The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  Between all the rifles, rocks, and movie mementos was a mounted cover of West Virginia Executive magazine from 2009 featuring Martin in a dark suit, with a big smile and shoulder-length blond hair. He’d cut his hair when he returned to conservative Pocahontas County in 2012, traded his suits for jeans, and strapped on a pistol.

  “I was the assistant prosecutor around here and I went after everybody,” he said. “I was a prick, and I wore a big fucking gun every day while I was in the prosecutor’s office. Think I worry about that now? No! There’s nothing to fear here. That’s endemic to West Virginia. It’s just rural America.”

  THE SUMMER OF 1980, in the days after the Rainbow murders, Simmons and Martin—who then ran a private law firm together in Marlinton—visited the Rainbow Gathering to see what was happening with the “gaily bedecked and unbedecked thousands,” as the Washington Post described attendees. Dressed in business suits, Martin and Simmons had to wade across a creek to reach the forest encampment, so they removed their shoes and socks and rolled up their pants. Many attendees had removed all their clothing, and they were walking with arms outstretched toward Martin and Simmons to place flower wreaths around the lawyers’ necks.

  “The girls came out and they were all hugging us!” Martin said, chuckling at the memory. “And a guy came out and he starts to hug us. You gotta remember this was the eighties. You didn’t even do bro hugs back in the eighties.”

  Martin recalled going to the infirmary at the Rainbow Gathering and hearing a loud, booming voice. He turned around: it was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall doctor named Hunter “Patch” Adams, years before he would become a celebrity thanks to the movie starring Robin Williams. Dressed as a clown, pockets full of gags, his hair dyed neon colors, Adams was running a medic tent for the hippies. He happened to have purchased 310 acres in Pocahontas County earlier that year with a plan to build a free hospital to serve rural Appalachia. Martin had been Adams’s lawyer for the property’s $67,000 sale and title transfer.

  Nearly four decades later, locals were still waiting for Adams’s long-promised hospital to open, despite millions of dollars having been donated to the project.

  “It’s just a joke,” Simmons said of Adams and his Gesundheit! Institute. “They’ve never treated anybody to my knowledge. Just took the money.”

  “I know he’s raised a ton of money for this hospital,” said Sarah Riley of High Rocks, “but the hospital doesn’t exist so I’m not sure where the money is going.”

  “They don’t really do anything for us,” said Joseph Smith, the former Marlinton mayor. “They didn’t do anything when I was mayor, and I was on the town council for twenty years before that and they didn’t do anything.”

  In the quietest place in America, could one get away with murder and fraud?

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Where’s the Hospital?”

  MY INITIAL IMPRESSION of Pocahontas County as a quiet paradise was initially deepened by the presence of Patch Adams. What could be more perfect than a clown with a medical degree running a free hospital in an area in need of health care?

  I’d seen the 1998 film Patch Adams as a boy, watching it on VHS at my grandparents’ house. I loved the story of a goofy doctor played by Robin Williams challenging the stuffy medical establishment to have more compassion and humor. Advertised as being “based on a true story,” the feel-good movie took in $200 million at the box office and closed with a line about how Adams had purchased land in West Virginia, where “construction of the Gesundheit Hospital is currently underway” and “a waiting list of over 1,000 physicians have offered to leave their current practices and join in Patch’s cause.”

  The movie was loosely based on Adams’s 1993 book Gesundheit! about his life and mission. An army brat who grew up in Germany, Japan, and the United States, he had earned his medical degree in 1971 from Virginia Commonwealth University and then helped run a free, home-based medical clinic in northern Virginia for a decade. He left that project with the aim of opening a full-scale hospital on land he’d purchased in Pocahontas.

  “In a way, finding the property was like reaching the Promised Land,” Adams wrote in his book. “It injected a renewed sense of purpose. Our fund-raising efforts, just barely begun, shifted into high gear.” He focused on public donations, raising awareness for his project through dozens, if not hundreds, of media interviews, including a 1988 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote his “forty-bed free hospital in West Virginia.” After drawing in tens of thousands of dollars in donations, Adams hired the Vermont-based architect David Sellers to design a “silly hospital,” which was to have an eyeball-shaped eye clinic and an ear-shaped examination room, according to his book, whose movie rights were quickly optioned by Universal Studios. The blockbuster film brought Adams international fame. Overnight, he could command $20,000 for speaking engagements. His hospital appeared all but assured of becoming a reality.

  Then he started asking for more money. In his book, Adams had said he needed $5 million to build his hospital. By 1999, the amount had ballooned to $50 million—half for construction, half for operating costs—and Adams’s vision was coming under criticism from “medical professionals, health-care volunteers, and even his ex-wife, who says he has done a poor job managing donations to his nonprofit Gesundheit! Institute,” according to a 1999 article in People magazine. Linda Edquist, who divorced Adams after twenty-six years and accused him of cheating on her for five of them, told the Washington Post in 1998 that most of the money being raised for Gesundheit! was being spent on Adams’s own salary and rent.

  Despite the negative press, Adams kept doing his thing, delivering paid presentations, organizing volunteer clowning trips around the world, and raising money for a hospital in West Virginia. Two decades after the movie’s release, in his mid-seventies, Adams was still talking about his soon-to-open hospital.

  DOWN ANOTHER NARROW, winding road of Pocahontas County, I turned into a dirt driveway with a wooden sign that read “Gesundheit! Institute.” An antique fire truck was parked by the entrance—presumably a nod to the comedy bit about clowns fighting fires. I rounded a bend to a large, grassy clearing with a caretaker’s house, a three-story workshop building, and a pond that was said to be a popular spot for skinny-dipping. Farther up the dirt road, I drove by two yurts, a cabin, and a multi-domed living facility in the shape of an elaborate, ostentatious Russian dacha, with two onion-shaped towers and two breezeways each in the shape of keyholes. The building looked like an Appalachian version of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

  I was greeted by a young man named Adam Craten, who gave off the vibe of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. He said he was the property caretaker while Adams was away, which sounded like most of the time. While the Gesundheit! Institute’s website referred to “our home in West Virginia,” Adams actually lived five hundred miles away, in Illinois. Adams’s Twitter page listed his location as “Hillsboro, WV,” but he visited Pocahontas only a handful of times a year.

  Scattered around the property were gardens of kohlrabi, kale, and collard, peppers, sweet potatoes, and pumpkins. Craten seemed most proud of his 225 feet of tomato plants, which he estimated would yield six hundred pounds of tomatoes. “Patch says the land hasn’t been this thriving since the eighties and he sleeps really good at night because we’re here and doing all this awesome stuff,” he said. “We try to be as sustainable as possible.”

  Craten showed me inside the skeleton of a new twenty-thousand-square-foot building under construction. Built by Andrew Must and Clay Condon, the second-generation back-to-the-landers from Lobelia, the building was to be a future library and teaching facility with classrooms, an industrial kitchen, and sleeping quarters for forty people. Adams had already invested $1 million in the building. Progress was on hold while the organization waited for several million dollars more to materialize, Craten said.

  He next led me inside the multistoried dacha, which had curving walls, winding stairways, and so many bedrooms and beds that I lost cou
nt. All those quarters were intended for people who came to Gesundheit! for paid events or to volunteer. A group of undergraduates from the University of Notre Dame had just visited for a fall break service learning trip, tending the gardens and going clowning at a nursing home in Lewisburg. Students had also come from New York University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Michigan to volunteer, according to Craten.

  But I was curious what the students were supposed to be learning. Online speaking agencies described Adams as having already “constructed a 40-bed hospital/healing center in rural West Virginia.” Gesundheit!’s website, meanwhile, said the nonprofit was still working to complete “our most important project yet: the Gesundheit Hospital,” and that “all donations take us one step closer to realizing Patch Adams’ vision, offering free healthcare within a community fostered on the importance of happiness, silliness, love, creativity and cooperation to achieve true health.” But where was this budding hospital? And where was Adams?

  “Some people come in and say, ‘Where’s the hospital?’” Craten said. He acknowledged that Adams had a unique, almost baffling mission, but such was his prerogative. “Patch raises most of the money for this place, he can do whatever the fuck he wants.”

  Maybe. But Adams had promised something very different when asking for donations. In his book, he described building “fully equipped, acute-care inpatient and outpatient services that can handle all aspects of rural medicine on a drop-in or scheduled basis. Emergency room, general surgery, X-ray, laboratory, pharmacy, ophthalmology, gynecology, acupuncture, dentistry, physical therapy, and many other specialties will be represented.” That was pretty specific—and pretty far from the reality on the ground. Money was clearly flowing into the organization, it wasn’t just being spent on any medical facilities, as far as I could tell.

  With no sign of Adams, I sent him an email via his website. Days later, my laptop rang with an incoming Google Voice call. It was Adams, calling from his home in Urbana, Illinois.

  BY ADAMS’S OWN ADMISSION, he was “almost never there,” meaning Pocahontas, because he needed to be near an international airport for all his clowning trips, which he called “humanitarian aid missions.” He claimed to have led more than two hundred such trips, including to war zones and refugee camps. He only intended to move to West Virginia once his hospital was complete. Given his age, I asked if he thought he’d live to see that happen.

  “I am optimistic,” he said. He just needed another $70 million, he added. He was confident new donors would step forward, and he said a $300 million donation appeared imminent. (When I checked back with Adams in early 2021, he was still waiting for that big donation. But on the bright side, he added, he’d been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. He didn’t appreciate when I told him Donald Trump’s son-in-law had also been nominated.)

  Adams’s mission was still to build a live-in medical facility and “eco-village” that would revolutionize health care by showing how services could be provided at a fraction of the cost of a traditional hospital. Medical and cleaning staff alike would receive a monthly salary of $300, he said. He would also save money by eschewing medical malpractice insurance, which he said introduced mistrust to the physician-patient relationship and stifled doctors from using “creativity” and “intuition.” West Virginia is among the minority of U.S. states that do not require doctors to carry malpractice insurance.

  Adams had a list of physicians ready to come to Pocahontas, though he conceded that a number of them had died in the time it was taking his project to come to fruition. Still, he wouldn’t budge from his goal of opening a full-fledged medical facility that would include an “enchanted playground with interconnected tree houses.”

  “But wouldn’t a simple clinic better serve Pocahontas County?” I asked.

  “We’re not building it for the people of Pocahontas County,” Adams replied. “We’re building a hospital to show you can do it at 5 percent of the cost.”

  To date, Adams had shown he couldn’t build a hospital at any cost. He called his original $5 million project estimate a forty-year-old guesstimate. Plans had changed. Costs had inflated. “We don’t have any idea what the plan is now because we’re going to wait until we’re funded and then get together and make the plan,” he said, in one of many statements that left my head dizzy. I couldn’t make sense of his circular argument for needing money to build a hospital whose costs had not been pinned down.

  “Why should somebody be convinced to donate now,” I asked, “when after four decades there’s still no hospital to show for the donations that have come through?”

  “What donations?!” Adams growled, his cheerful facade crumbling. “Almost all the money donated is money I made.”

  Adams denied that Universal Pictures ever donated $500,000 to Gesundheit!, as had been widely reported in the ’90s. The Hollywood studio “didn’t give me shit,” he said. Ninety percent of all financial pledges to Gesundheit! failed to materialize, he added, though he didn’t have a dollar amount for that other 10 percent. Most donations were under $100. He repeatedly asked me to make a donation, which he said was the least I could do for taking up his time.

  I said public tax documents showed more than $15 million going into Gesundheit! from gifts, grants, contributions, and gross receipts from admissions and merchandise at his paid appearances.

  “I’m sure I made at least $15 million in the years after the movie,” Adams said. But that was personal income, he said, quickly adding that he poured much of his money into his organization. He still charged up to $20,000 for speaking appearances.

  When I later rechecked his nonprofit’s tax filings, I tallied nearly $20 million going into the organization from 1997 to 2018, as well as about $800,000 in annual outgoing expenses, with the net result being that Gesundheit! sometimes filed an annual loss—though net revenues over two decades were still in the millions. Nearly 40 percent of annual expenses went toward administration and fundraising, which was high, according to Charity Navigator. Charities ideally spend no more than 25 percent of their budgets on non-programming costs. When I asked Adams to help me understand some larger expense items on his tax returns for compensation, wages, and travel, he told me he didn’t pay attention to those numbers. “I’ve never looked at our tax filing,” he claimed. When I asked if he could put me in touch with his accountant or another person who might explain the numbers, he flatly said no.

  Adams said he needed another $2 million in the short term to finish building the teaching center that I’d seen under construction. Once opened, it could host classes that might be a source of revenue.

  But if that building alone cost several million dollars, I asked, why didn’t he just invest the money in an actual hospital?

  “How dense are you, Stephen?” Adams said through what sounded like gritted teeth. “All of it is one thing! The buildings, the house, the staff aren’t different than the hospital. Can you get that in your noggin? If you don’t have a residence for the staff then you can’t have a staff and so you don’t have a hospital even though it’s built! It’s a complete project!”

  I was confused about another thing. The back of Adams’s book said the Gesundheit! Institute “has treated more than 15,000 people for free” in West Virginia, which sounded to me like a reference to his hospital project in Pocahontas. Adams said that was a typo. From 1971 to 1983, he and a few friends had treated fifteen thousand people in northern Virginia and the eastern panhandle of West Virginia out of home-based medical practices. But why wasn’t the book cover clearer? I asked.

  “I don’t give a shit what’s on the back of a book!” Adams snapped back.

  Or maybe the book was never corrected because it wasn’t in Adams’s interest for the truth to be known that he’d never treated a single person in Pocahontas. There is no hospital. There never was a hospital. There likely never will be a hospital, according to people who know Adams.

  MAUREEN MYLANDER WAS a struggling freelance writer when Ad
ams asked her to ghostwrite his book in the early ’90s. She told him that she only did coauthorship and equal split of the earnings. He agreed. She researched and wrote the book over two years as a side project to her full-time job. Several evenings a week she went to Adams’s house in Arlington, Virginia, and interviewed him for a few hours.

  The output of their collaboration helped create the mythical image of Adams as an idealistic and beneficent clown doctor building a hospital in Appalachia. According to the publisher, Healing Arts Press in Vermont, the book has sold more than 250,000 copies, most of them coming after the success of the film Patch Adams.

  “It was not the best book I ever wrote, but it was the most successful, and it’s because somebody wanted to make a movie out of it,” Mylander told me.

  Some things changed between the book’s 1993 and 1998 editions, however. As people became disenchanted with Adams and dropped out of Gesundheit!, their names were removed from the book. While Mylander’s own name stayed on the cover, even she grew suspect of Adams.

  “He just never struck me as a builder of hospitals when I didn’t even see a clinic down there in the early nineties,” Mylander said. “Anybody could have bought some bandages and had somebody there with some nursing care.”

  Mylander recalled being at Adams’s fiftieth birthday party in the mid-’90s, watching as friends presented him with a $10,000 check toward the Gesundheit! Institute. She overheard Adams say, “I wish there were a few more zeroes on it.”