The Quiet Zone Read online

  As the white supremacists retreated from Pocahontas County, a new group emerged. Diane Schou and the electrosensitives became a daily fixture at the Green Bank Public Library, taking advantage of the computers and free internet—so long as the overhead lights were turned off, because of their complaints about feeling pain from the lightbulbs. Computers and lights both give off electromagnetic radiation, but Schou and others argued that it was better to reduce their exposure however possible. They could apparently get by in darkness, but not without internet.

  Schou once gave Johnson a booklet about electromagnetic hypersensitivity to add to the library—she donated a similar book to the National Institutes of Health library outside Washington, D.C.—but he declined to add the title to his county’s collection. He believed EHS was psychological, based on what he read from the World Health Organization, as well as based on the electrosensitives’ behavior. At one library meeting, Schou reacted frantically to the overhead lights, storming out and wandering around the parking lot, saying she was too disoriented to drive home. She requested that Johnson change all the lights to incandescent, which emit a fraction of the electromagnetic radiation produced by fluorescent lights, although the latter are more energy efficient.

  “I said, ‘You got the money to pay for that?’” Johnson recalled. “We were barely scraping by on a tight budget.”

  As a compromise, the Green Bank library—which was already the county’s only library without WiFi—agreed to turn off its lights for the electrosensitives. Schou and other sensitives had high expectations for quiet. Locals had varying degrees of amenability. And Johnson was not alone in feeling Schou was trying to enforce “electromagnetic sharia law” on the county.

  “You could write a murder mystery story about all this,” he said. “Call it Murder by WiFi.”

  IT’S HARD TO BE an outsider in Pocahontas. I heard myriad iterations of the phrase “If you haven’t been here for six generations, you’re still a newcomer.” At first it sounded quaint, a note of pride in how families had settled the land. But it also hinted at how residents could be dismissive toward new people and new ideas, as if to say, We don’t care what you think because you’re not from here.

  Diane Schou pushed the county’s tolerance of outsiders to a new limit. I was told that at a square dance she flipped off the lights because they were bothering her, causing several elderly dancers to fall. (Schou told me she had no memory of this.) At the senior center, she unplugged the fish tank’s air pump because it emitted electromagnetic radiation; the fish were later found dead. (Schou didn’t deny this, and said other sensitives were also bothered by the air pump.) At a Christmas service, she reacted to the flash of a digital camera with violent sneezes and cries, writhing on the floor. (Schou confirmed this.)

  For a time after she first arrived, Schou found acceptance at a Lutheran church, which gave up its wireless microphones, changed its heating system, banned cellphones, and began offering gluten-free communion wafers—all at her request. Then she started having trouble with the vehicles in the church parking lot, perhaps because people left cellphones in their cars. Newer vehicles also had gadgetry that affected her, Schou told me. The church said it couldn’t dictate what vehicles people drove, so Schou switched to Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church, a mile from her home in Green Bank. It was a smaller church, which meant it had fewer cars, and even fewer after half of the congregation left in protest over Schou’s request that the lights be kept off. Pastor David Fuller called for the church to be accepting of outsiders. He sympathized with Schou, his empathy informed in part by his father’s death from cancer after working in a steel mill handling asbestos. Asbestos was largely unregulated in the United States before the 1970s. Maybe Schou was onto something now?

  The community’s frustration really erupted in 2010. Schou was a regular at the Green Bank senior center, which changed the lights in one area so she could feel more comfortable eating her daily subsidized lunch there. Then she requested that she be served lunch so she wouldn’t have to walk beneath the fluorescent lighting in the self-serve area. During a meeting that she organized to share information on EHS, a senior citizen named Walter “Tony” Byrd stood and asked Schou why she demanded special treatment for a condition that was medically unproven. Byrd (a brother-in-law to Bob Sheets) himself was a diabetic with high cholesterol and high blood pressure, yet he didn’t expect special foods or services. He learned that Schou had a history of filing legal complaints against organizations if they failed to accommodate electrosensitivity, and he would later show me a copy of the complaint that Schou filed against Northern Pocahontas County Health Clinic in Green Bank for “denying access” to an electrosensitive-safe bathroom. “This crap needs to stop,” Byrd told the other seniors, to applause. The meeting grew heated, and the sheriff was called to defuse tensions.

  At some point during all this, Schou found a woodchuck stuffed in her mailbox, shot to death. Leave Green Bank, was the message, because you’re not welcome here. She reported the incident to the police but was met with a shrug. “I thought they could take the animal and analyze the bullet,” Schou told me. “They didn’t even come out.” Another time, her car’s tires were punctured in her own driveway. Other visitors to her home mysteriously had their tires slashed.

  Schou stopped going to the senior center. When John Simmons took over the county’s senior programming in 2010, he changed the building’s lights back to the way they’d previously been. “Don’t come back here in these hills and expect these old hillbilly people to change their ways,” Simmons told me when I met him at his office in Marlinton. A wad of tobacco bulged under his lip. A longtime foreman at a leather tannery just north of Green Bank until it closed in 1994, Simmons was now responsible for organizing meals and services at senior centers throughout the aging county, as well as for delivering about one hundred meals to the elderly every day. He couldn’t be bothered by a dubious illness unrecognized by the Americans with Disabilities Act or the American Medical Association.

  “I don’t know how many are in the county now,” Simmons said of the sensitives. “They’re like flies, they keep coming in.”

  To his point, it was impossible to get a solid count on the number of electrosensitives in Pocahontas. Some lived in the closet for fear of being ostracized.

  “It’s like modern leprosy,” said one man who wished to remain anonymous. He had moved to Pocahontas from California with his wife and three kids in 2013, several years after he began experiencing brain fog, memory loss, and blurry vision around electronics. He tried everything to curb his symptoms. He cut all sugar from his diet. He exercised. He slept in special pajamas. He unplugged the electrical wiring in his car. He stopped drinking from aluminum cans because he believed they acted as antennas for radio waves. He considered becoming Amish. In 2013, he read about Green Bank and Diane Schou. He visited once and moved his whole family out. His son joked to schoolmates that his family was hiding in Pocahontas as part of a witness protection program; it was easier than explaining the truth.

  “If it hadn’t happened to me, I would for sure be super-skeptical of a lot of this stuff,” the father told me. “I used to be one of those guys that got in line and waited for the next-generation of an iPhone.”

  But he wasn’t interested in meeting Schou or being associated with the other sensitives. He just wanted to get better. He believed he could heal in the Quiet Zone and return to a seminormal life in the world of connectivity. The sensitives I spoke with all believed they recuperated in Green Bank, though they had varying degrees of tolerance for returning to the outside world. Schou, for her part, said the Quiet Zone made her feel strong enough to make periodic trips to visit family and friends, but she always had to return to Green Bank to recharge.

  “I feel like they’ve given up on trying to be a part of the modern world,” the man said of the sensitives who had settled permanently in the Quiet Zone, “and I don’t want to.”

  “HOW MANY SCIENTIFIC STUDIES wo
uld you need to convince you that this is real?” asked Bert Schou, looking me in the eye solemnly. His wife, Diane, sat beside him at Station 2 restaurant in Durbin.

  “A couple would be great,” I said.

  “This one will start you,” Bert said, sliding a folder across the laminated tabletop with an air of gravity. He said it contained definitive scientific proof that electromagnetic hypersensitivity was real. In addition to the study in the folder, he claimed, some “twenty thousand” additional research papers showed concrete evidence of EHS.

  We’d all just attended a Sunday morning service at Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church. Bert wore a collared shirt and slacks. Diane was in a flannel shirt and long skirt. I donned my sole dress shirt. By now I’d been visiting Green Bank for more than a year and had spoken with Diane many times, but this was my first conversation with her husband of forty years. Bert lived half the time in Iowa, where he ran an agricultural seed-testing company, but he intended to retire to Green Bank because he also suffered from “a little bit of sensitivity.” Diane chimed in that Bert’s hair thinned when he was working in Iowa, but it grew back “nice and thick” in Green Bank.

  When I got back to my apartment at the observatory, I peered into the folder, skeptical of what I might find. I’d already received “evidence” from other sensitives. On one of my first visits, a woman named Jennifer Wood, whom I’d met at church with Schou, demanded that I sign a pledge to include a list of her preapproved “research” in whatever I wrote. When I declined, she accused me of being “pro-industry” and “paid off” by cellphone companies. “Who are you working for?!” she’d yelled, pointing a finger at me. After assuring her that I wasn’t an industry spy, Wood handed me her “evidence” sheet. It said Russia had been aware of “radio wave sickness” for decades, but that fact was suppressed by the U.S. cell industry. Her sheet cited a 2016 study from the U.S. National Toxicology Program that showed male rats had a slightly higher rate of cancer when exposed to cellphones, though she left out that the male rats also lived longer and that female rats in the experiment showed no uptick in cancer—and none of the rats had cancer rates statistically higher than the average rat population. Wood’s sheet also highlighted how the World Health Organization in 2011 classified electromagnetic fields as “possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, associated with wireless phone use.” Thing is, drinking very hot beverages like coffee is considered even more dangerous and “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A), but I’ve never seen a cancer warning on a Starbucks cup. Moreover, the World Health Organization has since 2005 declared that “there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure.”

  In the Schous’ folder was a 1991 study called “Electromagnetic Field Sensitivity.” The lead author was Dr. William Rea, founder of the Environmental Health Center in Dallas, where Wood had spent time. In the study, Rea exposed one hundred self-diagnosed electrosensitives to frequencies at random intervals to test their ability to sense radio waves. One-quarter of subjects reacted consistently to stimulation; sixteen showed a hyperawareness of when they were exposed to a certain frequency. “We concluded that this study gives strong evidence that electromagnetic field sensitivity exists, and can be elicited under environmentally controlled conditions,” Rea and his coauthors wrote.

  I looked up Rea’s name. He’d been charged by the Texas Medical Board in 2007 with using pseudoscientific testing methods, failing to make accurate diagnoses, and providing “nonsensical” treatments. There was also a history of malpractice complaints against him. So much for a reliable source.

  The electrosensitives recommended that I read the book Overpowered, by Martin Blank, a Columbia University Ph.D. I did, and I was astounded by its dubious claims, including that metal eyeglass frames focus cellphone waves “directly into your brain” and that living within close range of a cell tower increases one’s risk of suicide. I was also directed toward an activist in New Mexico named Arthur Firstenberg who once sued his neighbor for $1.43 million for having WiFi that allegedly damaged his health. Another “expert” the sensitives mentioned was David Carpenter of the State University of New York in Albany. Carpenter had earned his medical degree from Harvard, which lent a degree of authority to his assertions that EHS is real and that 5G cell service is harmful—a debunked conspiracy. In the journal Child Development, professors from Oxford and Queen’s University Belfast found a number of Carpenter’s claims to be “scientifically discredited” and “widely dismissed by scientific bodies the world over.”

  In a major paper that poured cold water on the very concept of EHS, James Rubin of King’s College London reviewed forty-six blind or double-blind provocation studies involving more than one thousand test subject volunteers. He found no “robust evidence” supporting the idea of EHS, according to a study published in 2010 in the peer-reviewed journal Bioelectromagnetics. According to Rubin, in single-blind tests when the researcher knew that the subject was being exposed to an electromagnetic field, people did consistently experience EHS symptoms. But when neither the researcher nor the subject knew if the electrical field was on or off—that is, when the experiment was performed double-blind—symptoms disappeared.

  Rubin attributed electromagnetic sensitivity to the nocebo effect, which is when you feel physically unwell after you think you’ve been exposed to something hazardous. He ran an experiment where people watched a video about the harms of WiFi and were then exposed to a fake WiFi signal. Those who watched the video were more likely to report feeling pain from WiFi (even though there was no actual WiFi).

  I witnessed the nocebo effect with many of the electrosensitives whom I met, and most obviously with Schou. She complained about a neighbor’s WiFi and claimed to be able to attend Wesley Chapel only when the lights and furnace were off, but she had no problem eating at Station 2, which had bright incandescent lights and strong enough WiFi that the sheriff’s deputies sometimes loitered outside to access the free hotspot. When Schou and I attended a meeting of the county’s amateur radio club, she insisted on sitting in a dark corner lest the overhead lights bother her, even though the entire building had WiFi. She said she could eat eggs and poultry in Green Bank, but if she consumed the foods outside of the Quiet Zone they gave her “explosive diarrhea.” She said she was sensitive to electric coffeemakers, yet I saw a Keurig in her house. She said she had trouble driving beneath power lines, yet she regularly drove to Baltimore to visit her son and his family. She was allergic to microwaves made by Amana, but not microwaves made by Sharp or General Electric. She said she had type 2 diabetes and her blood sugar spiked when exposed to electromagnetic radiation, yet she and Bert had an iPad.

  Perhaps most peculiar, Schou claimed to have an intolerance for “rippling brooks,” perhaps because she once stayed in a cabin in Sweden by a waterfall that supposedly faced in the direction of Ukraine and had somehow “absorbed” radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Ever since then, “If I am near a rippling brook, some people who are electrosensitive cannot be around me then because they can detect something from me,” Schou said. “If I go to visit them from a different direction, not parallel to a rippling brook, they don’t have a problem. But if I go to see them via the way of a rippling brook, they cannot be around me. It is bizarre.”

  SCHOU WAS A MEMBER of the Deer Creek Valley book club, which I joined whenever possible. The club was led by a woman named Carla Beaudet, who was an engineer at the observatory. She had a degree in electrical and computer engineering from Johns Hopkins University and had previously worked as a radio frequency compliance tester for commercial products. Because of her knowledge of safety protocols, and because of her interactions with Schou, she seemed well positioned to offer an objective view on the potential dangers of electromagnetic radiation.

  Beaudet could often be found in a rear annex of the observatory’s science building, conducting tests inside something called the anechoic chambe
r, a rectangular room wrapped in a double layer of galvanized steel that insulated it against electromagnetic fields and made it a place of radio silence. Inside, the floor, walls, and ceiling were covered in blue foam cones made from conductive carbon. At one end of the thirty-seven-foot-long chamber, an antenna could capture electromagnetic radiation emitted from whatever gadget Beaudet placed at the other end, allowing her to test its noise level. Usually she was reviewing equipment to be installed on the telescopes, but she also helped keep watch for intrusive gadgetry. One of her experiments led to Fitbits being banned at the observatory.

  After showing me inside the chamber, Beaudet invited me back to her office to talk more. As we walked through a hallway, she pointed to a ceiling-mounted security camera. It had a mesh screen on the inside that blocked the electromagnetic radiation from leaking out, something she’d designed. She’d built similar Faraday cages for everything from the motors on the Green Bank Telescope to the LED lights overhead. Another project was outfitting the neighboring public school’s outdoor digital sign so it wouldn’t emit electromagnetic radiation, a project that required no fewer than nineteen tiny Faraday enclosures around the internal electronics.

  In Beaudet’s office, she took a moment to feed her pet African clawed frogs, sprinkling some chicken liver into their glass tank. On the wall, a climbing harness hung ready for when she needed to climb the telescopes to work on equipment. She boiled water for tea. Since moving to Green Bank from Baltimore a decade earlier, she had come to appreciate the area and its culture. She gardened, foraged, and bowhunted, with a goal of one day shooting a deer from her porch. She had more friends in this sparsely populated area than she’d had in the city, in part because Green Bankers couldn’t afford to not be friends. “You can’t get away with being an asshole for very long, because then you’re really isolated,” she said. “The interactions here are more valued.” In a way, Beaudet had also come to believe in the healing powers of the Quiet Zone, with a perspective that shed light on why Schou and other electrosensitives might feel better in Green Bank.