Mulling an environmental disaster in a Colorado bar surfaced my deep (and complicated) Pa. roots

I’m at a bar in Grand County, Colorado about a week after the 2023 East Palestine train derailment and returning home to Pittsburgh is the only thing I can think about. My coworkers are ordering $11 cocktails and the bar TVs show professional skiers dropping onto remote peaks from helicopters. There are three screens and each one is always playing a different breathless looping clip. I fix my attention on a clip of a man plunging through deep snow somewhere on another continent to make it easier to avoid conversation. I feel both sick with longing for home and horrified by another environmental disaster in the same region I am desperate to return to.

This was my fifth winter away from Pittsburgh and my first in Colorado. After graduating from a small college in Asheville, North Carolina, I moved out west to chase low-paying seasonal jobs in stunningly beautiful and almost surreal mountain towns that I could never afford to visit otherwise. By the time I landed in Grand County for a winter job at a ski resort, though, the West had largely lost its romantic mystique.

Even in the best of circumstances, Pittsburgh is a difficult place to leave behind. In my experience, the children of Pittsburgh families that have scattered across the country still think of themselves as yinzers, no matter how long they’ve been away. Something about this city haunts the minds and hearts of its inhabitants long after they physically leave.

My coworkers are talking to a group of electricians stationed here for a month-long stint of wiring newly built multi-million dollar homes. Even in the depths of winter, the demand for construction labor far outstrips supply, and most of the people who work in Grand County can’t afford to live there, at least not permanently. Like us, the electricians live in housing provided by their employer. Most people I meet in Grand County do not actually live there, and of those that do, few actually grew up there. We are strangers among strangers, and the connections forged to people and place here seem incredibly flimsy compared to connections forged in Pittsburgh.

Just like so many Pittsburgh families, mine has lived in the same handful of South Hills neighborhoods going back four or more generations. My grandparents and great-grandparents grew up in Baldwin, Mt. Oliver, Carrick, Jefferson Hills, South Side and Clairton. My knowledge of these neighborhoods extends far beyond familiarity. There are memories in every hollow, on every street corner, in every empty lot and in every new development. My family history is folded into every hill, and the same landscape that shaped the lives of my relatives before me continues to shape my own.

I grew up in a house just a short walk from the house my mother grew up in, and the house her father grew up in, and the house his mother grew up in. I went to church where my great-grandmother was baptized. I went to the same high school as, not just my parents, but some of my grandparents. Sometimes I call places by a name that was discarded before I was born because the old name was taught to me by those who knew it that way. I know what the new office parks and shopping centers used to be, and I know which places are exactly as they were when my grandparents were children. I know which homes used to belong to relatives I’ve never met.

So many of my strongest Pittsburgh memories and connections were forged long before I was born. I grew up listening to stories that were set in places right before my eyes, and the memories of my family became almost indistinguishable from my own.

This connection to place through memories that are not my own underwrites every interaction I have with other Pittsburghers. The city is full of families that have lived on the same street since before World War II, and the past lives on through their lives just as it does in mine. Even if we were born after most of the mills shuttered, every Pittsburgher can still remember the glory days. We are united by a shared history that is so vivid and immediate that even young children have an understanding of how things used to be.

There is no such understanding for me in Grand County, no deeper connection, no shared understanding. Almost everyone I encounter seems desperately lonely, alienated from any real community as they navigate whatever short-term circumstance brought them here. We pass through like ships in the night, and no one will keep the memory of our time there alive. History lives and dies by the seasons.

We are strangers among strangers and the electricians at the bar want us to go home with them. Men outnumber women noticeably in Grand County, and the barrage of advances from lonely men far from their homes is almost constant. My friends and I are well practiced at sidestepping these unwanted advances by this point in the winter. The electricians are not even the first to ask us that evening and they leave to walk home through the snow once they realize that none of us have even the slightest desire to go to whatever overcrowded hovel their company threw them in.

I spend the rest of the night vacantly staring across the bar and feeling unfairly hateful toward the subjects of the precisely edited clips of skiers gliding through snow while wondering what will become of all of the men, women and children currently breathing vinyl chloride-ridden air. I try to imagine the public reaction to a disaster of similar scale occurring here rather than East Palestine and wonder if the public would perceive it as a greater environmental tragedy. A mass poisoning event in one of Colorado’s remote mountain valleys and ski destinations might seem more striking.

I think not just about the derailment but of a cancer cluster thought to be related to fracking near the neighborhood in which I grew up. I think about the sinkhole that opened in a neighbor’s yard after the mine below collapsed. I think about a tale from my grandfather’s youth where he described watching burning patches of oil float down the Monongahela River.

Every retiree I see enjoying a day of skiing reminds me of my grandparents who did not live long enough to enjoy retirement.

I never found the derailment particularly shocking. It was another poisoning event in a region where the environment and its people have been treated as dispensable for generations.

My grandfather died of brain cancer just before his 62nd birthday. He grew up in Clairton, and spent much of his life working for U.S. Steel. I often wonder whether he would still be alive today if he hadn’t been exposed to the toxic industrial pollution that so many in Southwestern Pennsylvania live with.

It didn’t feel fair that some people’s grandparents get to spend their retirement skiing while mine are in an early grave. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who resents old people enjoying their retirement and I didn’t want the alienation to continue any longer than it had to. I desperately missed Pittsburgh even as I felt almost obsessively angry over some of its more tragic chapters.

The longer I stayed in Colorado, the greater the Pittsburgh in my mind grew. It became a hulking object of desire that dominated my thoughts. I was filtering every experience through the haze of my homesickness. Every resentment I bore toward the transient lifestyle I experienced in Colorado contrasted with my deeply rooted relationship with Pittsburgh.

Over the years spent away my feelings of homesickness waxed and waned. I counted down the days to every return trip home, and I dreaded the inevitable tearful embraces with family that bookended my visits. I watched political and environmental turmoil from afar and wished I could return home to make sense of it. I also loved so many aspects of my life beyond Pittsburgh, and I knew turning my back on them would be difficult. I spent many wonderful summers working in the mountains of North Carolina, attended a college that I loved, and explored some of the most beautiful places in the Mountain West for the better part of a year.

I felt profound gratitude for my time in these places, and I was always aware that I was extremely fortunate to live there, even for a short time. My parents and other relatives never had similar opportunities, and I didn’t want to squander mine. My gratitude was mixed, though, with a strange guilt over my overbearing homesickness while I lived in places where I would otherwise feel lucky merely to visit.

By February 2023 I knew that I needed to come home. By March I was back in Pittsburgh. I left Colorado without much fanfare. I was relieved to finally have the mountains at my back. Pittsburgh has returned to its rightful place, external rather than internal to my life. I now have the frame of mind to better appreciate the world beyond. Even so, it is difficult to imagine myself ever feeling at rest anywhere else.

Corina Pittman works in youth development in the Greater Pittsburgh area and can be reached at pittmancorina13@gmail.com .

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