Green Bank: the quietest town in America
To paraphrase a wise man, America is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Not only that, but it’s also pretty empty. Anyone who’s been on a road trip in the US of A will say the same, looking out from a deserted highway on hundreds of miles of undisturbed land, from the flatland desert of West Texas to the Appalachian mountains. It’s mad to think there could be a town in the country with even a claim to be the quietest of all, but one settlement in West Virginia has a pretty convincing argument for it.
The difference between Green Bank, West Virginia, and the vast majority of the United States is that operating electrical machinery in certain places is a crime punishable by a fine of up to $50 a day. Green Bank also contains a 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone, an area larger than some states, where all kinds of radio signals, from cell service to Wi-Fi, are strictly monitored and, in some places, outright banned.
Why is this? Is this town some Orwellian nightmare maintaining strict control over its populace? Not quite, although the name of the game is observation, but of everything above the town rather than in it. The town is host to the world’s largest, fully steerable radio telescope, named the Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope, after the West Virginia senator who pushed the funding of the telescope through Congress.
The structure is so impossibly huge that it takes a while to understand what you’re actually looking at. A 485ft tall structure cradling a satellite dish the size of two football fields, situated in a natural basin created by the surrounding mountains, some stretching 5000 feet in the air. This provides a very interesting conundrum for the surrounding area, as the place needs to be as undisturbed as possible, but it also needs people to operate the telescope, meaning that people need to, y’know, live there.
Somehow, they do. With an astonishing population density of nine people per square mile, the town has the lowest population density anywhere east of the Mississippi River. It contains enough homes to staff the telescope, one weekly newspaper, one high school, and all three traffic lights. It also has a reputation as something of a tourist destination, not only for the telescope but for the town itself.
After all, it does seem to be the one place in the world where you’re discouraged from having your phone on all the time. Not only that, but the settlement has also left the surrounding area pretty much undisturbed, leaving acres of forest and mountainland for nature lovers to explore. This sums up Green Bank better than any tourist brochure ever could: silent yet thrillingly alive.
Ecologist Gordon Hempton once said that there are perhaps a dozen places in the United States where a person can hear no man-made sounds for 15 minutes. Green Bank is one of those places, and, ironically enough, that’s because it houses one of the most complex and intricate pieces of machinery in the country. In today’s nonstop, deafening world, places like that need to be cherished while we still can.
