Yesterday I took a walk in the woods with my friend Mary. It was the sort of spur-of-the-moment adventure that only autumn seems to inspire, born over steaming coffee in the soft light of early morning. Mary is a psychologist, a true soul sister, and one of the unexpected treasures this new life in Pennsylvania has handed me. That we found each other at all feels like one of those rare synchronicities life occasionally delivers as proof that we are, indeed, on the right path. Perhaps that is what this book should be about. But I digress.
Our conversation that morning had drifted, to my work with Heritage Johnstown and a film series I’m pitching. Mary, who has an encyclopedic memory for odd and wonderful details, casually suggested we plan a pilgrimage to Livermore Cemetery an hour away and immortalized as one of the filming sites for Night of the Living Dead. (turns out that is a myth, but the Pennsylvanian filmmaker was inspired by it) “It’s going to be out of the blue,” she said in that disarming way of hers, “but we’ll do it this week. Be ready to go at a moment’s notice.” And so, yesterday, as I was brewing over a new project with April, my phone lit up. “Want to take a drive out to Livermore Cemetery? Then grab a quick bite to eat for dinner?”
Two hours later, she scooped me up in Beauty, her white Volvo, and off we went. She drove, which meant I could surrender to the scenery as we talked. Mary once lived along this country road, so she knew every bend and curve. I cannot begin to tell you how breathtaking the Laurel Highlands are in October, if you know, you know. The hills roll like an old quilt stitched with crimson, amber, and evergreen. The woods hum with birds and squirrels. The light on fall afternoons in this part of the world seems to tilt at its own private angle, slower and softer, a living brushstroke across the landscape.
Our first foray from the car took us, unwittingly, in the wrong direction—though as it turned out, it was exactly the right one. We wandered onto an emergency road used by the railroad and the river maintenance crews, crunching through leaves and listening to nature’s own orchestra: birds, wind in the treetops, a soft river murmur, the occasional bicycle rattling past. That detour, I am convinced, was no accident. It was a kind of prelude, a sensory overture preparing us for what we were about to find above the river’s edge.
Livermore Cemetery itself sits high on a hillside, a quiet prospect with a meadow on one side and the Conemaugh River slipping down below. This is no manicured city cemetery with marble gates and rows of clipped hedges. It is a place of unkempt beauty, a patchwork of simple stones and weathered markers. Hemlocks and cedars stand sentinel around the perimeter. Some stones lean, cracked or broken, worn by thinness, weather, and time. Others are hand-hewn, like one in the Hazlett family plot dating back to the mid-1800s. Perhaps a hundred souls rest here, many of them veterans whose flags from Labor Day still flutter, waiting for Veterans Day to arrive. It is profoundly humble and profoundly human.
The quiet irony is that the cemetery is one of the last remnants of the town of Livermore itself. Once a thriving 19th-century canal and mill town, Livermore was abandoned in the 1950s when the Army Corps of Engineers built the Conemaugh Dam. Most of the town now lies beneath the waters of the reservoir. Houses, churches, schools, all drowned for the sake of flood control. Only the cemetery, on its higher ground, survived. It has become a kind of ghostly sentinel, holding space for the memory of the town that vanished beneath the river’s surface. You can feel it when you walk there: the stillness of absence, the echo of lives relocated, the strange grace of a place that refused to be erased.
Standing there, one cannot help but feel the weight and grace of history. Livermore is not unlike Johnstown, another town defined by its relationship with water. Both places remind us that communities are fragile, shaped and reshaped by floods, dams, disasters, and the choices of people far removed from the lives most affected. My work with Heritage Johnstown has already taught me that history is never a dry ledger of facts; it is the story of human resilience, sometimes told in grand buildings, sometimes whispered in forgotten cemeteries.
We walked slowly, reading names and dates, noting the many children whose brief lives were cut short, as was so often the case in the 19th century. How far we have come. I turned to Mary and said, “Isn’t it incredible we are living lives beyond their imagining?” In that moment I felt the truth of it. Even on my most challenging day, my life is luxurious beyond anything my ancestors or even my parents could have dreamed. Even I never dreamed I’d be brave enough at 57 to buy a house on the internet and move all by myself to a new shore.
Despite the location, the experience was not heavy. It was serene. I felt, in the quiet of that cemetery above a drowned town, a kind of shift. As if some piece of me had finally settled. We were careful as we entered to set an intention, to leave only respect behind and to carry nothing away but gratitude. As we walked back to the car, we both said goodbye softly, sending love and peace and a promise to return.
Later, over dinner in Ligonier, everything tasted like heaven. But this is not a story about food. This is about the depth of peace that filled me as I slept last night. I woke, as I often do, several times. Yet not once did an anxious thought creep in. In the morning, on my yoga mat, I realized something simple but transformative: I have been so quick to blame others for upsetting me, without considering the effect I might be having on them. I saw myself as that subatomic particle Wayne Dyer often spoke of, inseparable from the observer, changing as it is observed. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Yesterday, in that quiet hillside cemetery above a vanished town, I saw things differently. I leaned into joy. I let resentments dissolve. I felt connected across time to people who loved and lost and worried and hoped just as I do. And I came home grateful grateful for plumbing and heat, for my car, for my bed with its luxury thread-count sheets, for my phone, for the very fact of friendship and freedom. Even those who don’t love me, I realized, are here to teach me the big lessons.
And so I begin this chapter here, not because Livermore Cemetery is haunted by ghosts, but because it is alive with memory. Because the Laurel Highlands, like my work with Heritage Johnstown, are teaching me that history is not a static thing stored in museums. It is a living force, shaping us, inviting us to listen, to walk quietly, to learn.