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As the Mountains Disappeared

As the Mountains Disappeared

Last updated on: July 17, 2026 at 11:56 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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As the Mountains Disappeared 2026-07-17T23:56:16-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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an orange sun in a smoggy sky, framed by factory chimneys like the ones in Steubenville.

image via Pixabay

The nightmare began when I was sleeping, and it didn’t end when I woke up.

I dreamed I was fighting my way through a maze of dirty rooms in a dank basement that went on forever. There were other creatures in there with me that looked like people, but they weren’t. They were demons who changed shape and tried to bite me if I got too close. I was just beginning to realize that I was never going to get out, when the dream ended. I woke up with my heart pounding in my ears. The room was overheated and too quiet: I’d kicked the book I fell asleep reading off the bed and knocked the air conditioner’s cord out of the socket in my sleep. The sky outside my window was the color of a dirty plaster wall.

It was nearly noon. Charlie the cat, who slipped out to sleep on the porch all night, was sitting crossly on the front porch. I don’t usually let her in any room with carpet; her domain is the yard and the basement. But no living thing deserved to be outdoors in Northern Appalachia, not today. The air was heavy, reeking of wildfire smoke. It hurt my eyes and throat in the time it took me to duck outside for a handful of lettuce for the guinea pig. I let Charlie in with me, and made sure the pig cage was securely covered. “Just be good, all right?”

Charlie stalked around the living room as I checked the weather forecast, and wished I hadn’t. There was a great big purple smear on the map, not rain clouds but clouds of smoke.

The whole of Northern Appalachia was still under that plume of smoke from the wildfires. There was no end in sight.

Maybe Saturday, after the rain, but not today. Today it would be dangerous to go outside for more than a minute.

The cat jumped on the back of the sofa to explore as I scrolled, and worried. A huge swathe of the country is still under the smoke cloud. My friend in Chicago can’t go out at all. Every photo I see from Chicago makes it look like a Noir film, grim gray and ecru instead of in color. A charity that helps the homeless in Columbus near Holly the Witch, is trying to draw attention to the plight of the homeless who live in encampments on the south side. They can’t get in away from the wildfire smoke. They can’t turn on the air conditioner because they don’t have any. They need misting fans, and n-95 masks.

Can you imagine living outside when the air can’t even be breathed?

I went upstairs, and the cat followed. I tried to scroll on my phone instead of the computer, in bed, but Charlie jealously knocked the phone out of my hand. She made herself comfortable on top of me, purring coyly as if she’d been allowed in the bedroom every day of her life.

Even inside, I could smell that smoldering air.

I could smell it through my mask as Adrienne and I got in the car to run errands later.

As we drove up towards Wintersville, we couldn’t see the hills to the north or the Union Cemetery to the south. There was nothing but a wall of ash, as if Steubenville had broken free from the rest of the earth and risen up into the clouds. When we got out of the grocery store, the car was dusty with little blotches of filth that hadn’t been there before. Later, after putting away the groceries, as we drove in the opposite direction to the bridge and Weirton, we could barely see opposite shore of the Ohio. That brown and tan layer cake of shale cliffs a thousand miles away was invisible, as if I had dreamed it. It seemed entirely possible that the bridge had disappeared, and we would fall into the river. But of course, we didn’t.

We got out of the car in Weirton and paid for our tickets to the rec center. Adrienne likes to run on the treadmill after lifting weights, but I much prefer the pool. I swam laps back and forth, under that long stretch of windows that usually let in a bit of sunlight. Today, there wasn’t light, just a stripe of gray-brown sky.

Again, as I have so many times lately, I imagined myself writing down this history for somebody far in the future. But I couldn’t imagine what that person would think. Would they be as shocked as I am, to read my description of the toxic air? Or would they not understand my shock?

A few years ago, when I was taking my driving lessons to get my license late in life, my teacher was an impossibly elderly gentleman who used to live down in Mingo.

He liked to tell stories of the Valley’s history while we drove. He remembered when Steubenville was the place to be, a busy, bustling city with theaters and nightlife. Mingo was much more backward. A lot of houses didn’t even have plumbing: it was his job to empty the chamber pots when the family woke up in the morning. But Steubenville was modern and crowded. He said that, when all of these rotting steel mills were open and the populace was employed, the pollution was omnipresent. Everyone in town had asthma but nobody knew they had asthma, because everybody breathed that noisily, so they thought that noisy breath was normal. Children’s brand new toys from Christmas and their birthdays took on a slimy, dirty look within a week or two, and everyone thought that that was what toys were supposed to do. The Dominican nuns who taught in the Catholic schools wore white habits that started to look gray about halfway through the week, and nobody knew that was abnormal either. When he woke up in the morning in the winter, there’d sometimes be fresh white snow on the ground. He would try and play in it quickly, because by afternoon, the snow would turn gray. This, too, was normal. All of this was just day to day life, decades ago. But it wasn’t normal to me. To me, it was shocking.

And now, here I was, driving on a bridge with no end in sight, marveling at a cloud of pollution.

Will future students of history think that this was shocking?

Will the world continue to deteriorate until this type of chaos becomes normal for them? If anyone reads my words, will they only marvel that I was so surprised to see that a fire burning in Canada stole the state of West Virginia from drivers on a bridge in the State of Ohio?

How long will there even be a Canada, a West Virginia, and a State of Ohio?

Will anyone remember that one summer in the first half of the twenty-first century, the city of Chicago lost all of its color? Will they think about the fact that the homeless in Columbus couldn’t breathe outdoors and begged for masks? Will somebody think about what it must have been like to drive across a bridge, from one shale cliff to another, not seeing the other side but only a cloud of ash? Will anyone ever find these words and think about a small family in a small town that used to be a city, with a cat and a guinea pig and a child who liked books, at the end of the American empire, in a world that was burning to death?

The sun was low and eerie red when we returned to Steubenville.

And it was night.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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