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The land where the internet ends
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the bars on my phone disappear. When I’m
out of range entirely, floating along in a
kayak, time grows elastic. I stare down into
that other kingdom below me, at the min-
nows darting through the duckweed, and
feel deeply free—no one’s watching; no one
knows where I am.
To experience the deepest solitude, you
need to enter the land where the internet
ends. Ten years ago, it was easy to do that.
But lately, even in the backwoods, my cell-
phone springs to life, clamoring for atten-
tion. The off-grid places are disappearing.
It’s likely that in 10 or so years, the country
will be blanketed with signal, from sea to
shining sea.
I’m hopeful that when that happens, we
might retain just a few quiet places where
it’s still possible to disconnect. Activists
have already created “dark sky reserves” to
protect wilderness from artificial light. In
the future, might we also create “privacy
reserves” where we can go to escape the
ubiquitous internet?
I
WANTED TO find out what it was like
to disconnect in the quietest town in
America, so here I was, hiking down
a dirt road behind the Green Bank obser-
vatory campus. I wandered through a
meadow and into an aban-
doned playground. The rusted
swings creaked in the wind.
In the distance, the largest of
the Green Bank telescopes
reared up over a hill like a
shimmering apparition, with
its lacy struts and moon-
white dish. The telescope is so
freakishly huge that it looked
completely unreal, as if it had
been CGI-ed into the sky. But
the quiet was even eerier. Not
just radio quiet, but the kind
of silence that I hadn’t heard in
years: no buzz of the highway,
no planes overhead, just the
rush of wind through the grass.
The spell broke when a truck
bumped down the road and
disgorged three dogs. A gray-
haired fellow stepped out. I
hurried toward him and asked
if he lived here. He introduced
himself as Stephen McNally,
a retiree who’d lived in Green
Bank for 12 years.
While his dogs chased swallows, I peppered
McNally with questions. Did he own a
cellphone? He told me he never had. But,
he said, lately whenever he ventures outside
of the quiet zone, “people tell me you have
to get one.” Recently, at a hardware store
a hundred miles from here, he tried to pay
with a credit card that he hadn’t used in
years. That must have tripped some secu-
rity alert, because the store clerks said that
they needed to verify his identify by calling
the phone number listed on his account.
“They wanted to call me to make sure that
it was really me,” McNally said. He tried
to explain that his phone wasn’t in his
pocket. It was back in Green Bank, because
it was a landline. The clerks couldn’t seem
to grasp this. McNally seemed to be of the
opinion that the rest of the country, out
there beyond the mountains, was losing its
mind.
Noreen Prestage, a tour guide at the obser-
vatory, agreed. She told me that she had
lived in Green Bank for 17 years, happily,
without a cellphone. But just the week
before, she’d felt it necessary to buy a basic
mobile phone so that she could rendezvous
with friends and her son when she went
outside the zone. “I don’t want it,” she said
of the phone, but if you’re going to make
It’s become harder and harder to escape from technology, said journalist Pagan Kennedy in The New York Times.
But there are still places with no cellphones—just stars, solitude, and human connection.
Any signal interference can disrupt the Green Bank Telescope.
A
FEW WEEKS ago, I
drove down a back
road in West Virginia
and into a parallel reality.
Sometime after I passed Spruce
Mountain, my phone lost
service—and I knew it would
remain comatose for the next
few days. When I spun the dial
on the car radio, static roared
out of every channel. I had
entered the National Radio
Quiet Zone, 13,000 square
miles of mountainous terrain
with few cell towers or other
transmitters.
I was headed toward Green
Bank, W.Va., a town that
adheres to the strictest ban
on technology in the United
States. The residents do with-
out not only cellphones but
also Wi-Fi, microwave ovens,
and any other devices that
generate electromagnetic sig-
nals. The ban exists to protect
the Green Bank Observatory,
a cluster of radio telescopes
in a mountain valley. Conventional tele-
scopes are like superpowered eyes. The
instruments at Green Bank are more like
superhuman ears—they can tune into fre-
quencies from the lowest to the highest
ends of the spectrum. The telescopes are
powerful enough to detect the death throes
of a star, but also terribly vulnerable to our
loud world. Even a short-circuiting electric
toothbrush could blot out the whisper of
the Big Bang.
Physicists travel here to measure gravita-
tional waves. Astronomers study stardust.
The observatory has also become a hub for
alien-hunters who hope to detect messages
sent from other planets. And in the past
decade, the town has become a destination
for “electrosensitives” who believe they’re
allergic to cellphone towers—some of them
going so far as to wrap their bedrooms in
mesh in hopes of screening out what they
believe to be harmful rays.
This town, in other words, calls out to
many kinds of eccentrics. And I guess I am
one of them. I came in hopes of finding
a certain kind of wildness and solitude. I
live in Massachusetts, and I often disap-
pear into the forests and rivers to clear my
head. I’ve always loved the moment when
steven felgate
(Steven Felgate)
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