Big News for Breezewood: Man Walks from Gateway Center to Sheetz and Back — and Lives to Tell the Tale

By Turnpike Tom | April 6, 2025

For generations, locals and weary travelers alike have pondered the great mysteries of Breezewood: Why is it laid out like a strip mall inside an M.C. Escher sketch? Is this town a real place or just a gas-powered mirage? What would happen if a person tried to navigate it… on foot?

Well, folks, we may finally have our answer.

On March 9th, Twitter user Henry Cohen (@henryzcohen) shook the internet—at least the small portion of it tuned into Eastern Pennsylvania infrastructure—with a modest but mighty post:

“Just became the first person ever to walk from point A to point B in Breezewood. From Gateway Center to Sheetz and back. Monumental.”

He even documented his path with a series of images—each one more evocative than the last. A triumphant selfie. A solemn mirror pic in the Sheetz bathroom. Roadside vistas bathed in pale sunlight. You could practically hear the hum of tractor-trailers and the whisper of destiny.

Let’s be perfectly clear: Breezewood is not made for walking. The crosswalks—if they exist—are decorative. Breezewood was designed for the motorist, the traveler, the RV enthusiast with a cassette collection and a cooler of questionable hot dogs. It is not, I repeat not, a walker’s paradise.

It’s a place built entirely for throughput. A rest stop masquerading as a town. A highway-side diorama of American consumerism, stitched together by parking lots and eternal left turns. The very concept of walking here feels like a minor act of rebellion—like using a fork at a sushi bar or asking for decaf at a truck stop.

So when Henry decided to walk from the Gateway Center to Sheetz—and then, crucially, back—he wasn’t just strolling. He was defying. Braving multi-lane chaos and automotive suspicion. There’s something poetic about it. A lone man venturing across a landscape built to be driven, not walked.

That’s the kind of tenacity we used to build cities on. The kind of stubborn grit that carved the canals and laid the bricks. And in 2025, it showed up in Breezewood in a pair of sneakers and noise-canceling headphones.

Shortly after his post went up, we reached out. We wanted to interview him, hear about the journey firsthand. Did he brave the shoulder, or did he duck behind the Pizza Hut? What snack marked the halfway point? Was there a moment—between the Sheetz station and the Sultan Kabob—where he began to question everything?

To his credit, Henry replied. Said he was interested. But then… nothing.

And look—we get it. Maybe he got busy. Maybe he’s a man of few words. Or maybe, and we’re just floating this possibility, the experience changed him.

In the weeks since, we’ve waited. We gave him time. We checked our inbox. We refreshed. We even asked a Chester’s Chicken employee taking a smoke break if she’d seen him come back.

“He didn’t even look scared,” she said, squinting toward the road. “Just walked past like he had somewhere to be. I thought maybe he worked for the Census.”

And now, with nearly a month gone by, we’re left with no choice but to speculate.

Did he emerge from the walk a different man—someone who no longer lives online, who now forages for meaning in the median between America’s arteries? Maybe he’s still there, trapped inside the Sheetz ordering system, stuck in an endless loop of customizing a sub he’ll never receive. Or perhaps he simply moved on… to walk other forgotten corridors of our great nation.

We may never know.

But what we do know is this: Henry Cohen walked where few have walked before. And he did it with a quiet determination. With earbuds in and the wind at his back. Some might say it wasn’t far. That it was just a handful of parking lots and a double yellow line. But those people have never stood at the corner of Breezewood’s chaotic convergence and looked across the asphalt sea and thought, I can make it.

All we can do is tip our hats to a man who defied the odds, who walked where others drove. Who, in a single loop between two landmarks, somehow made us all question what it means to go the distance.

So here’s to you, Henry. Whether you’re back home now or still out there walking—maybe east toward Bedford, or west toward the unknown—we salute your spirit. Your courage. Your willingness to walk in a place where no one walks.

You are, for now, Breezewood’s quiet folk hero. A legend with headphones.

At press time, Henry Cohen was not available for comment.