What started out as a way for a struggling journalist to save money by not having a cell phone in 2009 gradually turned into an obstinate refusal on his part to get one, author and Bozrah native Stephen Kurczy said during a telephone interview.

“I just started kind of pushing back against the pressure from family members and employers telling me that I had to get a cell phone for their sake, so that they could get in touch with me whenever they wanted to.”

As the years went by, the former New London resident believed his “life was no worse for not having a cell phone and arguably better given all the research coming out about how cell phones and Smartphones,” which are conduits for social media, “erode our concentration, undermine democracy, create echo chambers of misinformation, inhibit our ability to live in the moment and enjoy” nature.

It was in 2017 that Kurczy started thinking of writing a book about his experiences of not having a cell phone and “his uniqueness in the world,” and searched online for places without cell service.

“One of the first things that popped up was Green Bank, West Virginia,” advertised as the self-proclaimed quietest town in America (population: about 250), because of its restrictions on cell service, cell phones, Wi-Fi and wireless connectivity – radio waves that “can cause interference to the radio telescopes there at The Green Bank Observatory,” which was founded in 1956, he said.

Kurczy and Jenna Cho (now his wife), both former employees of The Day, visited Green Bank in March 2017, during which time he said he “was really fascinated and enthralled by the place.” Cho, not so much. However, as a journalist, he said she recognized his fascination with the place and that there was “a lot happening here” that was not covered by the media.

“That feeling of mystery is really palpable when you go into Green Bank and into Appalachia. It’s such a rugged landscape with mountains, rolling hills, winding roads and fixed fog that settles in the valleys. It’s a place where you never really see everything.”

Kurczy described rounding a bend and catching glimpses “of these massive 500-foot-tall telescopes rising out of the forest canopy or out of the fog.”

Pocahontas County (which Green Bank is part of) is about the size of Rhode Island with a sparse population of 8,200 residents spread over 942 square miles. A 10-square-mile, ultra-quiet-state quiet zone “was established in 1958 to protect both Green Bank and the nearby town of Sugar Grove, where the military operates a top secret surveillance facility with its own collection of radio antennas. The military and the astronomers both require radio silence to do their work,” he wrote.

Also, a 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone surrounds this 10-mile radius.

Over the next three years, Kurczy commuted from New York City to spend about four months in Green Bank meeting people and researching the area for his book, “The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence,” which was published in August by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

The book evolves from seeking quiet to “finding that quiet can have a nefarious side,” Kurczy said. “There’s a darker side to quiet that allows evil things to go unnoticed or unchecked, such as this neo-Nazi group (called National Alliance) that was out there for so long. There are some things that we can’t be quiet about. Quiet isn’t always idyllic, isn’t always perfect.”

Over time, Kurczy and Cho experienced “a lingering feeling of unease,” especially since Jenna is Korean and they now have two biracial children. “To be so close to an organization that is actively calling for genocide against non-whites” and calling for a “white society and implementing that through violence, that’s pretty frightening,” he said.

Key figures in his book include former Wall Street banker Marianne Roberts, who killed herself in 2018 “almost like an act of extreme violence in protest of the noise in the outside world that was creeping into Green Bank,” Kurczy said.

Roberts moved to the “Quiet Zone” after self-diagnosing as having “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” a condition wherein “people feel severe pain and illness to the point of sickness and even death from the radiation that most of us can’t feel from Smartphones, from cell phone towers, from Wi-Fi, even from certain lights and stoves and just electronic gadgetry all around us that is emitting, mostly imperceptible, electromagnetic waves,” he explained.

Among Pocahontas County’s more famous unsolved murders from its “influx of outsiders,” include two hippies who hitchhiked to the area in 1980 for a “festival known as the Rainbow Gathering.”

Hundreds of other people also flocked to Green Bank over the past decade, thinking of it “as their last refuge in a noisy world,” the last place they could go to “get away from all that electromagnetic smog.”

Kurczy said there is no fountain of youth, Shangri-La, or paradise on earth. “Green Bank is not as quiet as it has been made out to be” and the takeaway is that this area is not the solution to our “constant connectivity.”

Still, “there is a palpably slower pace of life” here, he said. “It still has a different relationship with technology,” because internet is so slow there and cell service is so spotty, people do have a more removed relationship to their Smartphones and other devices. “And that causes them to have to take a break from them. It’s kind of like in my own life. I don’t have a cell phone at this point, because that’s like my last effort. It’s like the one thing I can do to maintain some kind of quiet boundary where I’m away from Wi-Fi. I’m away from my devices. I cannot be reached and I cannot be tempted.”

He hopes after reading his book, people will “think more consciously and with more intent about their use of technology,” and how it influences their lives. He said many people are “tethered to their Smartphones,” which has caused a “real surge in driving accidents and deaths over the past five to 10 years.”

He pointed out that these devices are also causing “an erosion” in meaningful conversations. “Even people who use it in a rude way agree that it’s rude, but there’s this feeling of like, ‘What am I supposed to do? This is how life is now.’”

Over the past month, leaks about Facebook files featured in The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets show how “even Facebook knows that its own platforms (which include Instagram) “are toxic for us and they cause all kinds of social ills ... and in terms of democracy.”

Kurczy said his book also explores numerous core questions: “What is quiet worth to us? What is the value of quiet in our lives? What are we willing to do to preserve quiet or have quiet in our lives? Does quiet still exist in the world?”

Jan Tormay, a longtime resident of Norwich, now lives in Westerly.