(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.