The area’s live-and-let-live rurality has attracted hippies and back-to-the-landers since the ‘60s – including a hippie sex cult and clown physician Hunter “Patch” Adams, made famous via the Robin Williams movie “Patch Adams,” whose long-promised free hospital remains unbuilt. That the bunkers beneath The Greenbrier resort were once a Cold-War fallout shelter for Congress is well-known that the National Security Agency operates a high-powered eavesdropping observatory nearby, less so. Kurczy’s deep reporting uncovers other strange things in these hills. The laws limiting Wi-Fi have never been enforced. Fact is, nearly everyone there has Wi-Fi – including the guy who drives around policing for electromagnetic interference. Setting out to explore how dependence on technology affects lives by immersing himself where it doesn’t, Kurczy discovered that not everything added up in The Quiet Zone. More: Sarah, Duchess of York channels history of rebellion, royalty and red hair into debut novel Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning. “The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence,” by Stephen Kurczy. Even the motion-detector on the Dollar General’s front door messes with unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Within 10 miles of the observatory, using cellphones, Wi-Fi, microwaves and other devices is banned. That requires the high-level hush mandated in the National Radio Quiet Zone, 13,000 square miles where devices emanating electromagnetic emissions are restricted.
In the intriguing “The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence” (Dey Street Books, 336 pp., ★★★ out of four), Kurczy confesses: “… It did not occur to me that a community bathed in quiet could be anything but idyllic."įour hours from Washington, D.C., Green Bank is a small town in rural Pocahontas County that since 1957 has been home to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a federal complex whose giant single-dish telescope detects “invisible energy waves” from space. Wary of the tyranny of today’s nonstop connectivity, he hadn’t owned a cellphone for a decade, and had high hopes that Green Bank, West Virginia, would live up to its billing as “The Quietest Town in America.” When journalist Stephen Kurczy began traveling from New York City into the West Virginia backcountry in 2017, he was convinced he had found a modern-day Walden – an oasis unspoiled by the clamor of the digital era.
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