I was staring directly into the fissure -- a gory, ragged scar that ripped across the face of the asphalt and heaved up mounds of broken black rock on either side of the opening like a cartoon gopher trail leading off into the swaying scrub that grew alongside the weed-dotted road. I read the sign, photographed for posterity the warning that he was standing on top of a raging, merciless underground fire that, at any moment could swallow him whole or belch forth great stinking yellow fumes of noxious gas that would drop him right where he stood. That didn't stop me from plunging my face right into the rising steam, a youthful indiscretion that, at age thirty, was crossing over into that realm that is equal parts dangerous and just plain embarrassing. It's not as if there was anything to gain by enveloping my head in the acrid, billowing clouds that wafted up from the fissure. If anything, visibility was considerably worse in that position, and there was precious little chance from any angle that I was going to catch sight of some distant lick of flame or a jig-dancing minion of Hell. Still, I like to dream.

Ellie was behind me somewhere on that lonely expanse of abandoned pavement, preoccupied with snapping a few good shots of some graffiti someone had laid down. Fairly recently by the unweathered looks of it. "NS Pimps" said one patch. "KKK kill all nigers," said the other.


This was Centralia, just about smack-dab in the middle of eastern Pennsylvania, the heart of anthracite coal mining country. Below me -- I wasn't sure exactly how deep -- was the fire that brought me here and sent everyone else away, burning since 1962 and showing no interest in extinguishing itself or being extinguished by the occasional intervening hand of man. According to most stories, a trash pit was set aflame to get rid of refuse, and the folks who lit the fire didn't realize that the pit was connected to the vein of coal on top of which the town of Centralia sat and upon and off which most of the town's residents made a living as miners. Whatever money there'd been in being a coal miner went up quickly as the vein caught and the fire spread throughout the underground caverns. No one was hurt, at least not physically, which if nothing else made it less tragic than the shaft collapse that happened in nearby Avondale some years earlier.

There was no mining to be done after that, though there was plenty of fire fighting going on. The mines were flushed with water. Chunks of flaming coal were excavated. Shafts were backfilled and redrilled, but the fire refused to be tamed. In 1983, as the fire continued to spread, an engineering study was released that stated the fire could very well be burning for another hundred years or more and consume an underground area of roughly 3,700 acres. This spelled pretty dire news for the town of Centralia. Living on top of a raging mine fire was generally considered to be bad for the locals. Smoke, steam, and toxic fumes crept up through the soil. Water became contaminated. Trees died in droves and sat in barren patches of blackened, smoking soil that made the whole town look like it ought to be criss-crossed with trenches full of German and British troops locked in a Western Front stalemate.
And then the sinkholes and fissures began opening. One nearly swallowed a young boy whole, and people started thinking that maybe Centralia was a lost cause.

I pressed my hand against the ragged surface of the road. It was a cold day, gray and sickly with a trickle of limp silver-white sun dripping meekly through the clouds like water from the leaky faucet planted in the side of a bunch of cinderblocks. Damp fog clung to the scrub-spotted hills and mixed freely with the smoke boiling up from the fire. The ground felt warm, but that was probably just my imagination. I could hear Ellie shuffling around somewhere beyond the veil. She moved specter-like through the murkiness, a hint of a shadow in this sulfuric mess that stank of wet weeds, mud, and rotten eggs. It was a hell of a place to bring a gal, I thought. Her shadow grew larger, more defined as she moved toward him, until all at once she became solid again, a physical person instead of some disembodied wraith floating through a stew that would make the Scottish moors proud.


"The master race needs a spell checker," she said. "You sure do know how to show a girl a good time."

"Yeah," I answered, "I'm an ace at this sort of a thing. You should consider yourself lucky. It's not every girl I bring up to posted land to gawk at a mine fire that could cause the ground we're standing on to collapse at any moment. Some of them I just take out for dinner and drinks."

We covered ground carelessly. Each crack in the earth was a warning sign to stay away, as well as an irresistible, seductive hand beckoning us to come, come peer into the mystery, and I was like a little boy enticed by a carnival stripper standing half-cloaked by the dirty linen door of her tent, dutifully following the finger and gazing slack-jawed at the forbidden treasures within. In the case of the mine fire fissures, however, all I got was a load of smoke and dirt in the face. I assumed one got a decidedly different experience when gazing at the forbidden treasures of a carnival stripper, but I'd never had the opportunity to compare and contrast -- not for lack of desire.


My car was parked at one end of a posted stretch of road that used to be part of highway 61. The highway department built a new stretch of road away from the portion that was collapsing into a fiery pit of doom, presumably because it was judged that roads collapsing into fiery pits of doom were generally unsuited for automobile traffic, light or otherwise. At either end of the condemned road, they'd piled dirt and stuck a sign in warning of toxic fumes, sinkholes, and the generally inhospitable conditions waiting to engulf anyone foolish enough to venture past the dirt mounds and explore the ruined road. There were actually quite a few of these people every year, and though photographic evidence exists to suggest that most were just as thoughtless and foolhardy as me, the Centralia mine fire had yet to claim any lives.

When, in the 1980s, it became clear that the fire wasn't going to burn itself out, that it was apparently feasting on a seemingly endless smorgasbord of rich anthracite coal, the government began buying up the land and condemning the property. Houses were razed, and what had once been a bustling burg became a ghost town. Neighborhood roads bent and curved around houses that were no longer there. Driveways, cracked and green with disrepair and the weeds that manage against all odds to force their way up through solid slabs of concrete, lead to empty lots where once there had been a garage to greet them.

I took Ellie's hand as we climbed a small hill and stood staring down at what was currently ground zero for the fire. Somewhere down there it still smoldered. Or raged. Honestly, I didn't know a whole lot about underground coal mine fires, so whether they smoldered or raged was unknown to me. I imagined it was a little bit of both, depending on the particular conditions for that day. Above the fire, raging or smoldering, sat what was left of the St. Peter Paul Orthodox Cemetery. The mine fire burning somewhere below it meant that the grass was yellow and dying, and here and there fissures in the ground billowed with smoke that drifted spectrally along the grounds. It was the sort of landscape you'd see on late-night television, usually in black and white movies that involved a hideous Frankenstein monster lumbering across it. Pressure and the occasional upheaval of ground had set several of the tombstones at curious angles, toppled others, and I was doing his best not to think of what might be happening six feet under.


"That one over there has fresh flowers on it," I said as I pointed to a splash of orange and yellow lying next to a cracked tombstone just beyond the padlocked gates of the cemetery. "Someone's still coming by."

Most of the residents of Centralia left town, either by choice or because of lack of choices. By the time we rolled into town, there were only four houses and a shuttered, deserted-looking auto parts store remaining. In the front yard of one of the houses someone had strung a banner between two gnarled trees. "We Love Centralia" it said in glittery letters. It was certainly a sweeter sentiment than the Federal sign about toxic fumes and sinkholes.

"They could put it out," a voice croaked suddenly, and I cursed my highly tuned, ninja-like senses for failing to hear the approach of footsteps on crunchy gravel behind me, especially since I'd just been thinking about how spooky and quiet it was. "They could put it out if they wanted'a."

I turned. On the gravel road behind us stood a jumbo-sized elderly man in tan slacks and a dark green windbreaker. Thin wisps of gray hair were kicked up by the wind and resembled the thin wisps of gray smoke drifting from the ground. His face was not unlike the rotten apple carvings my grandmother used to bring home from the annual fall harvest festival. There were eyes and, presumably, a mouth nestled somewhere behind the craggy twists and lumps of flesh adorned with a red, pock-marked fist of a nose.

"Course lots of folks come up here now just 'cause a' the fire. I figure y'all to be up here 'cause a' the fire."

We scrambled gingerly down the slope of brush and rock that had given them a better vantage point. In this desolate landscape that somehow managed to be overgrown in one direction and barren in the other, human interaction seemed incongruous but not wholly unwelcome provided it wasn't with whoever had been spray painting racial calls to arms on the road.

"They could put it out," the man repeated as he stared off at smoke rising from a field full of wretched looking hills sprinkled with spindly, dead trees. "But some of us won't move. And they won't put it out unless we move, because then the land is theirs."


He took a pipe from the breast pocket of his jacket, and a stained pouch of tobacco from another pocket, then set about filling and lighting his pipe. It glowed orange in the silvery embrace of the world and smelled sweet. One of my grandfathers had grown tobacco when I was young. Tobacco and quarter horses were his trade, and selling carpet. This man's pipe smelled like the barn where the tobacco would be hung from wooden beams to dry. It was a barn that terrified me. The bundles of browning tobacco looked like pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, dangling so far overhead with sunlight falling on them in dusty beams that seeped in through cracks in the walls and ceiling of the building. The entire place had been a breeding ground for wasps, hornets, yellow jackets, these godawful spiders that could actually jump at you and make scratchy barking noises, and various other bugs that packed shockingly vicious stings and bites.

I did his best to shake the memory of brown recluse spiders and the time I'd stepped on an underground hornets' nest and ended up pulling a comic country boy routine by running across a pasture to leap into a pond, trailed by a cloud of angry hornets and completely unconcerned about the fact that the pond was a known breeding ground for water moccasins. Better to lose oneself in mine fire conspiracy theories. I wasn't unfamiliar with the man's theory. Among the very few who remained in Centralia, it was assumed that, despite evidence to the contrary, the government could extinguish the mine fire if it really wanted to, either by digging a system of trenches or, more recently suggested, by flooding the tunnels with flame retardant foam. However, if this was done while private citizens still owned chunks of the land, the government would be doing the work for private industry. If, however, the land was fully vacated, then the government could claim it, put out the fire, then sell the land and the mine back for a handsome profit. It didn't seem outside the realm of possibility to me, but my firm belief in the deceitful nature of the government was well-balanced by the equally firm belief that the government was, by and large, a surprisingly large collection of idiots and incompetents with not a lick of sense, perhaps genuinely incapable of figuring out how to put out the fire. I also figured that given state and local government abuse of eminent domain, if they wanted these people off the land for good, they'd make it happen.

Whatever the case, a few people remained behind and strung up banners to show their support for the dead remnants of their town. I thought they should find a way to make a tourist trade out of all the people who came up specifically because there was a fire burning.


"Not a bad place to live," the elderly man said. "Not so long as you don't fall into no pit." And with that, he erupted into a phlegm-heavy, gargling sort of laughter that flirted with coughing and the sound of choking to death on one's own sense of humor. And then, as suddenly as he had materialized to provide running commentary, he clammed up tight and walked on down the road, vanishing in the fog, the sound of his heavy work boots grinding into the gravel quickly fading.

"Did we just see a ghost?" asked Ellie.

"Nah," I assured her. "He's one of those guys whose purpose in life is to appear out of nowhere and tell strangers stories that start, 'Arrr, t'was ten yars ago, on a night just like tonight...' And probably point at us with the end of his pipe as he tells the tale."


"Dear God," was all she could say as we ground the parking lot gravel beneath the wheels of the car. Grandma's Country Kitchen. We'd seen the sign, in the official "hand stitched" font all places with names like that use, when we pulled off the interstate at the exit that lead to Centralia. Low, guttural thunder rolled across the mountains like the distant jungle war drums turn-of-the-century British explorers were always hearing. Gray clouds rushed across the horizon, dark bruises against the sickly pale of the sky. They were all business, these clouds; no lollygagging about with nothing better to do than obscure the sun and leak out a piddling little drizzle of rain. These clouds were tearing across the mountaintops like Johnny Cash's ghost riders, hell-bent on delivering fast and furious violence to Appalachia. And standing against that brooding, tumultuous sky was the single most hideous mascot statue I had ever seen and ever hoped to see.

Taken at face value, it was supposed to be an elderly woman in a pioneer bonnet and apron, offering up an undoubtedly delicious home-baked pie while her young daughter or grand-daughter -- it was hard to tell the larger woman's age, what with how that rugged coal-mining life ages you rapidly -- clings to her leg and holds a doll. But taken at face value, the problem was the face. Grandma was simply creepy, the sort of face you'd expect from some old woman who sits in the shadows, quoting the Bible in a quivering, sandpaper voice while her crazed inbred son sneaks up behind you with an axe or a chainsaw, intent on tenderizing you up real nice for dinner later that evening and stringing your hide up in his shed. The eyes were painted in a far-too-brilliant blue set against far-too brilliant white. I was convinced that if you could draw a line of sight emanating from those eyes, it would stretch clear across the globe and somehow, miraculously, be staring directly into the eyes of one of those Moai statues on Easter Island. Let Erich Von Daniken ruminate on that one for a spell.


But it was the daughter/granddaughter, clad in an identical apron and seafoam green dress, that sent chills down the spine. Whoever erected these fiberglass monstrosities had apparently run out of little girl heads, so in its place they affixed the head of a full-grown adult male, square-jawed and desperate looking with the same far-seeing eyes and no attempt to pass it off as anything but a male head. It was nearly as big as the rest of the body, and the doll that dangled lifelessly from one hand was yet another dress-and-apron combo, only with no head at all. Just a hollow stump of a neck. I couldn't help but think of the nightmarish sort of life the giant-male-headed girl with her decapitated dolly must lead in her cannibal grandmother's Appalachia shack.

"Get a load of that nightmare fuel," I said as they parked next to the statue, the ten-foot-tall little "girl" staring at them from her concrete perch, as if she/he was begging for some sort of help, some salvation that would deliver him/her from this insane giant of an old woman that forced the tiny man to dress up in pioneer girl clothing. "I wonder what's on the menu. Skinned cats and naughty little boys who don't eat their vegetables?"

"Why do you think she makes her son dress like a girl?"

"Is that what's going on?" I remarked. "You know, I read that at night this thing comes to life and prowls the foggy, abandoned streets of Centralia, looking for thrill-seekers who would make nice meat pie filling, while the little man-girl trills, 'Where's my dolly's head?'"

A blinding flash of lightning ripped through the sky at that precise moment, accompanied by an ear-splitting crack as it struck the forested slope of one of the mountains in the distance, sending an explosion of light and smoke hurtling into the sky.

"You're making momma angry," Ellie said.

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