Yumpu_Catalogue_Peacemaking

In fifth and sixth grade, on the way to Manor School I climbed a black
wooden overpass that spanned the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Some mornings I stopped and stood in the wind roaring above hopper cars
heaped with coal and iron pellets bound for mills along the rivers in
Pittsburgh, and imagined flight.
At the end of Peight’s lane, not far from where a horse and buggy accident
killed my grandmother in 1948, I spied a Texas Eastern Transmission sign.
This aluminum-sided shed is party to the fourth largest natural gas line in
the nation, which runs from the Gulf of Mexico to New York City. How did
that pipe snake in over Jack’s Mountain without my knowledge?
When they clear-cut the right of way to lay pipeline over the Nittany Ridge
in 2009, gas men left good lumber to rot, my handyman says. The Centre
Relay Compressor Station stands on a former cornfield in Pleasant Gap. The
pipe runs past Weis Market, recently built on a razed farm, and ends in gas
storage fields at Leidy, under the Tamarack Swamp. I, who have never eaten
grass out of necessity, drive home and cook my groceries on a gas stove. 1
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
1
Among Landowners and Industrial Stakeholders, the Citizen with Too Much
Memory Seeks Standing to Speak of Recent Events in Penn’s Woods” is
factual, to the best of my knowledge, except that my father’s feed truck
lost its brakes driving off of Tussey Mountain into Stone Valley, instead
of Mount Nittany into Nittany Valley.