The Quiet Zone Read online

  A LIFELONG GREEN BANKER, Bob was eight when the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) broke ground in town in October 1957. “If you think it’s quiet now,” he told me, “it was really quiet then.”

  A new and exciting field, radio astronomy had been discovered only a few decades earlier. Karl Jansky, a scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, realized in 1933 while testing an early transatlantic radio communication system that he was detecting radio signals from space. “New Radio Waves Traced to Centre of the Milky Way,” the front page of the New York Times heralded on May 5, 1933. Hearing of the discovery, an electrical engineer named Grote Reber built the world’s first radio telescope in 1937. In his mom’s backyard near Chicago, in what might be the quintessential DIY science project, he assembled a thirty-one-foot-wide parabolic dish of sheet metal that focused incoming radio waves onto a single point called a receiver, which amplified the incredibly faint signals into recordable measurements. As Reber aimed the dish at various points in the sky, the receiver picked up different strengths of radio waves, allowing him to create the very first “map” of the radio universe, similar to how an optical astronomer creates a map of the visible sky. But while an optical astronomer is limited to viewing visible electromagnetic radiation (or light) in the frequencies between 400 terahertz and 900 terahertz, the radio astronomer observes lower frequencies between about 1 megahertz and 1 terahertz. (Microwaves are considered a subset of radio waves. Higher frequency waves in space, such as infrared rays, x-rays, and gamma rays, are blocked by Earth’s atmosphere and can only be measured from satellites.) After two years of work, Reber published his findings in The Astrophysical Journal. The science of radio astronomy was born.

  The field received a major investment in 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower requested $7 million from Congress for the creation of “the nation’s first major radio astronomy center” under the umbrella of the recently formed National Science Foundation, which had already embarked on a multiyear search for the quietest suitable place to host such an observatory. According to a 1954 meeting of the NSF’s Advisory Panel on Radio Astronomy, the site needed to be largely free of radio noise, able to host a dozen major telescopes and campus facilities, in a sparsely populated area surrounded by mountains, and at least fifty miles from the nearest city. The site would preferably be in a northern latitude, yet far enough south to allow for observation of the center of the Milky Way. Snow and ice were to be minimal. The site also needed to be within three hundred miles of Washington, D.C., and “easy to reach by plane, rail, or automobile.” Of thirty short-listed locations, Green Bank came out on top. It was hemmed in by Cheat Mountain and Spruce Knob, the two highest points in the state, each peak nearly five thousand feet high. It was only two hundred miles from Capitol Hill. The surrounding county’s once booming logging industry had gone bust, leaving behind ghost towns.

  “Green Bank Assured of Great Astronomy Center,” the Pocahontas Times declared in July 1956. “And How Truly Thankful Are We All, Too!”

  Not quite everyone was thankful. Some farmers felt pushed off their land as the Army Corps of Engineers, with $550,000 in acquisition funds, began amassing 2,700 acres stretching across the hamlets of Green Bank and Arbovale. The Charleston Gazette photographed three Green Bank women by their hundred-year-old homesteads, each angered at being forced to sell the family inheritance. “What will we do?” asked one. “We’ve worked hard here. It’s our home. Where will we go?” A government lawyer initiated condemnation proceedings against at least four families who refused to sell. Resentment would simmer for decades. Kenneth Kellermann, a longtime astronomer at the observatory, said local people “gave the impression that the troops marched in, tore babies from their mothers’ breasts, pulled people out of the beds that they had been born in, and forced them out of the house.”

  Nevertheless, according to the Gazette, there was excitement for a facility where “the smallest telescope will be higher than the Daniel Boone Hotel”—a ten-story luxury accommodation in Charleston. “It’s the biggest thing that’s happened here since Bruce Bosley made All-American,” a local told the newspaper, referencing a Durbin boy who played football for West Virginia University and the San Francisco 49ers. The Inter-Mountain newspaper of Elkins declared that Green Bank was transforming “from a little farm village of 100 population to one of the science capitals of the world.”

  State authorities were thrilled with the influx of federal dollars. The West Virginia Legislature showed its support by holding a special session in August 1956 to enact the Radio Astronomy Zoning Act, which created legal protections within ten miles of “any radio astronomy facility in the state of West Virginia.” It remains the only state law of its kind in the United States. To further protect the area, the Federal Communications Commission in 1958 created a surrounding thirteen-thousand-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone, the first of its kind worldwide.

  One of the observatory’s early hires was Bob Sheets’s mom. For more than three decades, Beatrice Blackhurst Sheets was the executive secretary and welcome wagon for astronomers from around the world who traveled into the Appalachian Mountains to unlock the mysteries of the universe using some of the world’s premier radio telescopes. One day while visiting his mom at work, a preteen Bob passed an office where an astronomer sat staring into space. When Bob passed the door again hours later, he noticed the man hadn’t budged. Bob asked his mother, “What does Dr. Drake do?” She explained that Frank Drake was a scientist. Bob replied, “I walked past his office twice today and he hadn’t moved. It didn’t look like he was doing anything.” The Harvard graduate was paid to think, she said. “He gets paid to think?!” Bob responded. “Wow, that’s a great job!” He would have been even more shocked to know that Drake may well have been thinking about how to communicate with aliens.

  As the first telescopes rose from Green Bank’s hayfields, Drake turned them toward the cosmos in search of E.T. “In a limited way,” according to an October 1959 press statement from the observatory, “the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has commenced a project, called ‘Ozma,’ whose purpose is to detect radio emissions created by intelligent beings on other planets.” (Ozma was the name of a princess in L. Frank Baum’s Oz book series.) Drake dubbed this new branch of science SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Pretty quickly, in 1960, he picked up what seemed like an alien signal. It turned out to be human interference, perhaps aircraft radar. Otherwise, he detected only static.

  Undeterred, the following summer Drake hosted a “quiet meeting of scientists qualified to discuss the scientific aspects of establishing radio contact with other planetary systems,” as it was phrased in an internal memo of the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council. Attendees included the cosmologist Carl Sagan, who later wrote the novel Contact about an astronomer working on a project called SETI at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory; the biochemist Melvin Calvin, who won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry while in Green Bank for having discovered the stage of photosynthesis when plants convert carbon dioxide into glucose; and John Lilly, a neuroscientist famous for attempting to establish human-dolphin communication—a couple years later, Lilly developed an experiment where a young woman lived in a flooded apartment with a dolphin named Peter in an effort to teach him English. The group formed a semisecret society called the Order of the Dolphin, on the idea that if humans could learn to speak with dolphins then we might communicate with aliens, too. Drake presented a now famous equation that calculates the likelihood for intelligent alien life. Amid philosophical debate about our species’ tendency toward self-destruction, Drake estimated that ten thousand technologically advanced civilizations existed in our galaxy alone. The Milky Way is one of two trillion galaxies in the universe.

  There was some irony to Green Bank’s history as the founding place of the still-ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Since then, while E.T. has continued to elude humanity, Green Bank itself has b
ecome more and more alien to the rest of the world. Protected by the Quiet Zone, a place with restrictions on technology and without 24/7 connectivity in the modern age is today so strange, so foreign, so bizarre as to seem exotic. By 2017, the observatory was hosting around thirty media visitors a year and taking more than one hundred press inquiries annually, with a regular stream of articles being published about the Quietest Town in America. “Enter the Quiet Zone: Where Cell Service, Wi-Fi Are Banned,” National Public Radio reported in 2013. “Life in the Quiet Zone: West Virginia Town Avoids Electronics for Science,” National Geographic wrote in 2014. “America’s Quietest Town: Where Cell Phones Are Banned,” CNN said in 2015. Busy days could see three film crews crowded on the Green Bank Telescope at the same time, competing for footage of that most endangered of things: quiet.

  SETTLING INTO GREEN BANK, my mornings often started with a jog around the observatory’s wooded property, where I was encountering greater diversity of animal life than I’d ever seen outside a zoo. I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, spotting its coiled body just in time to leap over it. I passed a fawn that was curled in a ball, pretending to be invisible. A coyote popped out of the woods and trotted ahead of me for several hundred feet. I rounded a bend and saw two cubs scurrying up a tree, which sent me running the other way for fear I’d anger the mama bear.

  I quickly felt like I knew half the town. Because there wasn’t much to do and there weren’t many people, I was seeing the same people at the same events: at Bob’s house, at a community breakfast of biscuits and gravy, at a square dance, and at Trent’s General Store, where I got gas and groceries. The fuel pumps had no credit card reader, which meant everybody paid inside, where the wood floors were worn to a sheen and customers traded the latest gossip about who’d fallen off a four-wheeler or killed a bear.

  The observatory straddled the hamlets of Green Bank and Arbovale, each with its own general store: Henry’s and Trent’s, respectively. I quickly became a Trent’s regular because of its proximity to my apartment, a half mile away. Two old grocery store conveyor belts—purchased secondhand from a Kroger supermarket in the 1970s—ran alongside two cash registers, each covered in sticky notes, some with memos to be passed along to shoppers. Because people couldn’t call each other on cellphones, they used Trent’s to pass messages. It was a community hub. Longtime customers paid on account. Fresh meat was sold next to a refrigerated case for fruits and vegetables restocked every Thursday. Aisles were packed with nonperishables: cans of beans, jars of pickled pigs’ feet, bags of Atomic FireBall candies. You could buy a hunting or fishing license, plus ammunition or bait. Hanging from the walls were a selection of turkey callers and an air rifle packaged in a box with a picture of a squirrel. A cabinet held livestock medicine. The store also offered dry-cleaning services; clothes wrapped in plastic hung at the front for pickup. Cereal cost about five dollars a box, twice as much as at a Dollar General two miles away, but the cereal at Trent’s came with local charm.

  I’d drop by for the newspaper and a conversation with Betty Mullenax, who’d been ringing up customers for a half century, always wearing a blue smock, with her short, curly hair always neatly combed. Her husband, Ebbie, sliced up meats in the back while chewing tobacco and swallowing the juice. They’d married in 1953 and taken a stake in Trent’s General Store in 1965 from namesake Omar Trent, purchasing it outright in 1973 when Trent retired. In 1992, they passed ownership to their daughter Debbie and her husband, Bobby Ervine, who expanded with another gas station and store a couple miles up the road, creatively called Trent’s 2 and Trent’s 3.

  “Why is it still called Trent’s?” I once asked Betty.

  “It’s too much trouble to change the name,” she said.

  Trent’s was closed on Sundays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, but otherwise Betty and Ebbie never took a day off. Ervine managed the business, often wearing a Budweiser cap and with a lit cigarette in hand. “I told the FDA, ‘When you start paying my property tax then you can tell me not to smoke in my store,’” said Ervine, who was thin and wiry with an unkempt beard. When I asked what the most exotic item sold in Trent’s was, he responded, “Other than moonshine?” and led me to an unmarked cooler containing several two-quart Juicy Juice jugs. “You like berry or apple?” he asked. I opted for berry. Back at my apartment, I poured myself a tall glass of authentic Appalachian moonshine on ice. I nearly gagged, it was so sickly sweet. Ervine also offered to cook me rattlesnake, which I declined.

  The store’s semiofficial slogan was “If Trent’s doesn’t have it, you don’t need it.” It sounded like a Quiet Zone proverb, translating as “If we don’t have what you think you need, then maybe you should reconsider your needs.” It reflected how residents took pride in making do with less, including cell service. “Never had it, never missed it,” numerous people would tell me, as if they’d all rehearsed the line. “This is probably the sixth time I’ve been interviewed,” said a teenager named Mathias Solliday. “I’ve been on the Today show. I was interviewed by a couple of Germans who were at Trent’s. They all ask the same questions. I tell them all the same thing. I love it here. I don’t miss cellphone service.”

  Aside from no cell service, living in Green Bank meant no malls, no bowling alleys, no movie theaters, no delivery pizza—not because of Quiet Zone restrictions, but because the county was too sparsely populated to support them. The lack of such conveniences was why Michael Holstine, the business manager at the observatory, was initially concerned about moving to Pocahontas in 1992 from the city of Fairmont with his wife and three daughters. He thought, “Shucks, if I bring them here there’s a lot they won’t be able to do. You can’t just go to the movies on Friday night willy-nilly.” In time, Holstine’s daughters discovered other things: hunting, fishing, skiing, horseback riding, nights so dark they could see the U.S. Space Shuttle docking with the International Space Station against a backdrop of constellations.

  “They’re glad they were raised here because they feel like they know more about life,” said Holstine, a barrel-chested man with a graying beard. “They know how to use their electronic devices. But the difference is that when they come home, it doesn’t bother them to put it away. Whereas I think a lot of kids who have grown up with it, they can’t do without it—it’s like cutting off their hand.”

  Person after person began telling me stories like this, and I believed them, though I also felt they were trying to sell me a tidy image of rural life. David Rittenhouse, a longtime Brethren minister who had started several churches in the area, called Pocahontas “one of the best places in the world to raise kids.” Sure, his son Julian was nearly bitten by a rattlesnake at age twelve while foraging for ginseng. Yeah, a neighbor’s dog had killed all but one of the dozen offspring of his beloved Spanish fighting cock, which his wife had smuggled as an embryo into the United States from Ecuador, where they’d worked as missionaries. And to be sure, another neighbor’s dogs had repeatedly broken into Rittenhouse’s fields and killed dozens of his sheep and calves. But it was all better than being crowded into a city, he argued.

  “The loneliest people in the world live in cities, if you ever think about it,” Rittenhouse told me. “In the city, a neighbor is a threat and competes for your space. Here, we’re scattered out with only nine people per square mile, so somebody five miles away is an asset. Psychologically and socially, we’re closer than the people who are living in the city piled up on each other.”

  Rittenhouse was an outsider—he and his wife had grown up in Maryland and Virginia, respectively—but he was perhaps the most accepted outsider in Pocahontas, owing to his role as a longtime minister, his son Julian’s role as a minister and Green Bank teacher, and his grandson Abe’s role as a minister, high school teacher, and sports coach. The Rittenhouses were said to marry everybody and bury everybody in the county. David Rittenhouse himself had performed more than one thousand funerals as well as hundreds of weddings. One couple was married at the observatory. Another wanted to be marr
ied in a cave where a dead body was found in 1975.

  “The interesting thing about living here is you’re free to be a character of any kind,” Rittenhouse said. “You’re not expected to conform and all be the same.”

  If there was an old-fashioned intimacy to the community, there was also a feeling of insularity. Everyone seemed to know everything about everybody. It was impossible to go unnoticed. Before long, I caught wind of a rumor that a stranger was running around town in a bikini. I hadn’t realized how scandalous it was for a shirtless man in V-notch shorts to jog in the Appalachian countryside.

  EVERY EVENING, before Trent’s closed at 7:00 P.M., Ebbie Mullenax shuffled up to his wife’s register and put the cash in an old cloth sack that he stowed in a safe overnight. Their son-in-law Bobby Ervine usually locked the front door and followed Ebbie and Betty out the back as they walked over a well-worn path through the grass to their house next door. They planned to work as long as they humanly could—or as long as the store stayed open. That depended on the observatory.

  “I’d hate to see it go out,” Ervine said of the science facility. “Anything happens over there, we’d have to close up. Because that’s all there is.”

  Over the decades, scientists from as far away as Russia and Japan had popped into Trent’s for supplies. So had at least one millionaire: Jay Rockefeller, the six-foot-seven former governor of West Virginia and a two-decade-long U.S. senator. One of the most notable politicians from one of America’s wealthiest families, Rockefeller was the great-grandson of the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller Sr. and the nephew to former vice president Nelson Rockefeller. For years, he and his family had swung by Trent’s for groceries and fishing supplies before driving on to their nearby estate.