The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  The brochure seemed to signal a change from when tourism director Cara Rose told me the Quiet Zone was a hindrance to attracting visitors. Was radio quiet now seen as an asset to tourism?

  Rose corrected me. The brochure was meant to explain the limited WiFi and cell service, not to promote the quiet. Quiet would never be a selling point in and of itself, she said. Tourists came for skiing, mountain biking, hunting, fishing, and camping. “We won’t market Pocahontas as a destination to come because of the Quiet Zone,” Rose said flatly.

  I told her I’d check back in a few years to see if things had changed and there was a greater appreciation for the Quiet Zone.

  “We will never put in an ad ‘No cellphone coverage,’” Rose said. “Never. That will never happen.”

  The brochure was inaccurate, in any case. I’d first seen it at a restaurant called Dean’s Den that advertised WiFi on its front door. Andrew Dean, formerly the chef at Mountain Quest Inn and the son of its owners—the people who believed the Quiet Zone contained a portal to another dimension—ran the establishment, which happened to be in the same building in which the neo-Nazi Craig Cobb had once operated Gray’s Store, Aryan Autographs and 14 Words, LLC. The store now sold organic crackers, fancy cheese and sausages, and craft beers. Dean told me that about 10 percent of his customers were electrosensitive. Some asked him to turn off the WiFi, but he declined because the internet attracted other patrons—and anyway, the WiFi didn’t stop the electrosensitives from coming. The day I stopped in, the special was a chicken masala curry made with chanterelle mushrooms that Bob and Elaine Sheets had foraged from their woods.

  BOB SHEETS CRACKED OPEN three bottles of beer in celebration. He and Elaine had just shared the news that they were expecting another grandchild, so I’d told them that Jenna and I were also having a baby. We clinked our bottles with a “cheers.” A new generation would have to determine the value of quiet and if it was worth preserving.

  I looked out over the yard and past a wooden fence to their son Jed’s house a quarter mile away, close enough for convenient grandparenting. I knew the Sheetses didn’t have WiFi, which Bob touted as a point of pride. His mother had worked at the observatory for three decades; he’d been the facility’s longtime neighbor and public champion; he regularly poked fun at the outsiders who went into withdrawal without cell service. He had a reputation to uphold. But I’d never asked if his son’s home had WiFi.

  “Yeah, he does,” Bob admitted. If their son had WiFi, then any potential harm to the Green Bank Telescope was likely already being done, regardless of what the Sheetses did.

  “So why don’t you have WiFi?” I asked.

  “I would feel hypocritical,” he said. “We function. I can sit down at the computer and do whatever I need to do.”

  “You’re one of the last houses in the area without WiFi,” I said.

  Bob nodded. He named a few homes that he thought didn’t have WiFi, but he agreed they were the exception, not the rule, even if the media continued to portray an alternate reality about Green Bank. The New York Times had recently published a story titled “The Land Where the Internet Ends,” which claimed that Green Bank “residents do without not only cellphones but also Wi-Fi, microwave ovens and any other devices that generate electromagnetic signals.” Of course, most residents did have cellphones, WiFi, microwave ovens, and myriad other gadgets. The following year, another New York Times feature would describe Green Bank as a place “where Wi-Fi is both unavailable and banned.” Which was news to everyone around Green Bank.

  The way residents responded to most media articles about the Quiet Zone reminded me of how people from Appalachia responded to Hillbilly Elegy, the bestselling 2016 memoir by Yale Law School graduate J. D. Vance about escaping poverty and dysfunction in Appalachia. The memoir had inspired a book-length rebuke titled What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia as well as an essay collection, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, whose opening essay noted that for nearly 150 years “the region has been incessantly ‘discovered’ and then ‘rediscovered’ by a long series of novelists, journalists, social scientists, satirists, and documentarians, most—if not all—inspired by the irony of Appalachian Otherness. How can a region defined by the Euro-American frontier myth be so different, so far behind, the perceived American mainstream?” Didn’t that sum up so many portrayals of Green Bank? How could this place be so different, so “backward,” as to not have cell service or WiFi?

  It was a hot August afternoon, and I savored the cold beer as it bubbled down my throat. I’d first sat on this porch more than two years earlier, when I was welcomed to the Sheetses’ backyard party despite nobody knowing who I was. The Sheetses had shared so much with me, even hosted me and Jenna for Thanksgiving, asking for nothing in return except one thing.

  “I read something the other day that I think applies to us,” Bob said. “A journalist was interviewing a guy in the coal fields. The miner said, ‘I’ll talk to you as long as you don’t do “poverty porn.” Don’t hold us up for the world to look at as if our poverty is entertaining.’”

  In the same way that the miner didn’t want to be portrayed as the face of white poverty, Bob didn’t want to be a caricature for digital disconnection. The yarn about Green Bank as “the place where the internet ends” felt like another kind of media exploitation, repeated ad nauseam for an outside world. “It’s ‘disconnectivity porn,’” Bob said. He didn’t live in a “dead zone.” And he didn’t need to be brought to life with “connectivity.” Far from it. He was already living.

  Epilogue

  “Masters of Social Distancing”

  IN THE WEEKS LEADING UP to our child’s birth, I was often asked if I was anxiously checking my phone in case Jenna went into labor, almost as if the questioner were projecting their digital anxiety onto me. When I replied that I didn’t own a cellphone, I was typically met with a look of horror. “But what if she goes into labor and can’t get in touch with you?” the person would ask in an accusing tone, as if I were breaking an implicit civil code and should be dragged before a jury to account for my disconnection.

  Jenna ended up having a scheduled induction. We took the subway to the hospital, and the next morning the two of us became three. Using her smartphone, I snapped a photo of us in the delivery room, the baby still with streaks of blood in his hair, and shared it with family and friends. Jenna’s mother, visiting from Korea, recorded video on her iPad. The devices were valuable in those moments. If I’d learned something from Green Bank’s complicated relationship with technology, it was to be pragmatic in my own usage.

  For Jenna’s maternity leave, we relocated to a fixer-upper cottage in an area of rural Connecticut known, appropriately enough, as the Quiet Corner. My parents lived nearby, ready to help with baby care. As we settled into a routine, I began to hear the voices of the electrosensitives in my head. Some research suggested that smartphone radiation possibly posed a higher risk to children, owing to their smaller heads and thinner skulls. So we took some precautions. Jenna’s smartphone and my iPod stayed distant from the baby and outside the bedroom where we all slept. We got an analog clock for the bedside. We opted out of an array of “smart” baby care options, like the diaper that texts when it detects poop or the socks that track heart rate and blood oxygen levels.

  Initially, ours was a temporary move to the countryside. Then COVID-19 swept the nation, and our relocation became indefinite. At first, quarantining had the feel of a slumber party or prolonged snow day. My parents had all the time they wanted with their newest grandchild. Jenna perfected her pizza-making skills. I built a patio and vegetable garden. We watched a robin build a nest in our pergola, lay four eggs, and deliver grub to her brood until they were big enough to fly off. We weren’t alone in embracing a low-key lifestyle. The initial months of the pandemic turned into the longest-recorded period of audible human quiet in history, based on data collected from 268 seismic monitoring stations around the world. Highways em
ptied. Stores shuttered. Construction stalled.

  Meanwhile, the digital noise was blaring. Screens became a necessity for education, employment, and social connections. The online overload was even felt around Green Bank. After schools went remote, Pocahontas County High School math teacher Laurel Dilley started getting migraines from toggling between her computer screen, iPhone, and iPad all day as she tried to coordinate with students on email, Facebook, and Instagram. It was the first time she felt compelled to set digital boundaries in her life, and by late spring she’d begun purposefully turning off her devices from 4:00 P.M. to 7:00 P.M. to give herself a break.

  On the flip side, Dilley felt lucky to be connected at all. She estimated that at least half her students lacked reliable internet, making remote education nearly impossible for them. Ruth Bland, the technology coordinator for the county’s schools, asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to bring in two temporary mobile internet providers, called cells on wheels (COWS), to increase internet availability—with the understanding that the COWS would be far enough from the observatory that they wouldn’t interfere with the telescopes. Homeland Security denied her request because of the area’s low population, underscoring a catch-22: the small population meant companies invested little in internet infrastructure, which meant residents had slow internet, which meant Bland needed to ask for emergency help, which was denied because of the low population. The best Bland could do was open WiFi access at all public schools and libraries, with the exception of in Green Bank. She also asked teachers to stagger their Zoom sessions so they wouldn’t overload the rural internet lines.

  At Mathias Solliday’s home, the internet was so slow that he couldn’t download slide presentations, submit assignments, or watch the video lectures necessary to remotely finish his freshman year at West Virginia University. Every day, he drove to a friend’s house ten minutes away, where he parked in the driveway and tethered to the WiFi, which came from a faster internet provider. His younger brother sometimes joined him, the two sitting side by side in the back seat of their parents’ Highlander with their laptops open to schoolwork.

  Still, Solliday was glad to be in Green Bank during the pandemic, if he had to be anywhere. For a couple days, West Virginia had the distinction of being the last U.S. state without a case of COVID-19, making the remoteness of Pocahontas especially enticing to people fleeing cities. License plates from New York to Florida began appearing in the parking lot of Trent’s General Store as outsiders stocked up and packed into the county’s campgrounds. “It was completely nuts,” Donnie Ervine told me. “People we didn’t know were trying to buy twenty pounds of hamburger at a time.” Shelves emptied. All the while, Ervine’s ninety-two-year-old grandmother Betty Mullenax kept working the register, refusing to wear a face mask on account of some “flu bug.”

  People were also panic-buying land in Pocahontas, with home sales surging about 30 percent for Red Oak Realty, according to owner Oak Hall. “The number of people making knee-jerk decisions is through the roof,” Hall told me. It was the biggest land boom in a decade. The observatory closed to tours, but visitors could still walk around the telescopes. Bob Sheets, who biked regularly around the observatory, was seeing as many as thirty people on the site daily, and they repeatedly asked him if he knew of any properties for sale.

  To limit the influx of out-of-staters, the governor shut down all campgrounds in late March 2020. Some visitors resorted to sleeping in their cars. Sheriff Jeff Barlow repeatedly found a woman with electromagnetic hypersensitivity overnighting at random parking lots.

  The county reported its first case of COVID-19 in April, though some residents believed the virus had already been spreading undetected through the community. Hanna Sizemore, for one, was bedridden for two weeks in March with symptoms that a physician said clearly indicated COVID-19, even if her test was negative. She suspected it was a false negative. She had asthma, and she battled coronavirus long-haul symptoms through the rest of the year: fatigue, shortness of breath, extreme swings in heart rate, and the sensation of having a heart attack. But despite the distance from robust medical care, the Sizemores didn’t feel it was a hardship to live in Pocahontas during the pandemic. Quarantining almost came naturally. They had fifty pounds of beef in their freezer, plus a pantry stocked with flour, sugar, and yeast. Once a week, a neighbor delivered a dozen fresh eggs to their doorstep, a kind of rural version of FreshDirect; the Sizemores paid via PayPal.

  “We are the masters of social distancing,” said Ruth Bland. “I have a neighbor that lives a football field away, and my other neighbor is a half mile away. You have to cross a river and a field to get to anybody.” Allen Johnson said it was already normal for him and his wife to spend weeks in isolation; he only ever purchased toilet paper twice a year, and his pantry, root cellar, and freezer were full of food before the pandemic hit. Same for Bob Sheets, who had two freezers full of venison, beef, and other food. He also had fifty-five gallons of fresh maple syrup from that spring’s tap.

  The electrosensitives were also relieved to be in Pocahontas, though for slightly different reasons. Several told me that COVID-19 was linked to cell towers and 5G cell service (a baseless conspiracy theory), which was why the virus was worse in cities. To them, the Quiet Zone even had the power to ward off a pandemic.

  MY SON SITS on my lap, munching on Cheerios that I’ve arranged in a neat row along my desk to distract him from banging on my laptop. As I attempt to type this paragraph, he reaches for my face, then pushes against the desk with his feet. He pulls a tube of ChapStick from a drawer and, with the utmost intent, drops it to the ground, a game that he repeats with my wallet and credit cards.

  Isolated with an infant during the pandemic, I found myself struggling more than ever to strike a balance between being physically present and digitally connected, often failing at both. Always home, I couldn’t be with my family without seeing my laptop and thinking about work. It was also impossible to immerse myself in work without seeing or hearing my son. There was no separating work from play from family time. It all melted together.

  I was not alone in feeling digital burnout, and I hope there’s a silver lining—that the pandemic might push the widespread tech fatigue to a critical mass that spurs a cultural shift, or at least a cultural nudge. After feeling trapped behind screens through so much of the pandemic, perhaps when we emerge from the gloom we will choose to be physically present with others, setting aside our devices for a spell.

  People have urged me to get a phone for my son’s sake. I think it’s the opposite. For his sake, I will keep some distance from the device, in part because a smartphone would be another distraction from him. It would also undermine the kind of example I’d like to set—of someone who is attentive, able to sustain a conversation, able to stay in the moment. As it is, I don’t live up to that goal. I’m far from the most attentive dad. It’d be that much worse if an iPhone were also competing for my attention.

  I realize my position comes with entitlement. For many people, circumstances demand they be constantly connected for work, for education, for childcare. That doesn’t undermine my stance. Rather, it creates a greater onus on me to show that a cellphone-free life is still possible. As Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing, the attention economy’s grip over many people makes it “even more important for anyone who does have a margin—even the tiniest one—to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line.” So I will continue to stick out my elbows.

  My son may well become the most hyper-connected person I know. That’s fine. It’s his choice. I just want it to stay a choice and not a requisite for living.

  DO I REALLY have to say it? I also hope my biracial son never experiences the discrimination that so many minorities have faced. Through the course of this book, I was forced to reckon with the very real terror of white nationalism in the United States and the insidious legacy of William Pierce, which was on public display in January 2021 when a mob stormed the Capitol. Under th
e banner of Trump flags and white nationalist emblems, protesters erected a makeshift gallows and called for legislators to get “the rope.” Analysts saw clear allusions to a scene in The Turner Diaries where “traitors” to white America are hanged from tree limbs and electric poles. As photos circulated of rioters breaking into the Capitol, it seemed surprisingly easy to throw democracy into chaos, which was perhaps the event’s ultimate achievement. In The Turner Diaries, a mortar attack on Congress is valuable to insurrectionists not for its death toll, but for its “psychological impact” in showing that “not one of them is beyond our reach.”

  In the wake of the raid, Amazon stopped selling The Turner Diaries. But Pierce’s writings were beyond the tech giant’s control. The book has seen a renaissance online as Pierce grows in stature as a visionary for the Far Right movement, according to Heidi Beirich, the hate groups analyst. Today, people can become radicalized without formally joining an organization, making brick-and-mortar organizations like the National Alliance unnecessary. White nationalism no longer requires real estate. What Pierce wrought in Pocahontas has metastasized into a nebulous, leaderless, online echo chamber, even as forest reclaims his mountain compound. “Dr. Pierce’s name and his writings are still readily shared all over the internet,” said Billy Roper, who now leads a white nationalist prepper organization in Arkansas. “Since he died, his presence has only grown.”

  Sarah Riley of High Rocks once told me that white supremacy “is a scary thing whether it’s two miles away from you or five hundred miles away.” I’d responded that it certainly seemed scarier when it was in your own community.