We never felt isolated, because we knew we could leave. And we didn’t have to struggle with slow internet, because we could hook up to the observatory’s fast connection. We streamed Jeopardy! and Better Call Saul every night with dinner. We were also helped by a crucial piece of hardware. A week into our stay, Rudy Marrujo, the tech-savvy HAM radio operator, loaned us an ethernet splitter. “I doubt you’d have been able to find one of these anywhere in West Virginia,” he’d told me. Underscoring the challenge of getting any computer equipment, West Virginia is the only state in Appalachia without an Apple Store—not that an Apple Store would carry an old piece of technology like an ethernet splitter.

  We never had to take on the real challenges of life in Pocahontas: the struggling economy, the food deserts, the rural internet. As much as I had come to appreciate the people, culture, and rolling hills of Pocahontas, there were downsides. Jenna, as a Korean native, acutely felt the area’s lack of diversity, from the food to the prevalence of Confederate flags. And while the Quiet Zone forced residents to have a fundamentally healthier relationship to technology, even in Green Bank I found that I was one of the only people without a cellphone. I was still an outsider, still an anomaly.