The Town that Sold its Sunset

Rising above Pennsylvania's fertile river valleys, an ancient Appalachian ridgeline abuts the town of Palmerton. At the base of this corroded mountain, the day's dying rays seem to linger long after sunset. Mountain-veiled dusk swaths a town where people still know each other's names, attend the community festival in August, and root for the high school football team, the "Bombers." Many residents see nothing wrong with Palmerton. And little is wrong—except that the town and surrounding mountain are poisoned.

The mountain above Palmerton is bare. Its trees are dead, its wildlife has fled, and with each rain its dark soil flows down open earthen arteries. Some town yards nurse not even a blade of grass. Instead, townspeople hold Fourth of July barbeques on backyards of blacktop, bark chips and Astroturf. Louise Calvin's yard was once one of these areas.

On a warm day in April, I meet Louise Calvin in a small diner near her hometown and not far from my hometown. She introduces herself and asks that I call her Louise. As she speaks to me, she looks past the droning lights and the dull metal shell of the café, over the homes and the gray-granite graveyards, past the onion-dome churches and sky-slicing smokestacks to the heart of Palmerton—a rust-red zinc smelter.

Palmerton was born to refine zinc. Its houses and churches cluster around an industry that melts rock for the metal within. From 1898 until 1980, Palmerton's people fed ore to the town smelter. With each passing year, its stacks belched lead, cadmium, arsenic, and zinc—smelting's toxic by-products—across the town and valley. Pollution from zinc smelting has now put Palmerton on the United States Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) list of the most contaminated places in the country. But many of Louise's neighbors disagree with the agency. The dangerous levels of lead in their homes, some residents say, came from old lead paint on their walls. It could not have come, they say, from their jobs.

A photograph in Louise's mother's high school yearbook from 1939 shows a forested mountain overlooking a wilderness town. The trees of sixty years ago grew so dense that at sunset the mountain appeared washed in a subdued midnight blue against a polychrome sky. For this reason, people called the ridge "Blue Mountain." But the mountain above Palmerton no longer shimmers blue at day's end. Today the treeless mountain has faded to gray. A yearbook picture is all Louise has to remind her that the mountain once grew trees. During the 1930s the smelter's researchers developed something called Leafox-200, a zinc oxide product that prevents mold and fungus on houseplants. The product worked better than expected. As smelter smoke spread Leafox-200's ingredients throughout the valley, an area surrounding Palmerton's zinc smelter twice the size of Manhattan has been defoliated, denuded, and destroyed.

The town continues to operate under a dusty veil. People awake to sun streaks on corroding smelter stacks. Babies crawl across Astroturf lawns. Nurses draw blood from young children to test for lead contamination. Residents work on at the smelter. People endure in this town without a view—a town that long ago sold its sunset.

I grew up a few miles south of Palmerton on the other side of Blue Mountain. In the lee of the mountain, my home was shielded from Palmerton's poisoned wind. But one day at the age of twelve, I hiked beyond the mountain's green veil and saw the other side. Now, after many years of researching similar environmental problems, I find myself again on the trail to Palmerton. As I have done so many times before, I travel the road from my house that curls through a notch in the mountain and on toward Palmerton.

From this notch, the mountain stretches southwest...