(tractor motor running) (peaceful music)
- West Virginia, it's an essential part of my identity.
My whole sense of self comes from here.
I definitely still have that sense of straddling two worlds,
the old one and the new one, 'cause I came from the old one.
Green Bank is very unique 'cause it's right in the center
of the National Radio Quiet Zone, so we're protected here
from all kinds of radio transmissions:
television, cellphones, and in the immediate vicinity
of the telescope, even wireless internet.
So that kind of steps you back to a slightly different era
that's been lost everywhere else.
I always have a wonderful feeling when I leave Dulles
and I'm headed back to the mountains
and I know I'm gonna cross that line
where the phone doesn't work anymore.
Both my husband and I work at Green Bank Observatory.
I study planets based on data from spacecraft
that are actually there.
We decided to come back to West Virginia
when our kids were just a few months old.
We have nine year old twins.
(man speaking)
Two full-time jobs and two infants in daycare
in Silicon Valley makes for a very unbalanced budget,
so we decided to rearrange our lives.
(peaceful instrumental music)
I grew up here in rural West Virginia in a state park.
My father was the superintendent there,
so we lived in a public residence on the park.
I spent most of my time as a kid
just playing in the park in the woods.
We would go out and build dams across creeks
or saw down saplings and try to build
little log cabins in the woods all day.
And we didn't think it was odd.
I remember I thought that the world
was a big wilderness with cities in certain places.
I thought the forest here in the High Allegheny
just kind of rolled out over the central plateau
of West Virginia, and then that kinda started to break up
as prairie got more open and the trees got more sparse
out to the Mississippi, and then you had grass
all the way to the Rockies.
I was terribly disappointed when I actually saw
that there were people everywhere.
Deer, nice big buck and a doe.
I had already decided a long time previously
that I wanted to study planets, particularly Mars.
So I applied to five or six colleges.
I ended up at Western Massachusetts,
and then I went to California to do a postdoc at NASA Ames,
right in the heart of Silicon Valley.
There was a whole world out there waiting for me,
I thought I would leap into it. (laughs)
It was interesting, I was so thrilled to be out in the world
where not everyone was white and Protestant.
At the same time, I immediately saw what I'd loved here,
what I missed here, what I couldn't have back out there,
and what urban people didn't understand about the world,
having never lived in a rural place.
I think one of the biggest challenges
living here for me has always been
some philosophical differences with chunks of the community.
There are steep, steep gradients in income,
in class, in awareness of the outside world.
And it's difficult because there are many of my neighbors
who I identify with deeply, I feel like we have
a great deal in common, this Appalachian people
with similar mindsets and pragmatism,
and then I'll find that we're talking across this gulf
of different political and worldviews.
How do you handle that graciously,
particularly when people will say things casually
that you find utterly abhorrent,
but you still value them as neighbors,
as human beings, and as people who are struggling
with a lot of challenges here.
(peaceful music)
But I definitely feel like I belong here.
Coming back here kind of turned down a little
tension and unhappiness that I hadn't even known was there
in all the years that I was living an urban life.
And I was welcomed back so warmly.