The man sitting at his kitchen table and telling a story with an uncertain ending pauses for a moment, then rises slowly to his feet and holds onto the back of a chair to steady himself. He’s a tall man, 84 years old, with silver hair brushed back away from his face. His name is Tom Lewis.
Tom glances through a window at his long, looping driveway. He is waiting for a delivery truck that will bring him four tanks of oxygen. He needs the oxygen because his breath is slowly slipping away. Not long ago Tom could hike several miles with his daughter. Now he gets winded while walking to his garage.
For this Tom blames the dark stinking cloud that arrived two years ago and enveloped his four wooded acres near Negley, Ohio. That cloud is also responsible for the blackened fruit that grew on his apple tree the following season, he says. Tom wonders what poisons were in that cloud. Are they now in his garden soil? He vows to never again eat anything grown on his property.
The phone rings. It’s the delivery driver. He’s running late.
That’s OK. Tom is a patient man. Without the oxygen he can’t do much, anyway. Besides, the waiting gives him time to continue following the thread of a story he began several minutes ago.
Among the many consequences of the human-made catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio, is that it seized thousands of disparate life stories and twisted them together into one knot of uncertainty and loss. People caught up in the entanglement had no choice. At 8:54 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 3, 2023, their lives were singular and routine. They were watching TV; they were driving home with a pizza they’d just picked up from a local restaurant; they were talking on the phone; they were playing a video game. Then, a noise. Some described it as metal hitting metal; others said it was a booming sound. A train had tumbled off the tracks.
People stood on their porches in the frigid cold and watched flames light up the night sky on the east side of town. The disjointed braiding of lives had begun.
The knot grew larger and tighter a few days later when local officials, relying on what investigators called “incomplete and misleading information provided by Norfolk Southern officials and contractors,” decided yet more fire was needed to clean things up and get trains rolling again. A toxic black cloud blanketed the region. That’s how the derailment snagged Tom. His house sits 3 miles from the crash site.
So how do you separate a single thread from the knot? Tom Lewis knows. You find where it originates and then follow its weaving path through decades of wonder, love, struggle, laughter and tears. You remember, and then the life regains its singularity, its beauty. The tragedy of the knot reveals itself starkly.
Tom sits back down.
“Where were we?” he asks. “Did I tell you about the crow?”
A town where people make bricks and rivets

The crow entered Tom’s life during the Eisenhower years. Tom was 12, maybe 13 years old.
One day Tom’s two older brothers, Larry and Ralph, whom everyone called Buddy, scampered out of the woods, excited to be holding a baby crow. They took it home and fed it bread and water until it was big enough to eat other food. Then Tom and his brothers fed the crow whatever was on the family menu.
The crow lived in a cage on the porch of the Lewis home in Fallston, Pennsylvania, a pork chop-shaped borough of a few hundred people in Beaver County. The boys left the cage door open. The bird was free to come and go. It had the run of the town.
Tom says the crow was amazing. A bus rolled through Fallston every day, taking people across the Beaver River and into New Brighton. The crow didn’t like the bus. The bird would zoom past the windshield, then land on the roadway directly in front of the approaching vehicle. The driver would slam on the brakes, honk the horn, but it had no effect. The driver had to exit the bus to wave his hands in the air and shout. Then the crow flapped away.
Who knows what the crow was thinking? Maybe it felt protective of the small community that was providing its food and shelter. Fallston was the crow’s domain. The bird soared over the students lined up to enter the elementary school on Beaver Street and the weary working men wandering into the Back Door Tavern a few blocks away. It perched on the trees overlooking the field where the Lewis brothers and their friends played baseball and horseshoes. It could follow them down to the Beaver River, where the boys tossed fishing lines into the water.
In the mornings, perhaps the crow recognized the man walking downhill toward a brick factory on Route 51. This would be the brothers’ father, Frank, his hands and fingers covered in adhesive tape. Frank stacked bricks into kilns all day. The work shredded gloves. Tape worked best, so before leaving the house Frank wrapped his hands in layer after layer of the stuff, enough to survive the day.
After hours, homeless men wandered into the brickyard where they could warm themselves by the hot kilns. Sometimes the men walked into town and asked residents for food — an apple, maybe, or a sandwich.
One Sunday at noon a man approached the Lewis home. The family was eating its traditional Sunday dinner. Sarah Lewis, the brothers’ mother, treated the man well. She set up a table on the porch and brought the man a plate of food. From then on, he became a weekly visitor — and the family’s only visitor. He arrived always at noon on Sunday. He told other men to stay away from the Lewis home; that was his.
The crow never pooped on its own roof, only that of a neighbor (which did little to enhance neighborly relations). It flapped over the squat factory building on the northern end of town, where it could watch workers stream through the doors before their shifts. During World War II, Sarah Lewis joined the throng entering the Townsend Co. factory, which produced the rivets holding together the U.S. military machine. Frank did his part for Uncle Sam. He took a respite from stacking bricks to work at a Curtiss-Wright factory that manufactured propeller blades.

Steam-powered trains roared along tracks that cut through Fallston. The vibrations rattled the Lewis family’s cupboards, inspiring plates and cups and saucers to pirouette and sashay as if in some slow motion dance. Every now and again Sarah would open the cupboard doors and put everything back in its proper place.
One time Tom and everyone else in town heard a loud “boom.” People headed down to the tracks to discover derailed train cars. Spilled almonds covered the ground. Tom joined his neighbors, scooping up bags of nuts before the railroad police showed up and shooed everyone away. Another time a train crash busted open a car filled with hams, many of which magically wandered to refrigerators throughout Fallston.
Frank Lewis did not own a car or a television set. A neighbor bought a TV, however, and so on Saturday nights the Lewis family would visit and watch fuzzy images of large men in tights grappling in a ring. Saturday night was wrestling night.
Lest we think of the era as quaint, consider this:
One October day in 1951, a father named William Gillespie sat in the living room of his home on Beaver Street, a quarter of a mile from the Lewis residence, and browsed through a newspaper. A radio played in the background, but William Gillespie wasn’t paying much attention to the broadcast. Then came the voice of a Marine. William Gillespie looked up from his newspaper. The marine described a battle half a world away in Korea. His words speared William Gillespie. “They got our medic Bob Gillespie,” the marine said. “It was a machine gun that downed him, through the lungs. Terrible, terrible.”
In that way William Gillespie learned the manner in which his son had died. Losses like this reverberated through tiny Fallston.
Five years later, on Sunday night, Nov. 18, 1956, a state police cruiser pulled to a stop in front of the Lewis home. Tom, then 16, and his younger sister Carol were watching TV in the family’s living room. The trooper knocked on the front door. Frank answered.
“Do you have a son named Larry Lewis?” the trooper asked. Frank said yes.
“I’ve got some bad news. He was killed in a car accident.”
Tom’s sister wept.
Larry was a passenger in a car that slammed into the back of a semitractor-trailer rig moving slowly up a hill on Route 51 in Chippewa, Pennsylvania. He died of head injuries. Larry was 18 and newly married. He and his wife were expecting a baby.
The loss devastated Frank and Sarah. The level of grief heaped upon the Lewis household increased in the next year. Frank’s mother, Minerva, who lived a few blocks away, died seven months after Larry was buried. Then Frank’s brother Ralph died.
Tom was preparing to hunt with a friend in Chippewa early in the morning of Nov. 28, 1957. Frank was scheduled to join them. His friend’s phone rang. It was Tom’s mother. “You better come home,” she said.
By the time Tom arrived home, his father had died. He’d suffered a heart attack while still in bed.
Entering a world careening toward crisis

Teenagers in Fallston attended New Brighton High School, across the Beaver River. The school had no cafeteria, so at lunch Tom and his Fallston friends would bolt out of school, run down 13th Street in New Brighton and hitchhike across the bridge and into Fallston. Tom’s mother would have a sandwich or soup waiting for him at home.
One classmate, Frances Jean Howe, caught Tom’s attention. Everyone called her Jean. She and Tom often talked in class. Tom was good at math. Jean wasn’t, so Tom would help her out. He didn’t ask her on a date, though, because Jean always seemed to be dating someone else.
At the time, Tom worked in the produce department of an Ambridge grocery store. One day, he saw Jean and her mother in the store, so he approached them. He and Jean talked briefly. That was the opening Tom needed. He asked her out. Dates became a regular thing. They couple would drive to the Pittsburgh airport and walk around; they’d go to a drive-in movie theater. The relationship continued after Tom joined the U.S. Navy in 1960. On three-day leaves, he’d hitchhike home from Norfolk, Virginia, to see Jean.
The Navy trained Tom to be an “interior communication electrician.” He worked with a team operating a ship’s alarm, communication and navigation systems.
He did his share of grunt duty. Once he spent hours checking the bearings and wiring of a ship’s diesel-powered generator. The generator, 12 feet long, was one of two housed in a small room of metal — metal walls, flooring and ceiling. The second generator continued its shrieking while Lewis worked. For days after, Lewis’ hearing was shot. It finally returned, but he’s been haunted by a constant ringing in his ears ever since.

Jean took a job near Washington, D.C. Tom visited every chance he got. The two married in the nation’s capital on Saturday, July 14, 1962, under the soaring bell tower of the Church of the Pilgrims. It was a small ceremony, with only mothers and sisters and a cousin or two in attendance.
Three months later, Tom was back at sea — on the front lines of one of the most terrifying moments in world history.
For Americans accustomed to the comforts of “The Andy Griffith Show” and Spam casserole, 13 days in October 1962 offered a stark lesson: One man could throw a tantrum and turn the world’s beloved cities into piles of cinders. During the Cuban missile crisis, Tom manned an array of switches in a control room deep in the bowels of the USS Newport News. The heavy cruiser served as flagship during the blockade that kept Soviet ships away from Cuba until the crisis passed.

After finishing his obligation to Uncle Sam, Tom stayed in the D.C. area, working for a company that provided and maintained audio systems. Life happened.
One day in 1965, Tom lost control of his Volkswagen Beetle while negotiating a bend on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The car spun into the grassy median, plunged into oncoming traffic and collided with, luckily, another lightweight Beetle. Tom doesn’t remember the details of what happened; he simply recalls picking himself up in the grassy media, 75 feet from his car. He suffered broken ribs and vertebrae in his lower back, plus a few scratches. Doctors wrapped him in a body cast that made him look like a turtle. He rested for a week to recover, then returned to work.

Tom wore a tuxedo while working at a dinner at the National Press Club for then-President Lyndon B. Johnson and helped operate the massive audio system his employer set up for a 1967 anti-war march that started at the Lincoln Memorial. The protest ended at the Pentagon, which anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman vowed to levitate with psychic energy.
People now know the event as The March on the Pentagon. It was the first major national protest of the Vietnam War. The day’s most famous picture shows a protester placing a flower in a soldier’s rifle. Tom didn’t pay much attention to the speeches and the chants — he remained focused on his job.
Seven months later, Washington, D.C., erupted in flames after the assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Tom drove through the city while collapsed buildings continued to smolder. He was working.
Son Tommy was born at Prince William Hospital in 1958. Tom and Jean both missed their families, so in 1969 they packed up and moved back to Western Pennsylvania. Tom worked in the control room of a Youngstown, Ohio, TV station for a bit, then landed a gig installing and repairing meters for Duquesne Light.
Within a few years, Tom and Jean were expecting a second child. The baby was two weeks overdue, so on March 6, 1971, a doctor induced Jean. When Jean went into labor, the doctor turned to Tom and said, “Let’s go, it’s time to deliver.” Tom figured he’d be watching through a window — he never expected to be in the room while his second child entered the world.
Jean was lying on a wheeled table. “Hold it steady. Don’t let it move,” the doctor said to Tom.
Tom watched as the baby arrived. The doctor flipped a finger against the soles of the baby’s feet. The baby remained silent. The doctor tried a second time. Still no crying.
He called out to two nurses in the next room, “Get over here right now!’
One nurse suctioned fluid from the baby’s lungs. The doctor performed CPR on the child.
“She’s got good color,” the doctor said to Tom. “Don’t worry.”
Finally, Tom heard a wail.
Tom and Jean named their second child Julie.
Happiness, and then the rough period

For the next few decades, Tom and Jean raised their children and moved around, always staying near the Pennsylvania/Ohio border. Son Tommy raced motorcycles as a teenager. Father and son worked together to modify Tommy’s bikes and make them more competitive. Sometimes the Lewis family pulled a camper to races. Jean and Julie played cards while Tom helped his son.
Once the children were grown, Tom and Jean bought a small house on 4 acres just outside of Negley, Ohio. The house is surrounded by trees. Deer visit often. Jean collected dolls, which she displayed in a cabinet. If a visitor commented on a particular doll, Jean was apt to give it to them. Tom didn’t mind. It made Jean happy.
Jean’s health declined more than a decade ago. At times her blood pressure plummeted dangerously. Tom would rush her to an emergency room. Jean developed a disorder called essential tremor, which is sometimes confused with Parkinson’s disease. She endured extended hospital stays. It wore her out. In the summer of 2017, she told Tom she was done with the hospital. By then she could not walk. “I’m sick of this,” she told Tom.
He pleaded with her: “Let’s at least see if doctors can do anything for you.” She relented. Tom pushed her in a wheelchair to his car and drove her to a hospital in Beaver.
There, doctors diagnosed Jean with pneumonia. She’d probably not survive the night, one doctor told Tom. Jean said she’d had enough and was ready to die. And so she did, early in the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2017. She was 75 years old and was survived by her children and five grandchildren. She and Tom had been married 55 years.
Tom doesn’t say much about his wife’s death other than to say it was a rough period.
‘What’s going to happen to me?’

On Tuesday morning, Feb. 7, 2023, Tom rose from bed, opened his front door to let his dogs out and there it was — the black cloud, so thick that it seemed to have swallowed his property. It completely obscured the view of his barn 150 feet away. The air smelled of burnt plastic. Tom closed the door and called his daughter, Julie, who lives near Carrollton, Ohio.
“Dad, we’re coming to get you,” she said.
Tom packed a bag of clothes and some supplies for his pets. There was Juice, a boxer, and a Pomeranian named Teddy, plus two cats, Bushy Tail and Velvet.
Julie and her husband, Paul, arrived before noon, then began loading supplies into their pickup truck and Lewis’ 2014 Chevy Malibu. Lewis walked through the smoke, but by the time he arrived at his car, he’d become lightheaded. Feeling he was about to lose consciousness, Lewis slumped down into the seat of his vehicle. Julie, who’d developed a headache shortly after arriving, rushed over to him.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
Tom shook his head. “No,” he said.
Julie helped him back inside the house, where he stayed while she and Paul finished loading the vehicles with supplies and pets. Paul then drove Lewis in the Malibu as the two vehicles caravanned to Carrollton.
By the time they arrived, Juice’s eyes had swelled shut. In the unfamiliar Carrollton house, the boxer bumped into walls and furniture. After a few days, the swelling decreased but the pup’s eyes turned blood red. After four days the swelling cleared up and the dog’s eyes seeped liquid.
Teddy, the Pomeranian, developed issues, too. Lewis would let him out for bathroom breaks, but Teddy would do nothing but sit on the sidewalk for as long as two hours. He seemed confused. This continued for months.
Back at Lewis’ home, deer wandering through his yard wouldn’t touch the black apples that fell from his apple tree. Lewis always maintained a garden; now he didn’t trust the soil.
After several months, Lewis’ breath began slipping away. He developed difficulty with his balance. His throat became sore, and he had trouble swallowing. Lewis says he had to take a sip of water after every bite while eating. A physician diagnosed him with acid reflux and prescribed medication, which seems to have solved the problem. A biopsy revealed that a growth in his throat was not cancerous.
Now he wonders, “In the long range, what’s going to happen to me?”
‘Doesn’t anything ever change?’

Trains rolled into the Lewis family story more than 150 years ago.
The connection starts with Tom’s great-grandfather Joshua Lewis, born around 1830 and the son of a Beaver County farmer. By age 30, Joshua had moved 200 miles south to Mason County in what was then Virginia. He had a wife, Lucy, and four young children. Joshua worked as a farmhand.
Then the country exploded. South Carolina’s militia fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861. A week later, Virginia seceded from the Union. This didn’t go over well in several of the state’s western counties, such as Mason, which borders Ohio. Mason County voted overwhelmingly against secession and would soon become part of newly formed West Virginia.
Three months after the referendum, in August 1861, Joshua traveled to Parkersburg, West Virginia, and enlisted in the Union army. So did his younger brother Nathaniel, who’d traveled south with him.
The Lewis brothers served in Company G of the 6th West Virginia Infantry Regiment. Records list Joshua Lewis as a musician. Whether he was a fifer, bugler or drummer is unknown. Brother Nathaniel served as a private.
The regiment’s primary duty: protection of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Confederate raiders tried to wreak havoc on the line. During one engagement in New Castle, West Virginia, the Lewis brothers’ company “behaved with conspicuous gallantry,” according to Union army records.
By 1880, Joshua was done with farming and West Virginia. He and his family were living in New Brighton and Josuha became a coal miner.
News of his great-grandfather’s Civil War experience surprised Tom. The feds looking out for the interests of a railroad company? Tom laughed.
“Doesn’t anything ever change?” he asked.
Making it through another week
As Tom finishes his story, a vehicle crunches its way along his driveway. Minutes later, a delivery man stomps the snow off his boots and enters Tom’s house. He carries with him four tanks of oxygen that clink together when he sets them on the floor.
“I’d feel more comfortable if you could leave two more” Tom says. “I was on my last bottle. I barely made it through last week with just the four.”
The delivery man returns to his vehicle.
“I have no complaints about my life,” Tom says. “I wasn’t an executive or something, but I had a good job. We had a vacation every year, usually to Florida, the Orlando area, because my sister lived there. We never worried about where tomorrow’s money was going to come from. I was always comfortable with that.”
The delivery van pulls away. Six bottles of oxygen sit upright in Tom’s living room.
Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.