Michael J. Gaynor visits Green Bank, the West Virginian town without wi-fi:
In Green Bank, you can’t make a call on your cell phone, and you can’t text on it, either. Wireless internet is outlawed, as is Bluetooth. It’s a premodern place by design, devoid of the gadgets and technologies that define life today. And thanks to Uncle Sam, it will stay that way: The town is part of a federally mandated zone where a government high-tech facility’s needs come first. Wireless signals are verboten.
In electromagnetic terms, it’s the quietest place on Earth—blanketed by the kind of silence that’s golden to electrosensitives like Monique Grimes.
One response
My mother’s family lived in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, the location of the listening devices you refer to. The giant dishes at Green Bank are the only thing modern in the area; Angus cattle graze beneath them. My middle name is Andrew, after Andrew Sidenstricker, because my mother boarded with his family while attending high school (12 miles of mountain road being too far to travel from the farmhouse). Sidenstricker’s sister was Pearl S. Buck, Pocahontas County’s most noted author and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. If you visit this area, make sure to visit the Cranberry Glade, an unusual mountain swampland that was lifted into the air when the mountain was raised by shifting plates. You will likely be the only ones there. There are no other tourist amusements available, but you will be able to see a town (Marlinton) that time has not changed.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.