Indeed do many things come to pass

Posted by Colin Dickey

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/centralia-pennsylvania-rebirth

“There’s not much there anymore, it’s pretty much just a crossroads.”

I read the posts online telling me not to bother, but I wanted to go anyway. Certainly I could feel something as we got close: the sense of desperation, of ruin and abandon. So I drove with a small group of friends deep into eastern Pennsylvania—coal country—through towns with names like Frackville, Pottsville, Ashland. Many downtowns had at least one house that had burned to ruin and been left abandoned. It was early June, but clouds covered the sky and we drove through a slight but persistent rain.

We were on our way to Centralia, Pennsylvania. The Burning Town.

The coal that made this valley famous accreted in layers over tens of thousands of years, organic swamp matter turning first to peat, and then compressed over millennia into billions of tons of anthracite—the densest and most pure form of coal—the stuff that made this region of Pennsylvania famous. Mines first opened here in 1856 and Centralia was incorporated as a town a decade later. Through the years bitter labor disputes broke out over exploitative treatment of the (largely Irish immigrant) miners, leading to regular outbreaks of violence. Add to that the boom and bust cycle of the coal industry—and the environmental desolation and impoverishment of the region—and you end up with a town that is deeply scarred, both literally and metaphorically.

But the story that made Centralia famous began in May 1962, when officials set fire to the trash in a local landfill in an open strip-mine pit. This wasn’t the first year they’d done this, and there were firefighters stationed to ensure the blaze didn’t get out of control. After two days, the trash fire seemed to have burned itself out. But this time, for whatever reason (the actual cause was never fully determined), something went wrong. The landfill burn had lit the coal mines beneath the town.

Over the years, numerous attempts were made to put out the fire. Nothing worked. In all, federal, state, and local governments spent over $3.3 million on the blaze, which raged on, uncontrollably. Over time, residents reported that their basements were strangely hot, and in 1979, the mayor John Coddington lowered a thermometer into an underground fuel tank at the gas station he owned, only to discover that the gasoline was 172 degrees Fahrenheit. And then on Valentine’s Day, 1981, a twelve-year old boy fell into a four-foot sinkhole that opened up in his grandmother’s backyard, barely rescued by his fourteen year-old cousin. A plume of lethal carbon monoxide bellowed out from the hole.

Realizing that topsoil was the only thing separating the town from a massive, raging inferno, the federal government finally decided to clear the town. The United States Congress allocated money for a buyout, which nearly all of the town’s 1,000 or so residents took. By 1990, 63 people remained in the town. Two years later, governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain and condemned all the remaining buildings. By 2021, only five homes were still left standing.

I had come here expecting that we would find ruin and neglect, toxicity and destitution. I expected Centralia to be an exemplar of the eerie: A place where once there had been a town, place of thriving life, and instead now was only absence, an emptiness, a void.

What we found instead, strangely, was beauty. Centralia, despite everything I’d been led to expect, was thriving.

The Burning Town has come to stand in as a kind of exemplar of a post-industrial wasteland, a place where human folly reached its apex, scorching the land. All but abandoned, it became known primarily for the vents that poured smoke from the fire below, and for Graffiti Highway—a closed stretch of Route 61 covered in tags, doodles of genitalia, and declarations of love.

When adapting the video game franchise Silent Hill for film, screenwriter Roger Avary used Centralia as a model for both the town’s backstory and its look. For years it drew curious onlookers and legend trippers, while the name “Centralia” itself became an almost byword for late capitalism: a term for that mixture of rapacious profit-seeking and thoughtless stewardship that created America’s own Chernobyl.

Locals see the story a little differently, though their version borrows from similar themes. Phil, a tour guide at Pioneer Tunnel in neighboring Ashland, pointed out that while the grim toil of the mines claimed many human lives, their closure left the valley with little else to offer. He explained how the families that didn’t leave Centralia were harassed, as government forces tried to drive them off their land. Those that stayed had to go to court to defend their right to live on this abandoned land, all because they wanted to keep the mineral rights to their property. So now, people like Phil assume that the government is just waiting them out. Once they’re gone, putting out the fire will be easy enough. “They’ll take all that red hot coals, but also they’re going to get that rich anthracite coal,” he told us. “And I’m sure they’ll sell that. But are the people or the relatives going to get anything? It’s very doubtful. It’ll probably go to the federal government. Or the coal baron, maybe?”

His voice, I noticed after a while, has a peculiar kind of nostalgia for the worst times in the world. Like so many others in these towns, he seems to long for a return, another chance for Pennsylvanians to throw their children back into the maw of the mine. Anything for a chance to get the coal jobs will come back. Anything in service of waking the Mountain once more.

When we finally got to Centralia, we were met not with destruction or despair, but with what seemed at first simply like nothing. The streets are still laid out, and there are still a handful of houses left, but the graffiti highway has been covered over. Any abandoned buildings have long been torn down.

It’s why, if you ask around these days, folks will tell you there’s nothing to see in Centralia. “I drove through Centralia 2 weeks ago,” one local commented on a Reddit thread. “I didn’t realize till after I had already passed it. That should tell you everything you need to know.” In another thread a different local commented, “What is the draw? It’s just empty ground now.”

But emptiness can tell its own story. Standing on the empty streets of Centralia, I thought mainly of Cal Flynn’s Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. Flynn travels the world to places that have been forsworn by humanity: not the pristine, untouched wilderness, but places abandoned, like Chernobyl and the exclusion zone that divides the island of Cyprus between its Greek and Turkish halves. Places where, Flynn writes, “nature has been allowed to work unfettered.” Such places are often thriving with plant and animal life. Abandonment, she writes, “is rewilding, in a very pure sense, as humans draw back and nature reclaims what once was hers.”

What Flynn makes clear is that while we tend to think of human activity on the landscape as not only damaging but irreversible, this may not always be the case. We believe, in our hubris, that we have the power to wreck nature for good. And while it’s true that places like the Bikini Atoll and Chernobyl will be radioactive for unimaginable human lifetimes, that doesn’t mean that other species haven’t moved in and, left unmolested by human activity, found ways to flourish.

Flynn’s book catalogs a variety of ways in which nature has reclaimed places that we’ve left behind, often with surprising speed. When Estonia, for example, became independent of the Soviet Union, some 245 million square miles of collectivist farmlands were simply abandoned. They weren’t plowed over, repurposed, or re-seeded. They simply were left alone. Flora immediately went to work: soon these fields were covered in wildflowers and weeds, and then thorn bushes and brambles, and then the skinny shoots of young spruce trees. Now, thirty-five years later, Estonia is now one of the most forested countries in Europe, having nearly doubled the size of its forests by doing … nothing. Half the country is now a forest, and over 90 percent of those forests have naturally regenerated.

When I say that Centralia is thriving, this is what I mean. It is a landscape pulsing with life, overflowing with lush greenery. The old grid of streets is still visible, and there are still a handful of houses with carefully mowed lawns sitting in defiance. But everything else is the wild and vital province of nature. Turkeyfoot, broom-sedge, and switchgrass and silky dogwood. Young white oaks and linden trees push their way through this cacophony of life. Everywhere that’s not asphalt is a riot of green in every possible shade. And all of this is possible, at least in part, because the state and federal governments have forbidden any new human settlement, giving the wild and the lush and untrammeled room to grow.

Not all of this is just nature. In 2021, the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation planted 250 apple trees in the hope of attracting butterflies. EPCAMR has hosted annual trash clean-ups in the town, but a few years ago turned to planting and furthering the former town’s potential as an unofficial wildlife sanctuary. “We’re trying to get that area designated as a monarch way station eventually,” Robert “Bobby” Hughes, executive director of EPCAMR said at the time. But as vital as this work is, it seems primarily that the rewilding of Centralia is simply the work of leaving it alone.

Standing in what was once a small, otherwise forgettable town, I came to understand how folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity—could all be weapons in an arsenal to rewild and reforest the Earth, a future waiting in places we mistakenly believe we have irredeemably scarred.

Beyond the town itself, the thing people have come to mourn here is the Graffiti Highway, which for years was a strange destination before it was covered over in 2020. It began, as these things often do, as spontaneous tagging and defacement. But over time, more taggers added their names, their designs, their art, and their stories, until it had become a makeshift historical record of the people who live here.

Over time, it had begun to encroach on the natural history that was also unfolding, spilling out beyond the asphalt and into the forest, as trees and plants started to get defaced. It became an attractive nuisance, repeated bonfires and ATV crashes straining local resources, so when coal company Pagnotti Enterprises bought the land in 2018, they chose to bury the road in dirt and erased it for good. There is now, in the words of many Redditors, no reason to go to Centralia. But the company’s decision also obliterated what some saw as a vital piece in the region’s history. Pagnotti’s reviews on Google are uniformly one-star ratings alongside comments like “You ruined graffiti highway,” “ruined a landmark, nice piles of dirt, go die,” and so on.

For those who contributed to the Graffiti Highway, it had marked loves and losses, honored the dead and celebrated the living, all in a hundred different colors. (Park Street in Centralia has since begun to take the place of the old Graffiti Highway, decorated with a variety of tags, but at the moment it has nowhere near the density of the original Graffiti Highway. Some monuments take time to rebuild.)

Kutztown University professor Deryl Johnson has called the story of Graffiti Highway an “epilogue” to the story of Centralia itself, but I’m not sure I agree. The story of Centralia is still very much unfolding—it did not end in 1982, and it did not end in 2020. Now that the highway is gone, the tourist attraction draw of this place has waned, leaving even more space for the natural world to reclaim the land. A new chapter has begun, and there may be other chapters in the story yet to come—chapters whose shape and direction we can only guess at.

If you think of Centralia in terms of human habitation, it’s a ghost town, a few stubborn holdouts fighting against entropy and inertia. If you think of Centralia in terms of legend tripping and ruin porn, it’s nothing at all, barely a wide spot in the road. But if you think of Centralia as an unintended nature preserve, it is absolutely bursting with life and potential and possibility.

Yet still the ground burns. Just out of the grid of streets that was once the town, down Big Mine Run Road, are the vents themselves: small holes in the sides of the hills like something out of Tolkien that lead down to inferno below. These days, the smoke itself is rarely visible, but when rain filters down to the fires, it comes back out as steam. So on the rainy day of our visit, we watched as these vents let out a small, steady stream of white steam, proof of the heat somewhere beneath our feet.

It was an odd sensation. The wisps seemed peaceful, laconic, almost soothing. And at the same time, it seemed as though at any moment the entire valley would explode. Somehow it felt like both of these things at once.

Looking at these gentle wisps of smoke, it is difficult to picture the smoldering inferno they emerged from. A fire that has raged out of control for sixty years, unending and older than most people you know. You try and you fail every time.

Which is to say, Centralia’s mine fire is a thing that should not be. I can describe to you its history, the actions of the people involved. I can describe to you what the surface looks like, the species of plants, the words etched into the tombstones at the Odd Fellows Cemetery. But the secret, raging, burning heart of the Valley remains elusive.

The plumes are a subtle reminder, easy to miss, that there is a reason for this pristine, thriving wildness all around us. That the coal mines underground are a price that has to be paid, paid to an underworld god that must be forever fed.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/centralia-pennsylvania-rebirth