Unplugged
leads to an overlook with an expansive view of tiny towns, fields and mountains. Nobody stops to check their phones for new texts or emails along the way — because we can’t. Instead, we chat about the possibility of a bear sighting (highly unlikely) or enjoy the silence.
In the afternoon we drive south to Seneca Rocks, the magnificent rocky tower of whitegray Tuscarora quartzite rising 900 feet above the North Fork River in Monongahela National Forest. We climb the 1.3-mile trail, up steps and switchbacks for 700 feet to the top, impressed by the handful of rock climbers we can see scaling the peak the hard way. While we walk, I chat with my 16-year-old daughter, Mia, who says she thinks “society” has a problem with cellphone addiction. “I try to talk to my friends at lunch, and a lot of times they’re just looking at their phones,” she notes, adding that she sometimes wishes she didn’t have a phone — or, much better, that no one had one.
After lunch at the nearby Front Porch Restaurant, we head off to the Green Bank Observatory, home to the Green Bank Telescope, used to gather radio data from space. It’s the reason the surrounding 13,000-square-mile area (most of it state and national forest) is labeled the National Radio Quiet Zone, where radio transmissions are limited to prevent disruptions to the telescope’s reception — though only the approximately 150 people closest to the observatory aren’t allowed WiFi, or in some cases even microwaves. We’re given a bus tour of the grounds and background on the massive, 17-million-pound telescope and how scientists there work, in part, on finding signs of life beyond Earth.
We’re all too tired for games when we finally get back to the cabin. Mia points out that we were so busy, it wasn’t such a challenge to ignore her phone. My husband says he’s been surprised by how many times he’s reached for his pocket to check his email throughout the day and stopped himself — “several times an hour,” he notes. “It makes me realize how it’s basically become a robotic habit.” I’ve been the same way: It’s an almost unconscious impulse whenever there’s a moment of downtime. It makes me want to retrain myself to be comfortable with a little boredom, if that’s what a lack of digital stimuli is these days.
On Sunday, as we head home, we do a postmortem. We didn’t check our emails, or post photos on or scroll through social media all weekend. Countless Pokémon went uncaught, friends and family went untexted, and all the maps we consulted were paper.
“I think we should do a trip like this every year,” Dante B says, putting in his ear buds as we near home. “But I’m going to listen to a podcast now.”