Centralia

for those who belong nowhere
and for those who belong to one place
too much to belong anywhere else - Alden Nowlan

“Centralia, Pennsylvania is a former mining town, officially condemned and virtually abandoned (recent census figures place the population at just 9) after a mine fire that began in 1962 proved impossible to extinguish; estimates as to the lifespan of the fire range from forty to over one hundred years.”

To get there we had to drive north on Route 61, passing through towns like Mt Carbon, Dark Water and, just before we go there, Ashland. I remember sitting in the back of the car thinking how I would never be happy here, how I would never call this place ‘home’. Home was Philadelphia, where I was born, where I lived for the first eight years of my life. Philadelphia was loud and exciting and dirty; the air was thick with industry, heavy with the smell of the future and the future was something I thought about a lot. I cried for a whole day when my mom told me we were moving. “You’ll grow to love it” she said, mopping away tears with the corner of her dress. “We need to move honey; Daddy has to find work. You’ll get used to it. We’ll all get used to it.”

I didn’t believe her. I could never imagine calling anywhere else home. I would never see our old house again, never have to jump the squeaky step at the bottom of the stairs – making sure to land softly on my feet – when I sneaked downstairs late at night to make a snack and stare out the window overlooking the vast city with its skyscrapers and smokestacks snaking into space, the city that was bigger than the earth itself. Moving meant that I would never grow up there, I would never get to explore every inch of its inexorable sprawl. My brother didn’t care. He was too young to know a real home, too young to have felt the tug of a place that belongs to you, a place to which you belong. He was free and aimless in a way that made me envious. For him, this would always be home – he would never know anything else. But I did. I knew Washington Avenue, I knew Society Hill and Independence Park, I knew the roads that led down to Franklin Bridge and the Delaware. Centralia didn’t have any of those things. It was noisy, but not like Philadelphia. It was dirty, but not like Philadelphia; a layer of greasy grime permeated everything. The air was thick with the oppressive, stultifying heat of the mines and if it had a smell, then it was the odour of the past. It had nothing.

We arrived about six weeks before the school term. It was on the fourth or fifth day that Marcy Adams called round. My dad would be working with her dad and he had thought it would be nice for us to be friends seeing as how we’d probably end up in the same class together. I had spent all my time up until that point in my room, bunched up on the bed, trying to create tears that wouldn’t come and imagining myself back home where I belonged. Marcy came into my room with a flourish and proceeded to gabble on about how dull it must be for me to come here from somewhere as exciting as Philadelphia and what was it like and did I live like, really, really close to the city and what was that like and was I sorry I came and oh my but this bedroom is huge and on and on and on. I sat, my head resting neatly on my knees and began to cry. Marcy stopped abruptly and gathered me in her arms, rocking me gently until I stopped. “I guess you really miss it, huh?” she said and I nodded. She stayed the rest of the day and even slept over once my mom had checked with her mom and she listened to me telling stories about home until we both fell asleep in tangled bed sheets. By the end of the summer I had a new best friend and never wanted to leave.

Now, sixty years on, they want me to move. I keep getting letters from the state department. First cajoling, then pleading and then almost threatening. I tear them up, burn them, let the ashes flit away, the white smoke a sweet counterpoint to a bitter background. Most people left years ago and those who stayed, well, they’re still here in a way. The town has four cemeteries, because no-one here wants to be cremated; a real ghost town I suppose, where the dead outnumber the living. But I will not leave my home.

In 1956 I met Bobby Randall and by 1960 we were married. Bobby worked Saturdays at the grocery store; he would always help me bag my purchases and when he held my face in his hands I could smell charcoal and heat and love. He made me promise, before he died, to never give up as long as I had the fight in me. I didn’t need to – I’d have done it anyway - but I swore I would, as I kissed his chipped lips, as I touched my head to his suffering chest, as I listened to his swollen lungs sucking in the poison air.

Daddy died soon after they laid him off and just before the town became newsworthy for the first time. I remember walking from the cemetery arm-in-arm with Bobby, Marcy and my mom following. I remember the newspaper men all excited and energetic. “You folks live here? What’s it like? How does it feel to live in the world’s hottest town? How do you live?” What I don’t remember is screaming at the newspaper men “How can you ask that? How can you say that? This is our home! Go away! Leave us alone!” Bobby told me that much later, when I awoke after crying myself to sleep, the smell of bitter tarmac slinking through the windows of our house, our home. My mom died within the year, leaving the house to me and my brother. We sold it almost immediately, although we got much less than what it should have been worth. My brother moved back to Philadelphia with his share; he’d ended up hating the town with its quiet mundanity and I would visit him every year until he too died.

Bobby and I never had children of our own, although I had plenty I could call mine as I spent much of my working life as a classroom assistant at John Geary Elementary. So many faces I saw pass through the doors, so many faces that grew old and then were gone. I remember the Dombowski kid; he was a handful. If anyone was going to make national news it would be him. The school finally closed in 1988. After the relocation project it just wasn’t viable and any kids still living in town went to Mt Carmel instead. The mass exodus of the mid-eighties was the peak of many years of accumulated emigration, a slow-trickle down effect that began in the early-seventies and rose rapidly when the state declared us a condemned town. When I first moved here there were more than two thousand residents. Now there are less than ten of us. When I was twenty-six, when I was still young and my family was intact, we buried a time-capsule and everyone was invited to leave a message to future inhabitants of the town. I left a message and I never told anyone – not even Bobby – what it said. I imagined someone, perhaps a person I’d never known, tearing open an envelope sealed fifty years before, reading the words of someone they’d never met. Now, that future – sometime in the year 2016 – doesn’t seem as far away as it once did. It’s entirely conceivable that I might be the one reading those words, something I would never have imagined when I wrote them. But I wouldn’t need to open it because I can still remember what I wrote. Instead I would set it aflame and hope, without hope, that something new might grow from its ashes.

Centralia is hard to find these days unless you’re really looking for it. It doesn’t appear on many maps; Rand-McNally doesn’t consider us worthy it would seem and we lost our zip code a few years back. As a result, the visitors we get are people who know the town for what it has become and not what it once was. They come in fits and starts, walking round with their cameras and an air of reverential silence. When they see someone outside, you can almost hear their internal debates of should-we-shouldn’t-we-talk-to-them. They invariably ask, “Why don’t you go? Why do you stay? How do you live?” I always tell them that you get used to it. But what I want to say is “Why should we go? Why shouldn’t we stay? This is our home.” The truth is that we are a dying curiosity. Once we are all gone, this place will cease to exist as a town and will simply become dead land, a relic, a museum, a grave. And buried somewhere, between the crust and the smouldering coals will lie people like Bobby, like Marcy; people who belonged to one place too much to belong anywhere else.