Michael Holstine, the business manager at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, walks out of a shed underneath the Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope.
IN THESE PARTS, a pay phone is a visitor’s best option for reaching the rest of the world.
A mobile phone signal is an hour away by car. Wi-fi is forbidden. The radio plays nothing but static. And other than the occasional passing pickup truck whose driver offers a wave, it’s dead silent.
Seemingly off the beaten path, this community of fewer than two hundred residents in Green Bank, West Virginia, is the heart of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area where state and federal laws discourage the use of everyday devices that emit electromagnetic waves.
The quiet zone aims to protect sensitive radio telescopes at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, as well as a nearby naval research facility, from man-made interference. This silence enables the observatory to detect energy in outer space that is equivalent to the energy emitted by a single snowflake hitting the ground.
The sparsely-populated area of America was chosen in part because there was no industry in the region in the 1950s which posed a threat of creating radio frequency interference.
While scientists listen intently for clues from the universe on its structure and origins, residents in some of the timeworn railroad towns in this valley maintain a fundamentally tech-less lifestyle that for most Americans is a memory. More than 90 per cent of American adults have a mobile phone today, yet some locals fondly recall ditching their wireless device after moving here. After all, it’s useless, and that’s fine by them.
Here is a gallery of images from the towns within the National Radio Quiet Zone.
A phone booth on the side of a road in Head Waters, Virginia. Pay phones have all but disappeared in most parts of the US but can still be found in this part of the country.
A photo taken from a phone booth shows a truck passing through the town of Head Waters.
The Robert C Byrd Green Bank telescope, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty, towers over farmland.
Betty Mullenax walks behind a checkout stand at Trent’s General Store in Arbovale, West Virginia, inside the National Radio Quiet Zone. “We’ve never known any other way,” she says of life without mobile phones.
Discarded furniture and other belongings inside an abandoned home inside the National Radio Quiet Zone.
Vickie Croston sits in her ten-foot by ten-foot one-chair barber shop in a former sawmill town inside the quiet zone. Her shop has no phone and she says she doesn’t want one – or a mobile phone either. If mobile phone service was allowed, “it would be noisy. The same as everywhere else,” she says.
Part of a shuttered sawmill that closed in 1960 near the banks of the Greenbrier River in West Virginia.
Vintage toys on sale at Stonewall Grocery Shop in McDowell, Virginia, where shop owner Linda Simmons gives a policeman a sandwich. Simmons says the area is “pristine”, and that while having mobile phone service would be handy, the sight of mobile phone masts just wouldn’t fit.
Weathered instructions for using a pay phone inside a phone booth in Head Waters, Virginia. A nearby tourism office gives visitors a list of pay phone locations in case they need to reach the outside world.
(All pics: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say