The Quiet Zone Page 8
From what I could tell, Green Bank had what many gurus sought across the ages. It was also a real place—a living, breathing, pulsing community—unlike the contrived getaways at increasingly popular “tech-free” retreats that provided temporary reprieves from the digital overload. Around the time that Jenna and I first visited Green Bank, we had also stopped into a silent retreat center in rural Massachusetts where people paid for the privilege of locking their smartphones inside a large metal safe while they engaged in meditation. I’d read about the retreat in a New York article titled “I Used to Be a Human Being,” which described the writer Andrew Sullivan’s ten-day digital detox. According to Sullivan, for a decade he had lived inside “a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades—a wind tunnel of deafening, deadening noise.” So he decamped to the Insight Meditation Society’s silent retreat in the New England woods. Outside of such getaways, the only remaining phone-free “safe spaces” were the shower and the desert festival Burning Man, Sullivan jested. The iPhone was waterproofed in 2018 and Burning Man got cell service in 2016. Even airplanes, once high-flying zones of disconnection, now offer WiFi. What quiet remains?
This loss of radio quiet has coincided with a loss of audible quiet. In 2000, the director of the U.S. National Park Service passed an ordinance on “soundscape preservation and noise management” that called for parks to document and work to preserve natural sounds. The directive expired in 2004. Three years later, when the iPhone debuted, Science reported that human-made noise pollution was “pervasive” in America’s protected areas. An acoustic ecologist named Gordon Hempton today believes that only a dozen places remain in the United States where a person can hear no man-made sounds for fifteen minutes. Three of the remaining places are the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington, Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, and Haleakalā National Park in Hawaii. Hempton has refused to reveal any more locations in order to protect their silence. Once a given aspect of nature, quiet is facing extinction.
I’ve witnessed the loss firsthand. At the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, Maine’s Baxter State Park is renowned for its strict wilderness policy—you can’t even find a water spigot inside the park. Home of Mount Katahdin, the state’s highest peak, the park bans dogs, alcohol, and “the use of electronic devices in any way that impairs the enjoyment of the park by others.” That directive was meant to include cellphones. “Something as simple as someone pulls out their cellphone on top of Katahdin and makes a call to say, ‘You won’t believe where I’m calling from right now’—that takes away from someone else’s wilderness experience,” a former Baxter chief ranger said in a 2018 news article. When Jenna and I climbed to the summit of Katahdin that year, however, we heard someone talking on their smartphone. Rangers had essentially abandoned the no-phones rule because of pushback from visitors. An otherwise pristine wilderness was marred by a blinking cell tower on the horizon.
The fight for quiet has seeped into popular culture. The horror flick A Quiet Place, about a family trying to avoid the detection of monsters with hypersensitive hearing, is really a fable about Western culture’s “war with noise,” according to one media critic. We need “quiet cars” on the train and reminders at the start of every movie to put our cellphones on quiet mode. Even smartphone developers have been capitalizing on the search for quiet, with meditation apps such as Calm and Headspace valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The company Yondr does a brisk business selling cellphone pouches that prevent people from using their devices at places like schools, courts, and concert halls. Some musicians and theatrical performers have taken matters into their own hands, stopping mid-show to ask people to turn off their devices. In 2015, the actor Patti LuPone made headlines for grabbing a phone from a theatergoer.
More than annoying, human-made noise has been shown to increase the risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and even cancer. Bison-related injuries have soared in Yellowstone because of the selfie-spurred urge to get dangerously close to the wild animal. Between 2011 and 2017, according to one study, 259 people worldwide died while taking selfies, primarily from drowning, falling, and getting into transportation accidents. America is suffering from a “national attention deficit” as a result of our devices, according to the University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds. For years, internet addiction has been classified as an official disorder in South Korea and China, where hundreds of government-run health clinics treat addicts. In 2018, the World Health Organization added “gaming disorder” to its International Classification of Diseases. We might as well add “smartphone disorder” and “social media disorder.” A 2018 study found that, despite the fact that people are measurably happier after giving up Facebook, you’d still have to pay the average user $1,000 to convince them to deactivate their account for a year—meaning that people are choosing to be unhappy, such is the controlling nature of social media, enabled through smartphones and constant connectivity.
Even God wants people to reconsider their smartphone habits. Pope Francis has called on followers to “free yourself from the addiction to mobile phones.” Since 2009, the Jewish nonprofit Reboot has organized an annual National Day of Unplugging “as a way to bring balance to the increasingly fast-paced way of life and reclaim time to connect with family, friends, and our communities.” In Green Bank, a Mennonite leader suggested to me that the lack of cell service made it easier to be Christlike. His internet was “strongly filtered,” and all church members set limits on screen time. No one had televisions. I asked if he indulged in Netflix. “Um, that’s movie streaming?” he said of a company with more than 150 million subscribers. “We don’t really do that.”
And there are plenty of non-religious reasons to take a break from screens. Smartphones have been blamed for a rise in adolescent depression, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and suicide. It’s so much easier to feel isolated and left out when you’re constantly seeing Instagram posts of everybody else having fun. It’s also easier to not go out when your life is online. The psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University has repeatedly warned about a generation lost to smartphones. “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades,” Twenge wrote in the Atlantic in 2017. “Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” Teens are driving less, dating less, and having sex less, while still being less likely to get enough sleep.
Falling fertility rates worldwide have been blamed in part on our preoccupation with smartphones, video games, and social media. According to a 2012 study from the psychologists Netta Weinstein and Andrew Przybylski, who later became director of research for the Oxford Internet Institute, “the mere presence of mobile phones inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust, and reduced the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.” Studies have shown that people who text heavily have more difficulty falling asleep or psychologically disengaging from job-related stress, and that smartphones promote lazy thinking and are a major cause of car accidents. Matt Richtel’s book A Deadly Wandering powerfully laid out the consequences of mixing cellphones with cars: talking on a phone while driving is equivalent in crash risk to driving drunk, and texting while driving is even more dangerous. Between 2015 and 2016, U.S. traffic fatalities surged 14 percent, the biggest spike in more than half a century, which the Governors Highway Safety Association blamed on distracted driving due to smartphones. Pedestrian deaths hit a nearly thirty-year high in 2018, also credited to smartphones.
Wouldn’t there be fewer deaths and crashes if it was impossible to drive and text at the same time? Wouldn’t all of us sleep better if we lived in a place without constant connectivity? Wouldn’t our lives be richer and our communities stronger if we were not always online? And if all these benefits of a less digitized life were true, wouldn’t Green Bank and the surrounding Quiet Zone be a kind of utopia?
IN 2016, an Italian researcher named Goffredo Colini visited Pocahontas to measure whether people were happier in a place largely lacking wireless connectivity. As part of his master’s project for Salesian Pontifical University in Rome, Colini conducted surveys of 220 people in Pocahontas and the nearby city of Lewisburg. (Such a study would have been impossible in Italy, Colini told me, because of blanket cell service.) He determined that residents of the Quiet Zone experienced measurably lower stress and anxiety. He also found himself charmed by Pocahontas, despite initial alarm over the number of guns he saw. People went out of their way to answer his questions. He was invited to a bachelor party in the forest where he drank moonshine (presumably better than the batch I tasted). A random family gave him a ride to Washington, D.C., so he could catch his flight home. Everyone was amiable and willing to interact. “It was the first time in my life that people were focused on just how they can help you,” Colini told me.
Community seemed enhanced by the quiet. The lack of cell service created a greater sense of self-reliance, but also of reciprocity. “This winter, I don’t know when my ass is going to be in a ditch and who’s going to come along and pull me out,” as Wesley Sizemore said to me. “And if their ass is in the ditch, I’ll pull them out as well. That’s an Appalachian thing. Get rid of cellphones and Facebook and Twitter, I think everybody would revert back to that.”
Without cell service, locals found other ways to communicate. Pocahontas County’s local HAM radio club routinely acted as a kind of vigilante rescue service. With more than one hundred licensed amateur radio operators, the club claimed to have the highest per capita number of HAM radio operators on the East Coast—as well as to be the county’s most “connected” organization. Club member Rudy Marrujo had come across vehicles broken down on Route 28, stranded on Cheat Mountain, and with a flat tire at Buffalo Lake, and in each case he’d called for help using his car’s HAM radio. The club said it operated on frequencies rarely used by astronomers.
Because of the lack of cell service and notoriously patchy landlines, sometimes the only way of communicating was via HAM radio or Allegheny Mountain Radio, the county’s sole radio station. About ten miles south of Green Bank, a 180-foot-tall radio antenna transmitted at 5,000 watts, about one-tenth of the standard output for radio towers, in keeping with the Quiet Zone restrictions. (Because the station broadcasted at 1370 kilohertz, the transmission was negligible to the observatory. Astronomers didn’t observe frequencies below 100 megahertz, or FM 100 on the car radio.)
In 2012, when a severe windstorm knocked out the county’s power grid and telephone lines for more than a week, the HAM club radioed for help on behalf of the injured and stranded. The sheriff put out a message on Allegheny Mountain Radio requesting assistance from the observatory, which was running on diesel generators. The facility turned itself into an emergency shelter, providing the community with food, water, and washing facilities. The Pocahontas Times praised the observatory as “a beacon of hope during this dark time.”
It was not the first instance the observatory acted as an emergency service provider. In February 2010, when a navy MH-60 Knighthawk helicopter with seventeen people aboard crashed in the nearby forest, the observatory turned one of its offices into a makeshift command center for the rescue. A husband-and-wife team of bear hunters went out on four-wheelers. A fire chief attempted to bulldoze his way to the crash site through eight-foot-high snowdrifts on old logging roads. By morning, a team of snowmobiles and grooming machines from Snowshoe Mountain Resort evacuated everyone. The governor held an appreciation ceremony for the observatory’s coordination efforts.
Without the ability to call for help on a cellphone, one had to trust in the help of strangers. A teacher told me she was once driving over a mountain when she hydroplaned, spun in a circle, hit a tree, and smashed her windshield. She’d had an iPhone, but there was no service. After forty-five minutes, a man driving by with his Chihuahua offered to give her a ride to her parents’ house. Necessity bred kindness. “If you come upon a tree in the road, don’t panic, because someone will be coming along in a few minutes with a chain saw,” said Jaynell Graham, editor of the Pocahontas Times, a weekly newspaper that in itself reflected that quiet community feeling.
Nicknamed the Poky Times because of its pace in getting around to the news with just two full-time reporters, the paper was founded in 1883 and based in the county seat of Marlinton. Graham, who’d been editor since 2012, focused on upbeat stories about schools, family reunions, and history, boasting that the Times was one of the few regional papers that didn’t put police logs on the front page. “I try to focus on the positive,” she told me. “Sometimes it looks like a school newspaper. Kids killing their first deer. Honor roll. My thinking is, the more positive coverage you give to these kids when they’re young, the less likely you are to see them in the magistrate court.” Print circulation was 4,300, plus another 400 e-subscribers—not bad for a county with around 8,200 residents.
Aside from running the Times, Graham raised a small herd of cattle, played the organ in her church, put together the services’ liturgy and prayers, typed up the weekly bulletin, and was the county’s Republican ballot commissioner. She exemplified how, in a small community, people wore multiple hats and knew everybody. I began regularly swinging by the Times’s office to get the latest news from Graham.
I also would have benefited from getting a HAM radio license to stay in the loop. So many HAM operators were monitoring their scanners that when law enforcement radioed in an emergency, the club itself sometimes responded to the accident. HAM operators were also known to help relay information to the police dispatch in Marlinton when officers were out of two-way radio contact. Occasionally, law enforcement simply asked to use residents’ landline telephones. Gossip spread fast in a place where people talked on open channels. In general, it seemed people just liked to talk. Outside the sheriff’s office in Marlinton, a spray-painted sign read “No Talking to Inmates,” apparently because passersby had a tendency to chat with prisoners through the iron-clad windows. In the past, inmates had been kept company by the jail keeper’s children, one of whom told me she used to play cards with the prisoners.
“It’s a whole different set of rules here,” said David Jonese, the former sheriff. “Everyone thinks it’s Mayberry—you know, The Andy Griffith Show. They think your worst thing is a cat in a tree. It’s nothing like that. But I will tell you, my very first call on the job was a loose horse on the golf course.”
CONTEMPORARY LANGUAGE equates disconnectivity with death. We say “the line went dead” or we drove through a “dead spot,” and when reconnected we’re “back live,” with the implication that life only happens in places with connectivity.
“Through the lens of our techno-normative values, the cultural significance of a dead zone is a mistake, an error to be corrected, a gap in service or infrastructure that must be addressed,” Nathanael Bassett of the University of Illinois in Chicago would write in his Ph.D. dissertation, titled “Dead Zones: A Phenomenology of Disconnection.” His research led him to Green Bank, where he discovered not a lifeless community but a place where people were “outwardly focused” and neither isolated nor alone. The Quiet Zone helped residents take control of when they chose to be online; it provided “freedom from interference, and freedom to explore other connections,” Bassett concluded.
That aspect of the Quiet Zone was invaluable to Sarah Riley, executive director of High Rocks Educational Corporation, which operated a two-hundred-acre leadership camp for teenage girls at the southern end of Pocahontas County. The Quiet Zone created space for youths to open up.
“It used to be scary for them to come to a place where they didn’t have any friends,” Riley told me when I visited the camp that summer. “Now it’s so scary for them to be in a place where they’re not going to be connected to the world through their phones and have to give up that lifeline. For young people that are able to come to our programs and experie
nce that, it’s cited as a powerful thing.”
Everyone at the camp—called High Rocks Academy—attended on scholarship, and all had to apply to be admitted. Among the incoming group of two hundred campers in June 2017, one had written in her application, “The majority of kids today don’t want to go to these camps since there is no internet or cell service. For the ones that do go, this will be a good chance to be outside more.” Another wrote, “I will unplug from the internet and social media and I will become a part of something bigger.” Another said, “I’ve been attached to the WiFi for too long.” Even if these young women were terrified of being disconnected, they each seemed to know it would be worthwhile.
More than five hundred youths had gone through High Rocks’ summer program since it was founded in 1996, and many came from low-income homes where high school was the highest level of education. Hundreds more young men and women had received mentoring, tutoring, and college prep. The organization had active partnerships with Appalshop, a well-known arts and education center in Kentucky, and Highlander, a Tennessee-based social justice leadership training school, to develop youth leadership, which Riley called a “cornerstone” for building sustainable and inclusive communities in central Appalachia. High Rocks was also partnering with the Green Bank Observatory to boost the state’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, with a focus on rural first-generation college students, funded by a $7 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
Coming from a family of educators, Riley was well familiar with the unique challenges facing youths from Appalachia. Her sister was the county math coach. Their mother, Susan Burt, was a native Michigander who had attended Pomona College and led the county’s public schools’ gifted program for twenty years. Their father, Gibbs Kinderman, was a Californian who had attended Harvard and eventually settled in Pocahontas, where he helped found Allegheny Mountain Radio and was a longtime board of education member. Riley had also attended Harvard, which was a pivotal moment in her own education, though for unexpected reasons. Arriving in Cambridge in 1993, she’d gone from a home without a TV to an internet-connected dorm room. She found herself struggling to understand the academic language of her classmates and facing derogatory jokes playing on Appalachian stereotypes. But by her junior year, things clicked. She could write a thesis. She could deliver an argument. She was learning the language of power. And she was realizing that her peers back in West Virginia were as smart and capable as most anyone at Harvard. It fueled her desire to empower youths from West Virginia. When she graduated in 1997, she returned to Pocahontas to work at High Rocks alongside her mother, who had recently founded the organization on the idea that every child could perform at gifted levels if given the opportunities to thrive.