Photos by Dan Buczynski.
The road is dark, sharp and slippery, winding through naked trees and into the wintry Pennsylvanian mist. Thick layers of clouds are concealing the hills, black rocks and silver birches lingering in the morning’s dim blue haze. The stillness of the early hours hasn’t broken yet. Lonely headlights are striking the highway’s glassy surface when I enter the borough of Centralia.
Rusted street signs are the only hint that a city was ever here. Overgrown curbs run along decaying alleys. Dead shrubs and brown weeds have cracked the blacktop, with snow patches and litter scattered everywhere the eye can see.
Centralia is the ghost of a ghost town.
Almost nothing is left of this former community of 1,400. A few buildings remain, most of them old row houses deprived of their neighbors, needing brick retainers to help them stand up without adjoining structures. The total population here was six people in 2014. Everyone else left after a long-lasting mine fire rendered the place uninhabitable, resulting in a government-mandated evacuation.
I stop the car at the corner of Locust Avenue and South Street, near the Saint Ignatius Cemetery, steps from the landfill where it all started.
I walk to the end of the street in the damp and cold air. An acrid smell drifts with the slight breeze. Sulfurous, it comes from the bowels of the earth – the pungent smell of burning coal. Steam is rising over the bare ground, freezing the grass in thin layers of brittle ice. Smoke wafts are growing between small cracks in the bedrock and I can feel the heat under my feet when I climb up the rubble to get a better view of the place.
Discarded tires and metal parts are mixed with cinder blocks and charred branches, making for an eerie mood in the silent morning. I lift a small rock from the ground and it’s so hot I have to drop it. Heat waves from the fire are clearly noticeable. Vapor seems to stick to everything.
A sign for Savitski Brothers Coal Company in Mt. Carmel, near Centralia.
I soon head back east to what was once Centralia’s main avenue, taking a look at the house of the town’s last mayor, Carl Womer, who died in May 2014. The house still stands on a recessed side street, but with its deed held by the state since it was taken by eminent domain in 1992, the property is bound to be destroyed in the near future.
I think of the lost history and forgotten memories as I walk by a long-dead tree, a sign reading FIRE nailed to its bark, pointing at nowhere in particular, as if the FIRE had engulfed the whole land and the world along with it, leaving nothing behind but ashes.
***
Pennsylvania has always been a leading anthracite coal provider, with more than sixty-eight million tons mined in 2013. Despite the growth of natural gas and renewable power, coal has endured, still accounting for thirty-nine percent of national electricity production and representing one of the largest employment sources in Pennsylvania, with 49,100 jobs and more than $700 million netted in tax revenue in 2014 – even while the industry had to comply with ever-stricter regulations promoting clean energy.
Pennsylvania is also the state that is most plagued by mine fires, with at least thirty-eight recorded cases. Whether sparked naturally or human-induced, those blazes are well-known for being virtually impossible to extinguish. Most of the landscapes of the American West are actually the result of large-scale, ancient underground coal fires. Some, like Australia’s Burning Mountain, are thought to have been burning for 6,000 years.
A home on Troutwine Street in Centralia.
Coal consumption was already in decline when Centralia’s underground fire started back in 1962. Mining operators were struggling to keep profits up, fearing a looming economic crash and slowly downsizing their labor force. Small towns had been steadily shrinking for quite some time, their residents either moving to bigger cities or finding new jobs in different fields. In spite of this, Centralia was doing relatively well.
Then all hell broke loose.
***
It’s slightly past 8 a.m. when I reach May’s Drive In Restaurant in Ashland, less than two miles south of Centralia. Ed Fuller is a seventy-four-year-old technician recently retired from the mining industry. He is also a former Centralian. He sees me first and waves at me from his table. We shake hands and I’m soon sipping a warm cup of coffee, the waitress scribbling my order on her notepad.
“You should try the French toast,” Fuller suggests.
I follow his advice and we quickly start eating, the windows fogging up as the room fills with regular customers – ladies with walkers, white-haired men in gym slacks, old couples sharing breakfast together.
“Every now and then I see people coming here after they’ve visited the town,” Fuller declares. “Most of them are disappointed. They’re expecting more of it.”
“Ghost towns are popular,” I say.
“I can understand why for some of them. Because you can still see the history. Like abandoned places in the West, with the gold rush and the river dams and whatnot. Those I can understand,” Fuller says. “But Centralia, I don’t. It’s just trees and empty roads.”
Ed Fuller is a man of few words. He gets straight to the point, a habit he acquired during his years in the Army. His stern look and tall build give him the stance of someone who’s lived enough not to care about being judged.
“I was twenty-two when the fire started. I was living with my parents on Park Street. My mother was growing vegetables in the garden — potatoes, cabbage and such.”
“How did everything happen?” I ask.
“You will hear different stories about it. Everyone has his own version. Kids played with fireworks. A truck unloaded live embers. The government secretly did it. But in the end, it probably all came down to one simple thing: The Borough Council didn’t want the town to stink for a Memorial Day ceremony.”
Even though many theories were brought up throughout the years to explain the disaster, the Department of Environmental Protection today officially admits the most likely cause was the willful lighting of the fire by local authorities.
A Plymouth Fury sits in front of an active body repair shop in Centralia.
“May 1962,” Fuller continues. “The dump had been nasty for a while and needed a good cleaning, so the Council hired firemen to set it on fire. Of course, dump fires were illegal in Pennsylvania and no one would ever agree to having anything to do with it, but it was how it went back then. All was fine until they tried to put the fire out. Nothing was working, even after flushing and dousing the place several times. The reason, you see, is that the dump was sitting on top of an old coal mine, and the fire had somehow spread to it.”
Outside, a fine rain has begun falling from the low rolling clouds. A delivery truck turns the corner and disappears in the fog.
“Nobody acted on it until the year after,” Ed continues. “Firefighters knew they wouldn’t be able to contain the fire so they asked the DMMI [Department of Mines and Mineral Industries] for help. The DMMI designed a trench to block the fire from expanding, but their administration was in bad shape at the time because of the recession and it took them a long time to dig the trench.”
The waitress fills our cups with fresh coffee. Fuller continues.
“In 1967 the USBM [United States Bureau of Mines] proposed a new trench design that would have worked far better than the first one…It was a good plan,” Ed states, his hands slowly clenching into fists. “It was a good plan.”
“Why didn’t it work?”
“Centralia was a small town. People had already started moving out, jobs were scarce, don’t you know. We were maybe 1,200 living there, almost all of us working in the mining industry. Not especially rich folks. The government had estimated the town’s value at $500,000. The whole town. The shops, the garages, the churches, the schools, all of it. $500,000. I’m not kidding. “The cost of the USBM trenches was $4.5 million. You can guess what happened next.”
E. 2nd and N. Oak Streets in Mt. Carmel, where many residents moved after the fire began.
Fuller pauses and looks at me, his eyes piercing mine like he wants to make sure I fully understand the implications of what he’s telling me.
“Do you know how much they ended up spending for the relocation of everyone after the town was evacuated?” he asks with a chuckle. “$42 million.”
We finish our plates, leave money on the table and walk outside. A storm has been forecasted in the afternoon and the air feels like it.
“How was it, living there?” I question.
“Before the fire, it was a quaint place,” Fuller replies, smiling. “Nothing special. Nothing fancy. Lots of Polish immigrants there. My mother herself was a Catholic Polish. There was a farmer’s market she dragged me at every Sunday after the mass at Saint Ignatius Church. I’d help her set the stand and she’d sold produce there. Sometimes I’d go up the hilltop to pick huckleberries with my younger sister…My father was a miner and we didn’t see him much, so families often helped us with our chores. The community was tight-knit. Everyone supported each other.”
Fuller greets a man watching us from his porch, his hands in his pockets and his gray hair flying in the wind.
“The hardest part is having nothing left to help me remember. People, when they get older, they like to reminisce…they go back to where they used to live and all. Me, I don’t have that anymore. There’s nothing left.”
The street dives down the hill, opening on the mountains. I stop a moment to glance around.
“What happened after the USBM decided to let the fire burn?” I ask.
“At this point things were becoming harder to ignore. Residents were having constant headaches and nausea from the fumes and the fire was getting close to their properties. Vegetables were burning in the gardens. Basements were warm enough to stop using heaters.
“Then in 1969 the government decided to build a fly ash barrier to seal the fire. Boreholes were drilled across town to monitor the underground temperatures and CO2 detectors were installed everywhere. That’s when people began moving out.
“In late 1979, ground temperature was measured at over 135 degrees near the mayor’s gas station,” Fuller continues. “It was so hot, steam was coming out, mind you. Obviously the gas was removed straight away from the tanks. The station became useless and got demolished shortly after. This was the first real casualty from the fire, come to think of it.”
Then Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole.
Domboski was a twelve-year-old boy living on Wood Street, not far from the cemetery. As he was running toward a group of officials talking near the closed gas station, the boy’s attention was drawn by a wisp of smoke coming from a small hole at the feet of an ash tree. He got closer to the smoke. And the ground gave way.
Domboksi found himself crawling and pushing and yelling as he fell deeper into the 150-foot hole, clouds of foul-smelling steam spraying from below, the mud collapsing even further under him and the roaring sound of flames rising to his ears.
“The fire had weakened an old mine shaft structure and made the ground collapse where the kid was standing,” says Fuller. “The exhaust fumes and the heat would have killed him if his cousin hadn’t pulled him out.”
The swift reaction of Domboksi’s sixteen-year-old cousin, Eric Wolfgang, who ran to help him out of the hole, and the fortunate presence of tree roots, were the only things that prevented his death. One hundred and thirty-five degrees temperatures were later measured in the sinkhole, with enough CO2 concentration to kill anyone in mere minutes.
“This caught attention from television and newspapers and forced the governor to finally act on it,” says Fuller. “He came with a lousy buyout proposal to relocate the town elsewhere and offered owners as little as $25,000 for their houses. What can you buy for that sum of money? There were protests. We were all pissed because nobody was giving a damn.
“My wife Jodi and I had already purchased our home here in Ashland. You couldn’t have made her stay in Centralia for the world. She hated it. The smell alone made her sick.”
Fuller’s parents, however, were among those who opted to stay in Centralia.
Route 61 running through Ashland, another nearby town that former Centralia residents relocated to. The main streets of Centralia closely resembled these before the fire.
“My wife didn’t understand my parents for staying there,” he says. “She often tried to reason with them to make them leave.
“My father had built this house with his hands, you see. It was something they had worked all their lives for. They were proud of living there in spite of all that happened. They belonged here and they couldn’t afford to move anyway.”
***
At Ed Fuller’s house in Ashland, I sit at the kitchen table while he pours me a glass of water. Photos of his granddaughters hang on the walls. There is a tangy smell of varnish emanating from the wood paneling of the entrance hall.
“Two solutions were submitted: either excavating the fire for more than $600 million, or evacuating the city at the government’s expense,” Fuller says. “The outcome of the vote was maybe 350 to 200 in favor of the buyout.
“My parents and the folks who stayed after the buyout believed it was all a plot from the state to get the coal for free. They believed the government had started the fire on purpose so they could expropriate everyone in Centralia and access the coal underground.”
Ed Fuller’s not one for conspiracy theories himself. “I just think the government left us to ourselves and did nothing to help. It’s worse than if they had tried to steal the coal from us, after all. It’s just they didn’t care.”
Sunset at Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in Centralia. This is the only remaining church in the town, and it still has a congregation.
Fuller’s parents stayed until the state used eminent domain laws to take control of most of Centralia in 1992. “They were too old to keep fighting, so they eventually accepted the expropriation,” Ed says. “They got a little money from it and went straight to a nursing home. My father passed at seventy-seven, a month before our house got torn down. It killed him. It really did.
“I’m glad he wasn’t there to see the demolition. I watched the wrecker crush the roof and the walls. It was one of the saddest moments in my life, seeing the place I grew up in getting flattened in a matter of minutes.”
“My mother joined him in ’96. They both went through this ordeal to end up dying in a nursing home. It’s so damn cruel.” There is palpable sadness in Ed’s voice. Anger, too. A helpless anger lamenting all that could have been done to save a part of his existence from vanishing.
Fuller’s parents were not the last residents of Centralia. A few who still refused to leave, even after the eminent domain action, finally won a lawsuit in 2013, allowing them to stay in their homes now that the fire was no longer considered a threat.
“Centralia would still exist if politicians had handled things right in the beginning,” says Fuller. “The fire would have been contained. Nobody would have had to go. And I would probably still live there.”
***
On a sunny afternoon, the remains of Centralia look like an ordinary piece of countryside, with streams twisting through hilly woodlands and deer racing from trail to trail. But on a foggy morning like this one, the area becomes much more dramatic, frightening even, a lonely Orthodox church overlooking the valley like a godsend, holding tight before the apocalypse.
Cast in the Appalachian ridges and valleys, roughly in the middle of Pennsylvania and about eighty miles northwest of Philadelphia, the town was originally built on a grid plan, divided from east to west by Locust Avenue and north to south by Center Street. Classic miner’s houses were the most common type of dwellings, townhouses attached to each other, with front porches and pointy roofs.
Many urban legends have been inspired by the town’s story, even if you’d be ill-advised to call it haunted in front of its current residents. Yet, with the 1,500 graves spread among three cemeteries making up the largest part of the local population, Centralia’s withering grounds can certainly feel ghostly. This image wasn’t helped by the popular “Silent Hill” video game series and horror movie, loosely based on the local events and attracting lots of visitors in the past year— to the displeasure of the last six people living there. “If you’re a reporter, please hang up, we don’t do interviews,” a recorded phone message announced until recently when calling Bonnie Hynoski, a fifty-seven-year-old fourth-generation Centralian and the wife of the borough’s current Fire Chief.
The abandoned stretch of Route 61 that used to lead to Centralia is today covered in graffiti, crude inscriptions and explicit drawings. WELCOME TO HELL, one reads at the southern entrance of the blocked-off highway, right in front of a large crack snaking through the asphalt in which it was at times possible to get a glimpse of the devouring red inferno below.
The road was found to be a safety concern in 1982 after it was determined that the fire burned directly under it. The coal pillars supporting its structure were gradually consumed by the heat, making the asphalt buckle and sink. In 1983, temperatures exceeding 850 degrees were measured in the crack that had opened between the traffic lanes and the DOT finally closed the road.
The warnings reminding that the ground is prone to sudden collapse don’t deter bikers and off roaders who come here to practice obstacle crossing or ramp jumping. “I pretend zombies are chasing me,” says Justin, twenty-five, a Geisinger Services clerk who rides his motorcycle in every weekend from Kulpmont.
The 4,000 feet of abandoned highway end on Locust Avenue near where John Coddington’s gas station once stood. A few months before the closing of the station, David Lamb, a motorcycle shop owner living on the same block as Coddington’s, learned his house’s cellar was the entrance of a bootleg mine shaft diving right to the bedrock, allowing toxic fumes to infiltrate everywhere in a 100-yard radius. The fire was moving south. This was the beginning of the end for Centralia.
A windmill farm is visible from the end of South Street in Centralia.
I try to locate Lamb’s house but cannot find anything but rumble and weeds, so I decide to walk to the eastern side of Locust Avenue to see the Odd Fellows Cemetery. The grass is browned and the tombs hidden behind untrimmed hedges. I’m alone in the world, keeping company to the dead.
A toy horse is tangled between the branches of a tree. I cannot help shivering as the fog gets thicker in the woods. I stumble on a rusted borehole enclosed in wire netting, emerging straight from the ground, still and dark in the back of the cemetery.
More than 2,000 of those boreholes were drilled across the town to monitor the fire temperatures and let the pressure evacuate from underground tunnels, despite the indication that they could actually supply oxygen to the fire and worsen the air quality. Joan Girolami, an East Park Street resident and mother of two, had one drilled near her swimming pool in 1978. The temperature measured by the Bureau of Mines was 746 degrees. This was three years before the Centralia: HELL ON EARTH bumper stickers were made. Three years before Girolami asked “do we have to have a tragedy […] before we get any help?” during a General Assembly meeting.
I leave the cemetery to see where the tragedy almost did happen on Valentine’s Day, 1981. I look at the snowy ground where Todd Domboksi was almost swallowed. I try not to think too much about the void underneath me.
A few steps north on Park Street used to stand a green bench, set near a former war memorial adjoining Locust Avenue and enclosed by a dry stone wall. The bench, along with several lawns and vacant lots, was maintained by a resident named John Lokitis until 2009, when he received an eviction notice for his 108 West Park Street home. When the town’s ZIP code was revoked in 2002, Lokitis painted it on a bench at the corner of Railroad and Locust: 17927 in white stenciled letters. Lokitis took care of his birthplace. He didn’t want it gone.
Today, forty feet of concrete curb is all that’s left of his house, demolished in 2010. Lokitis has since moved to nearby Milton but still doesn’t understand why he had to leave his home, inherited from his grandfather and completely spared by the fire.
Even though almost nothing remains of Centralia, every street is steeped in history. Here is where the Welsh’s candy store was. Here a beauty shop. Here the Zimbo’s Hotel. This was the Speed Stop, the motorcycle shop owned by David Lamb.
When the fire was confirmed in 1983 to have spread so much that it was impossible to put out, the dead zone, as it was called, was already easily visible from the sky at the southern end of town. The forest here was completely burned out. Bleached white trees were frozen in brown foliage and scorched ground – a black and white trail in the middle of the greenery. The earth had cracked, opening long crevices through the scrubs.
A complete excavation would now cost a staggering $660 million when a similar plan proposed in 1963 would have only been $277,000. Since putting out the fire was out of the question, a government buyout program was presented as the only viable solution for Centralians. The market value of their homes was very low and the $42 million help from the local administration wasn’t enough to pay a fair price for everyone’s relocation. But in the August 8, 1983 referendum, residents voted in favor of a relocation, considered the safest and fastest way to deal with the situation.
Appraisers roamed the streets with notepads, knocking on doors and meeting with the owners, writing notes about the locations, in or out of the 300-degree zone, east or west, near or far from other amenities. Widespread demolitions started. Houses were boarded up and codes were painted on each one of them. Bulldozers came and wrecked everything as fire hoses poured water over the dust. The fog and the smokes were still there.
The Odd Fellows Cemetery in Centralia. The landfill that was ignited is located directly behind the cemetery – ground zero for the fire.
In 1986, only fifty households were remaining, all belonging to people who refused to let their homes be sold for a pittance.
When Governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain in 1992, he made sure the legal system would leave the eviction order active, even after the land takeover dispute was brought to the Supreme Court.
The remaining Centralians were now essentially squatters in their own homes, their titles transferred to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Authorities didn’t bother enforcing the evictions though. “That would [have been] very bad publicity,” explained eighty-nine-year-old Mayor Lamar Mervine in 2005 to the Smithsonian Magazine, adding that no one would have risked another Waco-like siege.
By this time, the only indication of the fire burning underneath was a light sulfurous odor from time to time when the wind blew right. The only indication that a thriving town had been there were the twenty or so houses standing in a desolate field made of yellowed grass, torn down sheds, dead trees and anthracite rocks.
All were lost in the mist.
***
Teens are slowly gathering in Mount Carmel’s Vine Street Sandwich Shop, talking of school and social network apps as I finish my cheesesteak. Mark Sawicki is waiting for me outside, finishing a phone call with his brother. Sawicki is fifty-seven. He used to work as a coal picker in the nearby Harmony Mine. Until a few years ago when health issues prevented him from going underground anymore.
“I can’t say I was sad,” he says with a smile, opening the door to his townhouse down the street. “It was probably the best thing that happened to me back then.”
“My family left Centralia back in ’72,” Sawicki declares. “We were living on Center Street. I don’t remember much of it, to be fair. Just the basketball field.”
“Why did you leave so early on?” I ask.
“My dad was a miner. It runs in the family, as you can see. He knew about mine fires. He knew something was up from the moment we learned the DMMI had trouble with the trenches.”
“Had he experienced an underground fire before?”
“You could say that. He started bootlegging coal in the 1930s. He was there when the Bast Colliery exploded a mile or so from Centralia in 1932. The word was someone had pitched a lit butt into a tunnel and the whole drift had caught on fire. The mine was flooded and blasted shut, but my dad often told us he could still see glowing embers burning at night in the 1960s, thirty years later.”
“Was this fire related to the one in Centralia?”
“It could have been. The Bast fire could have moved under Centralia with the time. I believe so. The coal seams are all linked under there,” says Mark, kicking the floor with his foot. “It’s possible that the fire went from vein to vein until it reached Centralia. It’s too late to tell anyway. It would make sense, though.”
The Bast Colliery theory has been discarded several times during ecological assessments of the situation and is today mostly considered a local legend. However, many are the miners who still believe the legend has some truth in it, even if none of them can really prove it.
Snow is beginning to fall outside, quickly piling up against walls and hedges. Sawicki coughs a lot. I can hear him wheeze as he offers me a cup of coffee.
“Was it hard for your family to leave?” I ask.
“You know, people come and go in places like this one. It’s all about the mines. Every city around here works the same. If the mines do well, people stay. If the mines don’t do well, people leave.”
Sawicki’s rasping voice is echoing in the house, the surrounding silence only broken by the refrigerator’s compressor starting and stopping in the kitchen.
“Would you have wished to stay?” I inquire.
“Not really. It’s where I lived for a part of my life, but that’s all,” Mark replies, but then adds: “I guess that without Centralia I probably wouldn’t have worked in the mines. I found [the fire] fascinating, you know. The idea of a fire burning right under a city, right under my street. Everyone compared it to hell and I was very intrigued by this…I wanted to know more about that. I wanted to see it… to understand it.”
“So the fire made you follow your father’s steps?”
“In a way. I never wanted to be a coal picker. I was just curious. My dad got me hired, I passed my miner certificate and there I went…It paid well but if you ask me, the money isn’t worth the risks you take down there.”
“Were you ever injured?”
Sawicki laughs and coughs again.
“Sure I was,” he says. “Broke my leg when a rock fell on me. Got smashed by a chariot. I couldn’t even count the minor injuries. In ’94 one of the guys I was working with died. The roof collapsed on him and he was trapped under a boulder with no oxygen. Accidents are part of the deal. That’s why the money’s good.
“I see young folks like you trying themselves at it almost every week. They never last. They put a little money aside and get the hell out of there as soon as they can. They’re the smart ones. The ones who keep at it are those who don’t really have a choice. Until they’re fired because there ain’t no work anymore, that is.”
Mark Sawicki himself was laid off from the mines twice.
“The first time was in the early eighties. The boss just gave me a pink slip on his way to his locker like it was nothing. The second time the poor guy was half my age and I had to show him how to do it. Both times were for economic reasons. The company didn’t really have a choice. They eventually hired me back.”
We watch a neighbor brushing snow off his car. We chuckle when a draft blasts the snow right back where it was. The rest of the town is at a standstill.
“Traditional mining is dead,” Sawicki says as he turns to his side and clears his throat. “My dad picked for maybe forty years. Back when he started, coal was the main source of energy in America…They were providing electricity for the whole goddamn country. It was all thanks to them. The radios, the TVs, the lights of course, the heating, everything. It was them. Guys like my dad, they worked like crazies and risked their lives every single day for everyone else to get those things…And yet as soon as those guys weren’t needed anymore, they just got tossed away like nobodies.”
Sawicki finishes his coffee and grins.
“You would think that when your town catches on fire someone would help you. Especially if you’re one of the people who helped build this country. Right? Well, it turns out you’d be wrong! You’re a coal picker, what do you think? You’re not important. Your house ain’t important. Your life ain’t important. You just get to work and die like a rat.”
Cough, again. Cough and ache as he goes to the bathroom, with the snow still falling and the wind still howling outside.
“What did you do after you were laid off?” I ask when he comes back.
“I was drinking pretty heavily back then. Almost cost me a divorce.” Now eleven years sober, Sawicki goes to AA meetings every other Saturday.
“After so many years in the mines, you come to miss it,” he says. “There’s a real brotherhood. You practically live together. When you lose that you kind of lose everything. From the ten or eleven people I knew that got axed back then, three of them were dead in a year. One crashed his car in a tree after drinking a bottle of vodka. Another one went into a coma and never recovered. Another one got into a fight and was beaten to death.”
“Working in a mine is a one-way business,” he continues.” You go down there and you never really go out. Even in your free time you’re there underground with your face all black and limestone in your lungs. Drugs and alcohol make you skip that.”
I think of the burned cans and broken bottles piling up near the Odd Fellows cemetery, of the empty cellophane balls and the old campfire traces.
“Centralia hasn’t helped the world to see coal mining as a good thing,” Mark Sawicki declares. “Explosions and mine fires are pretty common, but this was a real ecological disaster… It showed that coal picking was an ugly business and that everyone was only concerned about profit. The people, the land, who cares?”
He pauses and pulls a gray oxygen bottle from behind his armchair, apologizing as he puts a mask on his face and takes long, deep breathes of air from it.
“Myself, I thought of moving away from here. Countless times,” Sawicki adds. “Florida, maybe. Never had the heart to do it, though. Everyone I know lives here. I was born in Columbia County. It’s my home. I know it doesn’t mean much, but it means something to me.”
“It’s too late for me anyways,” he continues. “Working in the mines takes a toll sooner or later. You know you’ll die young the moment you start on the job. When my doctor told me I had the black lung, I wasn’t even surprised. Sometimes I feel good and then I start coughing and it doesn’t stop until I’m in the ER.”
We finish the pot of coffee and comment on a recent Pittsburgh Penguins hockey game to lighten the mood. I listen to Mark recount the story of how he met his wife. There is so much pride in his eyes when he points out his youngest grandson has said his first word.
The valley is cold and cast in white when I leave Mount Carmel.
***
A couple is walking in front of Centralia’s Municipal Building, a brown-tiled warehouse still used to store a thirty-year-old fire truck and an ambulance in case an emergency occurs in nearby Aristes. “It’s so sad,” the man, a German tourist named Rudi, says. “It’s like the city never existed.” We take pictures of the garage doors and talk about what it must be to live here today before parting ways.
One of the original vents installed in the area surrounding Odd Fellows Cemetery. These vents were installed in hopes that dangerous gases would be released here, and not into the homes of nearby residents.
I climb the Paxton Street steep slope at the town’s northernmost point. Life seems to come back here, maybe because of the soothing presence of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Church. Weekly services are still held there under the church’s blue and golden roof. Flowers blossom in spring. People gather and walk up the steep stairs to listen to the local minister’s lectures.
Something moves between the trees and a deer shows his head, careful and alert, steadily watching me as I crouch to the ground. No sound around but the wind.
The deer crosses the road and disappears into the woods.
I think of persistence and stubbornness. The years it took before the remaining residents ended up having the last word when they won their lawsuit in 2013, receiving a cash payout of $349,500 and the permission to stay in their homes for as long as they lived.
I walk down empty Locust Avenue, as cars dash by with their fog lights and their wipers on. Everything has been removed and erased.
Not even the time capsule buried in 1966 for the centennial of the town and opened in 2014 by a group of former Centralians subsisted. The items inside the vault were almost all ruined by water that had leaked into it. One of the only things that survived water damage was a miner’s helmet and lamp signed by the men living there at the time — a cruel reminder of the town’s origins and demise.
Centralia was bound to die like it was born.
While Pennsylvania recently unlocked $1.4 million to put out another mine fire threatening Pittsburgh’s main gas pipeline and airport operations, budgets have been completely cut in Centralia. A few volunteers will help clean the borough from trash on May 16th, 2015, led by the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation. Windmills spinning on the horizon line, white and graceful, are a vivid sign that the region has moved on. Down below, the fire still burns.
I get back to my car and start the engine, warming my cold hands against the heat vents. A thin layer of ice is shining on the weeds, the ground sparkling like glitter.
This was a place where people lived.
This was a place people loved, loved so much that some would stay there in spite of the hell that burned below the earth and menaced to spill all over them.
This was a place people had to surrender.
The road is dark and sharp and slippery, streaming by the young twilight as music fills my ears in the coziness of the car. The mist fades away and with it the Borough of Centralia, the fires and the hills and the smokes and the doomed memories.
Anthony Taille is a freelance writer exploring untold tales of Americana. His stories have appeared on Narratively, Vice, Medium, Thought Catalog and in various magazines across the web. He is currently based in Montreal with his wife and daughter and finishing his first novel while trying to survive the local climate.