Traveling east on highway 61 one encounters piles, piles, and more piles. A
landscape of piles - coal, culm, old machinery, collapsed collieries,
collections of old mattresses and toilets and roofing shingles dumped by the
roadside - everywhere piles. Then orange, deadstreams, more towns and more
people. And the aberrant, discordant landscape. It is all to easy to condemn
the Philadelphia capitalists who colonized these coal valleys, removed its
wealth as their own and left the landscape as a brazen monument to their deeds.
Yet there is an odd attraction to such landscapes, maybe even a strange,
incongruent beauty. Dead places occupied by life (people everywhere), jagged,
torn earth and comatose machines slowly being enveloped by a shroud of vivid
vegetation, curious and refreshing eccentricity mixed with awareness of
relentless and unfettered exploitation; a duplicitous landscape.
[..]
The sulfury smellscape of Centralia grows more insistent as one nears the "hot"
part of town, where the fire is closest to the surface. A church near a field
of pipes venting noxious gasses - and further stoking the fire - sits near the
southern edge of town. Beyond this the gentle curve of highway 61 (this stretch
closed to traffic) slopes through a broad, rumpled, smoking field, well-baked
dead trees bleached white and charred at their bases. One stands on the buckled
asphalt road and watches this curious, roasted landscape...but not for long.
The road is hot through your shoes. Moving onto the spongy, burnt field from
the road you must step around small holes venting fumes from far below. A taste
of soil from near one of these vent holes betrays some sense of the place: a
complex, slight sulfury burnt flavor with a metallic overtone, fine and dusty
in consistency. Surprisingly moist and organic, it quickly coats your mouth
with an inky pervasiveness. Repeated spitting never quite expels the blackness,
and the taste remains in your mouth as Centralia remains in your mind.
http://www.owu.edu/~jbkrygie/krygier_html/placetaste.html
see also:
http://www.xydexx.com/modernruins/centralia_gallery.htm
http://www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/DEPUTATE/MINRES/BAMR/CENTBRF.htm
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