What I’ll Remember
Thoughts on growing up
I grew up in a valley between two named mountain regions.
To the west were the Endless Mountains.
To the east was Moosic Mountain, a long ridgeline stretching from Carbondale to Dunmore and forming part of the Pocono Mountains.
From my bedroom window I could see one mountain range.
But it was Moosic Mountain, only a few miles away, that became my sanctuary.
Back then I used to tell people you could never get me to leave northeastern Pennsylvania.
Why would I?
Everything I loved was here.
When I think about where I grew up, I don’t think about buildings first.
I think about the mountains.
Moosic Mountain stretches from Route 6 in Carbondale all the way to Dunmore. If you’re willing to put in the miles, you can walk nearly the entire ridgeline. Along the way are forgotten reservoirs, the remnants of gravity railroads slowly disappearing beneath the forest, and abandoned engine houses that once helped move coal up the mountains.
History isn’t hidden in museums up there.
It’s scattered across the mountain itself.
I didn’t just hike Moosic Mountain.
I learned it.
I knew where the mountain laurel bloomed.
I knew where the dwarf forests began.
I knew where the glaciers had scratched their signatures into the stone.
I knew where the forgotten reservoirs waited in the woods.
I knew where the old gravity railroad climbed the mountain.
I knew where to watch the sunset.
I knew where to find peace.
Moosic Mountain is old.
Really old.
Huge stretches of exposed rock break through the surface. If you know what you’re looking at, you can still see the scratches carved into the stone by glaciers thousands of years ago. Whenever I brought someone hiking, I always pointed them out. Those marks were proof that the landscape had been changing for longer than people have existed.
At the top of the mountain the trees change.
They aren’t tall forests anymore.
They’re twisted dwarf trees bent low by centuries of wind and weather. They huddle together so tightly that walking through them can be almost impossible.
As a kid that didn’t stop us.
It became a maze.
We crawled beneath branches, squeezed between trunks, and disappeared into a forest that felt like it belonged in another world. Every trip up the mountain felt like there was something new waiting to be discovered.
Pennsylvania taught me to love history before I ever opened a history book.
I learned about the Lenape.
I wandered through the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour.
I spent countless afternoons at Steamtown National Historic Site.
The abandoned railroad grades and forgotten industrial ruins weren’t just relics.
They were invitations.
They invited me to imagine the people who built this place, the lives they lived, and the communities they left behind. Looking back, I think that’s where my love of history really began—not in a classroom, but in the woods.
One of my favorite places in the world sits near the end of the mountain in Dunmore.
The ridge simply stops and becomes a cliff.
Hundreds of feet below is Route 435.
In the distance you can see Interstate 380 cutting through the mountains.
Every year in Boy Scouts we’d hike nearly eight miles to change the flag that stood there. Years later I realized I could park in Dunmore and make the climb from the other side. It was still a long hike, but every step was worth it.
I never got tired of that view.
Eventually I brought my own children there.
They climbed onto the giant rocks while I took pictures. The photographs always make it look as though they’re standing right on the edge, ready to fall into the valley below. It’s only a trick of perspective, but there are places on that mountain where one careless step really could send someone hundreds of feet down.
Somehow that danger only made the place feel more alive.
Those are still some of my favorite photographs.
I’ve always believed northeastern Pennsylvania has the most beautiful sunsets in the world.
The oranges.
The purples.
The pinks.
Every shade of blue you can imagine.
The clouds seem to play with the colors instead of simply reflecting them.
I’ll miss standing on that mountain watching the sun disappear beyond the ridges.
The mountain wasn’t just beautiful.
It was quiet.
You could hear the cicadas.
You could hear birds long before you heard another person.
Whenever life became overwhelming, I knew where to go.
I never went looking for answers.
I never expected the mountain to solve my problems.
I just knew that I always came home feeling lighter than when I had arrived.
For most of my life, I believed that mountain would always be there waiting for me.
In a way, it still is.
For most of my life, I believed that mountain would always be there waiting for me.
In a way, it still is.
One day, years ago now, a few friends and I decided to camp beside one of the old Jessup reservoirs near the pump house.
There wasn’t any special reason for going.
We just wanted to spend a week on the mountain.
Around two o’clock in the morning on the last night we decided to hike to the next reservoir simply because we could. The walk was long and basically totally dark. The only light came from the stars and we didn’t use flashlights for seeing the trail.
When we reached the top of the dam, we sat down in the grass.
I hadn’t seen fireflies in years.
Maybe ten.
Maybe fifteen.
Then I looked down.
The hillside below us was alive.
Thousands of fireflies.
It looked like the stars had fallen from the sky and covered the gully below the dam.
Then I’d look back up.
The night sky was perfectly clear.
Above me were the stars.
Below me were the fireflies.
For a while it became difficult to tell where one sky ended and the other began.
Mickey, my dog, sat beside me the whole time. He loved camping almost as much as I did. We had gone there expecting nothing more than a quiet night beside the water.
Instead, we witnessed one of the most beautiful things nature has ever shown me.
Moments like that are why it’s so difficult to explain what northeastern Pennsylvania means to me.
It was never just the scenery.
It was the freedom.
When I was a kid, the woods surrounded my neighborhood.
They became my kingdom.
I’d ride my bike miles into the valley to meet friends. We’d spend entire days exploring, swimming in the reservoirs or the river, building forts, hiking trails we probably weren’t supposed to be on, and somehow we’d always make it home before dinner.
Looking back, it feels impossible that parents trusted kids with that much freedom.
Maybe those days disappeared everywhere.
I don’t know.
I only know they existed here once.
That freedom shaped me more than I realized at the time.
It taught me to be curious.
It taught me to wander.
It taught me that the best days usually weren’t planned.
You just picked a direction and started walking.
Sometimes you’d find an abandoned railroad grade disappearing into the woods.
Sometimes you’d find an old stone foundation with no obvious history attached to it.
Sometimes you’d stumble across a place so beautiful that you couldn’t believe it existed only a few miles from home.
Those discoveries made me want to know more.
Who built this?
Why was it here?
What happened to the people who once stood where I was standing?
Pennsylvania answered those questions because back then I had nowhere else to look to.
History wasn’t locked behind glass.
It was everywhere.
It was in the coal mines.
It was in the railroads.
It was in the old company towns.
It was in the forests slowly reclaiming what people had left behind.
Even the way we spoke belonged to this place.
We have our own language.
Ask someone around here, “Heyna or no?” and they’ll know exactly what you mean.
It simply means, “Isn’t that right?”
Little phrases like that don’t seem important while you’re growing up.
Everyone says them.
Everyone understands them.
It’s only when you begin thinking about leaving that you realize they were part of home all along.
For years I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Why would I leave a place that had given me mountains to climb, history to explore, forests to disappear into, and memories that still feel as vivid today as they did when they happened?
At the time, leaving never crossed my mind.
I thought home was permanent.
I hadn’t yet realized that places can change just as much as people do.
At first, the changes were so gradual that I barely noticed them.
A few trees disappeared.
A new development went up.
A trail I used to walk suddenly ended at a fence.
It didn’t happen all at once.
It happened little by little.
When I was growing up, my neighborhood was surrounded by woods.
Those woods were part of everyday life. They weren’t parks or attractions. They were simply where we went. We’d disappear for hours, explore places we’d never seen before, and somehow always find our way home.
Little by little that started to change.
The woods disappeared.
Developments took their place.
Every year another patch of forest was cleared.
There are still pockets of woods left, but they’re shrinking.
The places where I wandered as a kid don’t all exist anymore.
It wasn’t just my neighborhood.
It happened on the mountains too.
Little by little, the places we had always been free to explore became places where we suddenly needed permission to enter.
More fences.
More gates.
More “No Trespassing” signs.
So many police or security cards.
More places where police would show up simply because someone reported a person on the mountain or they simply saw us on the camera systems that they installed.
It stopped mattering whether you were hiking, photographing wildlife, sitting beside a waterfall, or watching the sunset.
The assumption became that you didn’t belong there.
As a kid, those mountains felt like they belonged to everyone.
As an adult, they felt like they belonged to whoever owned the property surrounding them.
The mountains themselves hadn’t changed.
The relationship people had with them had.
For a while, I thought that was what I was mourning.
I thought I missed the forests.
I thought I missed the mountains.
I thought I missed northeastern Pennsylvania.
Then it finally hit me.
I’m not really missing a place.
I’m missing a time.
I’m missing a world where kids disappeared into the woods all day and came home when the streetlights came on.
I’m missing a world where history felt like something you could stumble across instead of something you had to search for.
I’m missing a world where the mountains felt like they belonged to everyone.
That world exists now mostly in memory.
The Pennsylvania that raised me shaped who I became.
Some of those lessons were beautiful.
Some were painful.
But it isn’t the same place anymore.
And neither am I.
In a few days, I’ll board a plane and begin a new life in Oregon.
A younger version of me would never have believed I could leave this place.
Today, I know that leaving doesn’t mean forgetting.
I’ll still remember the sunsets from Moosic Mountain.
I’ll still remember the dwarf forests.
I’ll still remember the glaciers that scratched their signatures into the stone.
I’ll still remember the forgotten reservoirs, the old gravity railroad, the cliffs overlooking the valley, and one perfect summer night when the stars above and the fireflies below became impossible to tell apart.
Those memories aren’t going anywhere.
They’re part of me now.
That’s why this isn’t really a goodbye to Pennsylvania.
It’s a goodbye to the version of home that lives in my memory.
And maybe that’s what growing up really is.
Not finding a new home.
But carrying the old one with you wherever you go.
Maybe that’s why leaving has felt so strange.
People keep asking me if I’m excited.
I am.
They ask if I’m nervous.
I am.
What they don’t usually ask is what it feels like to leave the place that taught you who you were.
The truth is, I don’t think anyone ever really leaves home.
We carry it with us.
We carry the roads we learned to drive.
The trails we learned to hike.
The words we didn’t realize were local until someone looked at us with a confused expression.
The places where we laughed.
The places where we cried.
The places that quietly became part of us.
For me, that place will always be northeastern Pennsylvania.
It gave me a love of history.
It gave me a love of the outdoors.
It gave me mountains to climb, forests to wander, and sunsets that I’ll spend the rest of my life comparing every other sunset to.
It also taught me something I didn’t understand until much later.
Nothing stays the same.
Not places.
Not people.
Not us.
For years I believed I could never leave because I thought leaving meant abandoning the place that made me.
Now I understand something different.
The Pennsylvania that raised me isn’t something I can leave behind.
It travels with me.
Every lesson.
Every trail.
Every overlook.
Every forgotten railroad grade.
Every quiet walk through the dwarf forest.
Every glacier’s mark carved into the stone.
Every summer evening filled with cicadas.
Every firefly.
They’re all coming with me.
In a few days, I’ll wake up nearly three thousand miles from the valley where I grew up.
The mountains will have different names.
The forests will smell different.
The sunsets will fall over a different horizon.
I’ll learn new roads.
I’ll find new trails.
I’ll build a new life.
But a part of me will always belong to the place that first taught me to look up at a mountain and wonder what waited on the other side.
This essay isn’t a goodbye to Pennsylvania.
It isn’t even a goodbye to Moosic Mountain.
Mountains don’t need us to remember them.
They’ll still be there long after I’m gone.
This is a goodbye to a season of my life.
To the little girl I didn’t yet know I was.
To the boy everyone else believed I was.
To the valley that gave both of them a place to grow.
The next chapter begins in Oregon.
But this one—
this one will always belong to Pennsylvania.