In Cat Kemmerling’s dream, she and her husband Rob are sitting in their pickup truck on a cliff on their West Virginia farm, overlooking the Shenandoah River. The truck is falling backwards over the edge, into the abyss below.
An Army engineer who helped dismantle IEDs in Iraq and lives with PTSD, Kemmerling says her old nightmares returned this summer after an organization she had never heard of, calling itself Valley Link, mailed an anodyne flyer announcing plans for a high-voltage transmission line through the heart of the 70-acre farm she and Rob bought in 2018 as a retirement sanctuary.
