When the World Ends

When the world ends, it’s going to look something like Centralia, Pennsylvania. I’d heard about the town before, on websites about abandoned places and television shows like the History Channel’s Life After People. It’s just over a three hours’ drive from where I live in Virginia, so when Justin, a friend of mine, came up to visit for the weekend we got up early (yes, 8:00 am is early for a Saturday) and drove up to Pennsylvania, where we spent half an hour or so driving about looking for the town.

We’d finally narrowed our search down to one particular intersection–the right angle junction of 61 East and 61 South–and had been driving back and forth looking for the “town” when a biker told us that this, in fact, was it. Old paved roads, a fire station, a few houses, and lot after empty, overgrown lot are all that remain of a coal-mining town that used to house well over two thousand people.

The event that caused this rapid depopulation to what is now the lowest population burrough in PA is a coal mine fire. Though no one’s really quite sure how it started, local best guesses are that a landfill fire in 1962, in an old strip mine pit, was left untended and managed to ignite a nearby coal vein, which then spread underground to the abandoned mines under the town. From there it spread. The town’s residents only really became aware of the problem some twenty years later when the town’s mayor and local gas station owner checked the temperature of his underground tanks and found that they had reached a shocking 172 degrees Fahrenheit. Needless to say, this caught people’s attention. When a twelve year old almost fell into a 150-foot deep hole leading to the burning coal pits beneath the town, things came to a head and, in 1984, the government stepped in to relocate the town’s residents.

These days, the town itself has all but vanished. There are old moss-grown steps leading up to where doors had once been. Nothing there now but weeds. There’s a fire hydrant on a crumbling sidewalk in front of what looks for all the world like a patch of meadow in the woods. Here and there are a few relics of Centralia’s past–discarded window frames, broken chimney brick, and, off in the woods, a single mortar stone with a child’s handprints pressed into the concrete. All bits of stories whose context has almost entirely faded.

Just south of the town lies old Route 61. It took Justin and I several passes and one stop for directions to finally find it. It’s a stretch of highway perhaps half a mile in length which has been abandoned after repeated repair attempts, and is now blocked off at either end by piles of earth that also conceal it from the road. It’s something you’d only find if you were looking for it, and the effect of seeing it as you climb over the bulldozed barrier is eerie, to say the least. It’s also covered in graffiti. If there is one thing Centralia has taught me, it’s that should our civilization ever end, our last words will be written in spray paint.

A few hundred yards down old 61 the pavement warps and splits in a wide, smoking gash, one of the places where the coal fire has forced its way to the surface. The air around it is pungent with steam. We saw only a few other people–a couple with professional camera equipment, a hippy on a bike, four kids on four-wheelers doing wheelies the length of the highway– but when it was quiet and there was no one in sight, it was easy enough to imagine the rest of the world going this way. Already the center line of the old highway is overgrown with weeds and, in some places, high bushes. For all of our civilization’s comforts, we are far less permanent than we think.

Back towards town are the cemeteries. Still mowed, still visited, there are far more gravestones here than there are remaining residents, and all of the dates peter off around the early eighties when the town was abandoned. Coal smoke billows out of nearby sewer grates, and one wonders just how long it will take before the burials here become cremations.

This is Pennsylvania, and there’s plenty of coal underground beneath Centralia. Experts say it will continue to burn for the next 250 years. I suppose it’d be easy enough to draw grand lessons from this town’s example, but that’d be too easy. It’s more fun to just read the graffiti. Some of it refers to the particularly ugly deeds done to Mother Earth in this spot. Some of it’s clever. Most of it’s just the usual inane blather of dumb kids with spray paint.

Maybe we can draw a grand lesson from that.

Note: in the video below, check out Centralia shortly after abandonment: