The Quiet Zone Read online

  Riley appreciated how the Quiet Zone enhanced the High Rocks experience, even if the camp’s location in Pocahontas County complicated operations. One of those complications was slow internet, as the county seemed unable to attract significant investment in broadband. Riley considered fast internet indispensable for managing the camp, so she’d had a dedicated fiber-optic line installed through a federal subsidy for educational facilities. On review, however, the Federal Communications Commission had determined that High Rocks did not qualify for the subsidy, putting Riley into a protracted dispute with the FCC and internet provider Frontier Communications over a $5,000 monthly bill that soon added up to six figures.

  Without that fiber-optic line, Riley’s internet was so slow that she couldn’t download emails on snowy, windy, or rainy days. Such was a general hurdle to education in Pocahontas. Her husband, Joseph Riley, was the principal of Pocahontas County High School, and he’d found it necessary to always warn teaching applicants that the area lacked “modern conveniences” like fast internet, fast food, and cell service. With one candidate, he recalled, “We said there’s no cell service, no McDonald’s, and no Walmart—and he was out!”

  I would meet one teacher who never got the warning. It took Teresa Mullen a week before she learned why her cellphone wasn’t working, after moving to Pocahontas in 2010 from Pittsburgh to teach culinary arts. While filling her car’s gas tank, she asked a stranger tending his pump, “What’s your phone provider?” The man didn’t know what she meant. “You know,” Mullen continued, “your cellphone provider, is it AT&T, Sprint, or what?” The man responded, “Oh, honey, we ain’t got none of that around here.”

  Mullen had moved from a city where she could order pizza and Chinese after midnight to a county where the biggest retailer was Dollar General and the only fast food was Dairy Queen. She considered quitting, but she’d already sunk her cash into relocation expenses, so she hunkered down. She got a landline phone, her first since moving out of her parents’ house nearly a decade earlier. She got a West Virginia driver’s license and upgraded to a Subaru Crosstrek for the mountain roads. She became a regular participant in the county’s annual Roadkill Cook-Off, where teams competed to create the tastiest dish from what could potentially be roadkill: turtle, possum, squirrel, rabbit, mink. For one year’s cook-off, Mullen’s students cooked bear meat burgers. The bear had been shot that same morning by a young woman in the class. “It was still warm when it got here,” said Mullen. “There was still hair on it.”

  HIGH ROCKS FACED another complication, one that I felt uncomfortable even bringing up with Riley: a nearby neo-Nazi organization. Not just any obnoxious group of racists, this had been the longtime headquarters of the National Alliance, once considered a terrorist threat by the FBI and called “the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi formation in America” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights watchdog. While the group had faded in the fifteen years since the death of its notorious founder, William Luther Pierce, it was still expounding its racist philosophy just up the road from the girls’ camp.

  Riley said parents had in the past expressed concern over an infamous neo-Nazi compound being a mile away through the woods, but less so with the organization’s decline. Since I was nearby, I figured I should see for myself what remained of a group associated with violent crimes, murders, burglaries, and plots to overthrow the federal government.

  Chapter Eight

  “Back to the Land”

  I TURNED OFF ROUTE 39 and onto Boyd Thompson Road, which hardly even seemed like a road—just a dusty, narrow strip of hard-packed dirt cutting uphill between forest and fields. A half mile up, I came to a blue trailer where a gaunt, toothless woman stood outside with two Rottweilers. She waved for me to stop.

  I shifted into park and got out of the car. The Rottweilers ran up and sniffed my leg.

  “What are you looking for?” the woman yelled, not so welcomingly. A burlap sack was slung over her shoulder. She held a garden hoe.

  I was trying to find the National Alliance, despite warnings to stay away. “People like that are liable to shoot you,” a county official had told me. The organization’s founder hadn’t thought highly of the media, as made clear in his novel The Turner Diaries, about an underground organization of white nationalists that kills journalists, Jews, and non-whites and overthrows the government by flying a nuclear-armed crop duster into the Pentagon. “One day we will have a truly American press in this country,” William Pierce wrote in The Turner Diaries, “but a lot of editors’ throats will have to be cut first.”

  The gaunt woman said she was heading toward the compound and I could follow her, though she added that I was unlikely to be allowed inside. She walked ahead with her dogs as I rolled behind in my car.

  After a half mile, we came to a metal gate. A burly man with a bushy blond beard and tattooed forearms roared up to the other side on a four-wheeler, a rifle strapped to the front. He wore a T-shirt, cargo shorts, and work boots. The woman disappeared into the woods with her garden hoe, her dogs running ahead.

  My heart was pounding. I’d never met a neo-Nazi before—at least, not that I was aware of—and my mind conjured violent images from the movie American History X.

  “Who do you work for?” the man growled from the other side of the gate. “Do you have any contact with the Southern Poverty Law Center? You don’t do any subcontracting for G4S or Blackwater, do you? You don’t have a camera on you?”

  When I squeaked that I was a journalist researching the National Radio Quiet Zone, the man’s face brightened. He said his name was David Pringle and he was “chief of staff” at the compound. He lived there alone with his wife, though a few more people associated with the organization also lived nearby. He added that the National Alliance’s headquarters had in recent years relocated to Tennessee, near the home of the new chairman, a former U.S. Army Special Forces captain named William White Williams.

  “We call this our West Virginia campus,” Pringle said. “We’re rehabbing the place after a decade of it being moribund.” He motioned to the tall brush around him. He’d just been weed-whacking and his legs were covered in grass clippings. I asked if I could see the work he was doing. First, he wanted to see my I.D., so I passed him my driver’s license. I wondered if he was gauging the potential Jewishness of my surname. After a moment he started undoing the chain around the gate and swung it open, motioning for me to pull my car inside.

  “Ever rode an ATV?” Pringle asked. I nodded. (There was that one time as a kid . . .) He motioned for me to hop on his ride—an odd proposal, to be sure, but I didn’t feel like I could dictate the terms of my tour. Pringle climbed on and I saddled up behind him in my khaki shorts and button-down shirt. He was drenched in sweat. “I’ve been working all day so I probably have a little odor,” he warned a moment too late.

  Pringle kicked the four-wheeler into gear. I figured I was only being allowed entry because I was white, and perhaps also because he hoped to somehow co-opt my pen and paper for media coverage. I wanted to see inside, but I didn’t want to be unwittingly used to advertise his ideas.

  This had been home to the National Alliance since 1984, when Pierce purchased the 346-acre mountainside for $95,000 and built a combination country retreat, business headquarters, and militia base from which to inspire a “white awakening.” The land title of sixty acres was held by the Cosmotheist Community Church, which was founded by Pierce and described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a racist religion that stresses the superiority of the white race and the unity of the white race with nature.” Calling it a church got Pierce a state tax exemption as well as an argument for protection from religious “discrimination.” It also allowed him to perform weddings, including his own to several European mail-order brides. In 2001, he officiated the Cosmotheist wedding ceremony of Billy Roper, a top staffer at the time.

  We drove up to a two-story, warehouse-like building that was adorned with a giant, upside-down peac
e sign. Pringle called the symbol a life rune, a badge of Cosmotheism. It was also a symbol of Nazi Germany. I followed him inside the double doors. A table by the door displayed framed photos of Pierce, a kind of shrine to the man. A magazine rack held old issues of National Vanguard, the organization’s glossy magazine, as if ready for people to come and peruse the hate literature. Tables and other furniture were splayed haphazardly, and the thin carpeting was stained and fraying. The air smelled musty. This is what remained of the organization’s business offices, which once had nearly two dozen full-time staffers. Behind the building, Pringle showed me a large cement cistern with several large cracks. Repairing it was one of his summer projects. The cracks had been patched several times, he said, but the cistern needed a total overhaul to be fixed right. It seemed he was making an analogy for the entire organization.

  I asked why Pierce had chosen to base the National Alliance here, of all places. Pringle began talking about the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, one of the largest armed insurrections in American history, when more than ten thousand coal miners marched on Charleston to demand the right to unionize from a state government controlled by the mining industry. In a convoluted way, that history would have appealed to Pierce, who dreamed of overthrowing the federal government and installing a pro-white regime. The county’s predominantly white population and Confederate roots were also selling points. In the Civil War, 550 men from Pocahontas County fought with the Confederate army, while only 84 joined the Union. At the 1863 Battle of Droop Mountain in southern Pocahontas, in which the Union pushed back the Confederates and essentially took control of West Virginia, the South was vastly outnumbered, but during an annual reenactment more locals always wanted to dress as Confederates, underscoring the area’s long-standing alignment with Dixieland.

  Pierce was also attracted to the isolation in nature. “I wanted to live on land on which I could hunt my meat and grow my own fruit and vegetables if I had to,” he wrote in National Vanguard. A 1986 issue of the magazine featured a story titled “Back to the Land: Our Source of Spiritual Health.” In the Quiet Zone, Pierce and the neo-Nazis had essentially gone back to nature, joining a movement that had already been thriving in the area for several decades.

  SOON AFTER the astronomers arrived in Pocahontas, but before the electrosensitives and neo-Nazis, hippies, and back-to-the-landers had flooded into the county in search of a quieter way of living, so much so that Pocahontas saw its population rise about 15 percent in the 1970s after decades of decline. Hundreds of thousands of urban-to-rural émigrés nationwide were moving back to the land on homesteads, and thousands were coming to West Virginia, as chronicled in the 2014 book Hippie Homesteaders: Arts, Crafts, Music, and Living on the Land in West Virginia. Highlighting the bohemian influx, as many as ten thousand flower children flocked to the surrounding Monongahela National Forest in 1980 for a back-to-nature festival called the Rainbow Gathering. As if to put an exclamation mark on the peacenik powwow, a long-haired hippie doctor named Hunter “Patch” Adams arrived in Pocahontas the same year, purchasing 310 acres with the stated mission of opening a free hospital.

  Young people were coming from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and as far away as California in search of unspoiled forestland, low population density, and distance from cities—characteristics enshrined by the National Radio Quiet Zone. Among the first to arrive were Carl and Barbara Hille, caving enthusiasts who moved to the Green Bank area in 1968 from Maryland. They were married by David Rittenhouse. When their son was born, two women from the observatory gifted them a pig. The Hilles’ farmhouse became a gathering place for cavers and hippies, hosting about 150 visitors a year.

  “They were a different class of people,” Eugene Simmons, the county’s longtime prosecuting attorney, said of the newcomers. “They were land-lovers that smoked a little grass, were more relaxed than we were.”

  “They had this idea of what they wanted out of life,” said Jerry Dale, who served twelve years as county sheriff and one term as magistrate judge through the ’80s and ’90s. “Run naked, raise their children how they wanted, grow organic food and a little weed. And you know what? Have at it.”

  To Dale’s point, in 1971 a hippie originally from New York named Laurie Cameron was one of the first people—if not the first person—in West Virginia prosecuted for growing marijuana, which got him a year’s probation. Cameron didn’t stop growing marijuana in Pocahontas, he just got more discreet about it. Not that all the back-to-the-landers did drugs. Jason Bauserman, who moved to the Green Bank area in 1971, said he and his wife were simply called “hippies” because they were outsiders with long hair, even though they were churchgoing Christians who never touched alcohol.

  Many of these newcomers settled at the southern end of the county in the mountain hollow of Lobelia, where one road became known as Hippie Hollow. And they were still living there when I showed up in 2017 to visit a new educational nonprofit called the Yew Mountain Center, created by some of the original back-to-the-landers in the area. Named after the surrounding Yew Mountains, the center aimed to be a mix of nature preserve and teaching facility for outsiders to disconnect from modern life and reconnect with the forest primeval—essentially, it was quiet camp.

  To get to Yew, I drove up Droop Mountain and down swerving switchbacks so gnarly that one section of road was called Hell’s Gate. A quarter-mile-long gravel driveway led up to Yew’s massive lodge. I spotted several young women milling around the lawn with infants. A naked baby crawled through the grass. A handsome, bearded man waved to me from a barn. I felt like I’d wandered into a forest oasis and half expected a winged fairy to prance out of the woods and alight a flower wreath around my neck.

  I was greeted by Yew’s director, a slender lady named Erica Marks who had a daughter on her hip and two more clinging to her legs. All three children had been home births facilitated by a midwife named Danette Condon, who had moved to the area in 1980 and still lived off the grid nearby. “With my first one, I couldn’t get in touch with Danette, so we started it ourselves,” Marks told me. She described the home births as intimate, in a “quiet, dark place where you’re not stressed out.” The alternative was driving an hour to the nearest birthing hospital.

  A Virginia native, Marks first came to Pocahontas in 2007 to work at High Rocks. When this five-hundred-acre property in Lobelia came up for sale in 2015, she was able to find an out-of-state benefactor—the friend of a friend of a friend—who was interested in safeguarding areas for water conservation and endangered species. “The benefactor was interested in Yew’s proximity to the Quiet Zone,” Marks told me. It was “remoteness cred.”

  A dozen people from as far away as Charlottesville had just visited Yew for a birding program, finding sixty-three unique species around the property. Marks was organizing a nature series about the area’s geography and wildlife, including how to use the forest sustainably through activities such as foraging. As an example, she pointed to a jar filled with slivers of slippery elm bark. She called it “tree jerky” and said it could be ground into baby food or eaten for medicinal qualities. She took a piece and offered me some. It tasted slightly minty, with the texture of gum wrapped in paper. Marks chewed happily.

  In the lodge’s kitchen, we found an older woman named Ginger Must chopping vegetables. Fast-talking and spritely, she volunteered regularly at the center. Her husband was Yew’s board chairman and a longtime county doctor. He was also among the earliest back-to-the-landers in Lobelia. If I wanted, Ginger said, I could swing by their off-grid home to learn more about the area’s history.

  But first, Marks was inviting me to join her family for a swim in Yew’s spring-fed pond. I didn’t want to impose, but I also knew I’d be a fool to decline the offer on a hot summer day. I followed Marks, her husband, and their daughters to the pond behind the lodge. Taking a cue from Marks’s husband, I stripped to my underwear, stepped onto a wooden dock, and cannonballed into the fish-filled pond surrounded by slippery elms.

>   WET UNDERWEAR SOAKING through my shorts, I knocked on the Musts’ door, a few miles deeper into Lobelia, toward a remote mountaintop clearing known as Briery Knob. Ginger welcomed me in and offered me a salad. Her husband, Bob, was tall and lanky with short white hair and a fuzzy beard. He said he couldn’t sit for long because he had a list of to-dos that he was trying to check off late in the day. He let me pepper him with questions while he painted a closet.

  Born in California and raised on air force bases in the United States and England, Bob had been drafted into the army in the late 1960s, serving for two years. When he got out, he wanted to move to the mountains, so he hitchhiked around the country, through the Rockies, Smokies, Adirondacks, and Appalachians. Back home in Georgia, he went to the Emory University library and researched the least populated, most undeveloped mountain land on the East Coast with temperate weather and adequate rainfall for growing food, which pointed him toward Pocahontas. In 1973, he hitchhiked into town with a ponytail and a couple thousand dollars. He soon heard about a mountain for sale in Lobelia and met with the owner, who was asking $10,000 for seventy acres. Must offered $5,000. “That’s right smart timber up there, Bobba honey,” the farmer responded. (Appalachian men called their friends “honey” in those days, and some still do.) “I couldn’t sell it for that.” Bob offered $6,000, then $7,000, then $8,000, figuring he could borrow money, since he only had $7,000 to his name. The farmer held firm. “Well, thanks for talking to me,” Bob said, shaking the farmer’s hand and walking out of the house. Bob crossed the yard with his head down, trying to reconcile the fact that he’d lost his dream property. Then the door slammed back open. “Wait a minute, Bobba honey!” the farmer yelled. “I talked to my wife and she said we can go $8,000!”