Beneath The Yellow Line, The Story of the Moran Life on the Land
- Engage Mountain Maryland
- May 8
- 13 min read
Written by Susan Gordon | Photography by Brandon Moffitt
November 19-December 2, 2024
Originally published on StopMPRP.com, Susan Gordon captures a compelling story of a family who sought to live off the grid, embracing nature as their neighbor, friend, and caregiver. Suddenly, the Moran family finds themselves battling to save their generational utopia from power infrastructure and bureaucracy, which sees this special place differently and its inhabitants as expendable.
Western Maryland residents are facing a similar struggle with the Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link (MARL) transmission lines, slated for completion by 2031. The Morans provide valuable insight as to what to expect as the land agents, surveyors, and engineers site untouched wildlands and privately owned patches of wilderness for development.
Matt Moran was speaking to me by phone as he and his mom, Terri, walked up the hill to join his dad, and Matt’s wife, Zana, on the deck of the elder Moran home. It was their joined voices, the pictures they painted for me of the sun slipping behind the trees, and the call of bird song that pulled me deep into their history and their life on this long-chosen land.
Frank Moran described himself as “an original back-to-the-lander, one of the first people off-the-grid,” if not in Maryland, then in Frederick County. He spoke about growing up and moving around in a Marine Corps family, always, even then, seeking the wild places, of having, as he said, “an exasperation to know things, to hike out and find my way back.”
Terri said Frank knew the love of the land long before they found this stretch of hardwoods, springhead, stream, and seep in the early 70s. Terri said they would drive out every weekend to find land, and then they found this 40-acre “chunk,” as Frank called it, that has always been sacred to them. This forest of oaks, beech, hickory, tulip poplar, maples, and its cool, narrow creek had such a pull that Frank and Terri’s grown sons, Matt and Pat, returned with their wives and children to also build their own homes on this land.
Frank and Terri built their home themselves. They needed help to dig the well and set the footers for the house; everything else they did with their own hands, steeped in practical knowledge they had gleaned, bit by bit, from others. The only electricity they had was from the solar panels they placed on the roof. Frank called it a “twelve-volt system,” so they gave up size in their appliances, but they had them, a smaller oven and refrigerator. Their well provided water; so, did the clean spring. They heated by woodstove and Frank said that he “never cut a living tree, just the dead ones that needed to come down.” And he was careful in how he felled them, so they dropped clear of the growing trees. He also said he heated water by a process others call dangerous, “but I haven’t had a bit of trouble with it in 50 years.”
And then Frank began to speak about the 50 years he has lived here and everyone chimed in.
“You get to need open space,” Frank began. “You grow used to it. You become more and more in harmony” with every living thing around you. “The trees become brothers and sisters because you are living among them. It is incredibly quiet here, not even an electrical hum. The silence is this deep.” Matt said, “We’ve seen eagles scoping out the trees.” Zana added, “There was a raven’s nest back a few years ago. A lot of wildness here…” And someone said, “wood thrushes” describing their “distinctive, beautiful, musical call.” Terri said, “They fly to South America but they come back like clockwork.” “When,” I asked, and everyone spoke at once, “April 24th.”
I asked Terri what brought her here, and she laughed and said, “Following Frank,” and then she began to speak of how this land, this quiet place, changed the way she teaches. That is when I learned all four people speaking with me were teachers. Frank was an art teacher. Matt is an art teacher. Zana teaches geography and anthropology.
Terri said, as an English teacher, she always had the students keep nature journals. Sometimes she asked them to listen for “the sound of snow when it hits the ground,” a sound she knew well from living in these deep woods in winter. Her students were incredulous. They didn’t believe that sound existed; they had never heard snow touch the ground. The homes and the suburban communities where the students lived were full of noise even on the quietest days.
Terri told her class, “Go find a spot with green, with plants, trees, or bushes. A small square of earth in nature’s place.” She asked them to “go once a week, to sit, listen, watch, and write a page.” She added, “I would ask for a volunteer to read in class. I never forced anyone to read.”
Terri never insisted that the students learn to hear snow. Instead, she invited them to hear what they could hear in the little spaces they had found in their neighborhoods. She said, “some of them thought it was silly, others probably made things up, but some, some were changed by this practice. It taught them how to orient, how to find the sunrise or sunset,” to find a direction, to find those little quiet places in their own lives. As adults they came back and told her.
Terri closed by saying, “I was teaching them deep listening, something I think I learned from Annie Dillard, who sat and listened to Tinker Creek and wrote about that experience day by day (1). And I did that listening journal with the students,” because “you never ask a student to do something you won’t do yourself.”
Frank returned to the gifts he and his family had been given by living on these forty acres. “We were lucky to find this place. You can’t imagine everything that can be found here: bear, deer, raccoon, grey fox, red fox, coyotes, porcupines, quail, eagles, osprey, hawks …” his voice trailed off and picked up again. “We are fifteen minutes from downtown Frederick, and it feels like we are in the mountains of West Virginia.”
Zana said quietly, “I have been keeping an ongoing list of every living thing that we have identified here,” and she began listing trees, mushrooms, all types of reptiles, ferns, mosses, other birds, every plant they forage. I asked, “Ramps?” “Oh yes,” everyone answered, all of us thinking of those sharp broad leaf onions that rise green in the early spring, and Frank said, “you take a few leaves, usually from the center, but never the bulb, so it can fill back in every year.”
Zana said she would send me her list and I found it on my computer that evening. Every species, divided by type, hundreds of them. She said, “I don’t have them all. I find something new almost every day.” She shared that her children had grown from youngsters to adults on this land, and, even with a lifetime here, “if you were paying attention, there was always a new discovery” to be found on this 40-wooded acres.
And then sadly, we turned to the reason for our conversation. The proposed PSEG transmission lines will cross the Moran property, transmission lines for a kind of energy they had intentionally declined for decades. And now there was a different listing, a deleterious listing, of all that will be lost if the Maryland Public Service Commission approves these lines.
“We have an upland wetland,” Matt said. “We have a spring that feeds our stream that feeds the Monocacy. Headwaters to delta, an entire stream on this piece of forested land. If the power lines come through, the hardwoods will be clear-cut, pulling shade from the cold-water creek” and turning it into sun warmed stream, killing all the species in it that need the cold water. “With the trees gone, and no roots to hold the earth, sediment will fill the creek.”
Matt said, “The lines will cross approximately 120 feet from my parents’ home. Where it is routed, the bunkhouse where my brother and I slept for much of our childhood will be torn down. With the bunkhouse gone, the lines will steal the only accessible bedroom for my mom and dad; leaving only a loft for sleeping in the home they built.”
And then Matt said, “When they drill the pilings up here for the transmission tower; and those go deep, they could kill the spring. And when they punch down through our seeps, they could drain the creek. There won’t be a cool creek to bring cold water to the Monocacy. These are critical tributaries up here. When they get disturbed, they alter the terrain and the hydrology. The nearby Bennett Creek watershed has been protected from development for generations by Montgomery and Frederick Counties.” There is a concern that Frederick County may be ignoring its own policies.
He spoke again of the trees he has known since childhood. “The trees will get wiped out; they will clear 150-foot path. Some of the trees around here are 12 to 16 feet in circumference. The last time there was any logging up here, it was nearly 90 years ago, in the 1930s. Logging changes the ecology. Once they cut the trees down, they will keep it cleared, and all the carbon sequestration that has occurred here for 90 years will be lost.”
They described the changing light as we moved from late afternoon to dusk, the breeze lifting the remaining yellow leaves of the smooth-trunked beech, the red and brown leaves of the white and black oak. In the background, I could hear the call of a single bird. Frank raised the question, “What does one tree do? What is the ecological impact of one mature oak? And then he spoke of the latest science, and “how the trees are connected by one big system,” roots, fungi, mitochondria. They spoke of an American chestnut, affected by the blight a hundred years ago, and how they nursed this one last chestnut along until it died in their woods just a few years ago.
And then Matt spoke of the cooling effect of the trees, that driving up into the forest, the air drops by at least 10 degrees, “you can feel a cool blast of air coming down the hill.” He added that “Frank and Terri have never had air conditioning; they have utilized the forest for cooling.” But with towers 120 feet from their home, their land clear-cut, that cool sanctuary will be a furnace.
Zana spoke of all the species loss that will occur if the power lines are approved by the PSC. She listed the animals and birds who would no longer have a safe home in this forest, speaking of the migrating thrush who needs a hundred acres of canopy to thrive and who returns to this forest every spring. And then she added, “We forage here. This land contributes to our meals everyday: fiddlehead, mushrooms, ramps, venison, paw-paws, huckleberries, wineberries, blackberries, raspberries.” Zana said, “This land helps to feeds nine people.” She spoke of all the ways they preserve these fresh things to carry them through the winter, naming a favorite, paw-paw bread.
Matt pointed out, that he and his brother had built their own homes here, “and we weren’t allowed to build on steep slopes because the county didn’t want erosion. So, if we can’t build on steep slopes, why can a power company from New Jersey, put their towers here?”
“These towers worry me. They are monstrous. I think they could mess up the pollinators and the ways they navigate. Flowers communicate to the bees; they give off a kind of radiation that lets the bee know which flowers still needs pollination. That communication could be wrecked by the humming radiation of the power lines. Pollinators aren’t just needed for crops; they are needed for the trees in the forest.”
I asked them to calculate their losses and they realized they had already listed them, the destruction of a creek, springhead to river delta, a clearcutting of their forest, the loss of so many species relying on that water and those trees, the destruction of a bunkhouse, a transmission line 120 feet from Frank and Terri’s home, the complete up-ending of a significant food source. They had trouble adding up the financial ruin, land and three homes holding 3 generations and nine people devalued by half.
Then they began to speak individually, Frank asking, “Is there not another way?” He added, “It would be hard to be civil to them. They should be paying us for the pain and suffering they are causing. Every one of us has lost sleep. This distress is affecting people’s health and marriages.”
Terri said, “I want them to know that we are grieving. Once you live here…” and her words dwindled off, the unspoken already told.
Zana added, “People say ‘nothing is out here.’ And I am answering, No, this is a place where everything is.”
This forty acres is a place of abundance for everything that finds a home here: trees, the creek, fish, reptiles, birds, bees, butterflies, beasts large and small, bears to chipmunks. It is a refuge for three generations of the Moran family. This is a place that provides for them so well that they fill their supper plates here.
Zana went on, “Frank and Terri’s place is so small. PSEG used a basemap image that was taken in the summertime. Can they see the house or the bunkhouse with the leaves on the trees? Do they really not know we are here? We are here.”
And those words were taken up. “We are here. We are here. We are here.”
And Zana added, “Just like the Dr. Seuss book where the Whos in Who-ville are calling out to Horton the Elephant, ‘We are here.’” Horton chooses to protect this whole living world as small as a bit of fluff, because, indeed, the Whos have their home there.
Matt described the home he and Zana had built almost from scratch, timber construction, hauling in fieldstone for the foundation, going to auctions to find windows and doors, building a house partially from the salvage of others' waste. And hanging over a bench, is a carving of an eagle with a clutch of arrows in his talons. His dad, Frank, carved that raptor from wood found on the property.
And that eagle represents every fierce effort the Moran family is making to bring attention to their existence on this wild forty acres. They have attended most of the PSEG meetings, as well as the IW2 meetings on the placement of data centers in this county, and numerous meetings with community stakeholders. Matt and Zana pointed out that their land is within the protected Sugarloaf Region of Frederick County, “a treasured area of ecological significance,” in which there was to be “limited development, nothing industrial,” and now Planning and Zoning appears to have taken a different tack. They have written to the Public Service Commission to let them know that this rushed MPRP plan is ill-conceived, that the PSC should be working with the local municipalities, with the State and local governments and listening to the cries of its affected citizens: “We are here.”
They pointed out that the governor, Wes Moore, had not expressed genuine concern about the environment when the transmission lines were proposed. Governor Moore also invited data centers into Maryland, just as many other governors did in blue and red states across the country, because it was thought they would be a source of revenue. But now, article after article has documented that data centers, for whom these transmission lines are being proposed, are taking up a city’s and, sometimes, a state’s entire electrical grid that should be serving the needs of its people. And that there is not enough water to cool them (2.) (3.) (4).
The data centers in Loudoun County refused to build their own energy on-site. Profits ruled over human need. It was decided that the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MARL), tearing up 70 miles of communities and farms for transmission lines, would be their power source. Whole communities will lose half their value. Children will be exposed to radiation that can cause leukemia. (5, 6.) Agri-businesses may be uninsurable. (7.) Wetlands and other environmental areas, and the species that depend upon them, will be destroyed. The cost of providing energy to data centers will also show up on every ratepayer’s bill in Maryland.
The four data centers that want to set their behemoth, vibrating, buzzing concrete warehouses in Frederick County are already pushing against the regulations created by the county workgroup and themselves. (8.)
The whole world is pushing to see who will dominate this AI industry. Stephen Hawkings and Carl Sagan and the safety experts of ChatGPT have spoken of the dangers that could be unleashed. “Ex-employees (of ChatGPT) went public with a scathing letter.
"We joined OpenAI because we wanted to ensure the safety of the incredibly powerful AI systems the company is developing. But we resigned from OpenAI because we lost trust that it would safely, honestly, and responsibly develop its AI systems." (9.)
The writer and teacher, Max Regan, wrote, “They tried to warn us of what would happen if we allowed technological culture to overwhelm human culture. The moral decisions that human beings are uncomfortable making, and unable to justify to one another, are too easily outsourced to technology, which has great ability, but no soul whatsoever.” (10.)
Matt and Frank said that their land had been covered in the Washington Post, Home Section, Utility Free Living, A House in the Woods that Works, February 27, 1992. The entire article underlined the ability of folks to live off the grid, in concert with the world around them and independent of transmission lines. The article is also a reflection on the way each person in this family has been both a learner and an educator. Because they have listened in the living silence that wildness brings, the Moran family has been tutored by this land for 50 years. They are also teachers about this upland and forest. They have broken it open, the way a walnut is cracked apart to show the nourishing meat inside, to show everyone who is listening that a deep, rich, interdependent life exists here. Three generations have valued and protected this 40- acres, just as this land has protected and sheltered them. (11.)
We may not realize it, but they are speaking for all of us. Terri knew her students were unlikely to hear snow as it meets the ground, but it didn’t stop her from asking them to listen, to find their own bit of “nature ground” and to hear and touch and see what they could. They are asking the same of us, to listen, to see, to remember what tends and shelters us, and to remember to tend and shelter all that sustains every living thing.
As a people across three Maryland Counties, we are doing that, speaking out about what will be lost and chanting, “Just Say No!”
We have spoken to the elected officials, to the media, to PSEG and PJM and the PSC, insisting “We are here.” We matter more than data centers. We are calling out sleight-of-hand, false narratives, promises made about green energy and climate resilience, which were never the truth.
We demand to be seen. We are insisting that “We are here.” And not just us, here in Maryland; we represent people across the world who are facing this same AI tsunami. (12)
The Moran family is reminding us of what is truly sacred, our interconnectedness, our dependence on each other and the land that sustains us.
We have a chance in Maryland to recognize that truth, to do our part to repair the tears in the weave that holds us together.
“Maybe,” Terri said, “someone will listen, slow it, maybe, Praise God, stop it.”
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974.
The Connection Between Data Center Energy Demands and Our Digital Future, Lauren Hamilton, Interviewed on 1A, WAMU, October 22, 2024.
1. Wertheimer N, Leeper E.1979. Electrical wiring configurations and childhood cancer. Am J Epidemiol. 109 (3). 273-284.
2. Draper G, Vincent T, Kroll ME. 2005. Childhood cancer in relation to distance from high voltage power lines in England and Wales: A case-control study. BMJ. 330(7503). 1290
Frederick News Post, Jacoby, C. Data Centers, Draft Bill on Design Regs Faces Pushback. November 21, 2024
Written Communication between Liza Gaver, Gaver Farms, Inc., and Susan Gordon, December 2, 2024.
Katie Scott, in Tech. Co. wrote in 2023, “Last August, news hit of a mass exodus from the company’s safety team. One former employee said that safety has been sidelined since Altman returned to the top seat.”
Washington Post, Home Section, Utility Free Living, A House in the Woods that Works, February 27, 1992.
Written communication between Susan Gordon and Max Regan, November 22, 2024.
All Things Considered, NPR, December 2, 2024, AI Seeks Advertising.
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