Pennsyltucky, Part II - October 28, 2008

The first thing you realize pulling into Centralia is that it hasn't been dead long. Since 1984, to be exact, the year Congress finally passed an act giving all the residents huge settlement checks to move to a place nearby called New Centralia. The grid's still there, a patchwork of paved, operable roads telling you that yes, this was once a town. It's all overgrown now, trees hanging over rusted signs, weeds and bushes obscuring the sidewalks. But the roads are still traveled, and a few base elements - defiant reminders this was once a "community" - persist. An artery leading to a nearby highway runs smack through the center of the place. The graveyard off the main drag is tended, home-made street signs mark the roads where people refused to move and just off what looks like a park in the middle of town, a painted park bench remains, reminding you where you are.

I wanted to ask somebody if this was a play on the street name. But I didn't.

Somebody forgot the '-1984' after '1866'.

"Should we stop in to see some people?" Charles fiddled with his digital camera.

"I don't know..." That'd been the idea, but there, sitting in the midst of the mess, pestering the victims seemed wrong. The poor bastards who lived in the last remaining homes had probably been examined enough. How many years of inspectors and bureaucrats with checklists at their doors? Of obnoxious, pushy reporters asking the same irritating questions? "Are you really going to stay? Aren't you afraid? Afraid that fire's going to creep up a vein just under your home, corrode the foundation below? Suck your house into a flaming, sulfurous sinkhole?

...It's dangerous here. You could die. Right here. Right now! Any minute!"

Hyperbolic? Sure, but those reporters wouldn't be joking. There's something sinister in the smoke in Centralia. As if the fire, the only thing that's supposed to be vibrant, was somehow as dead as the town around it. I expected the smoke to be bitter, stink like the coal fueling the blaze. That wasn't the case at all. The fumes were sweet, weak, almost misty - like someone was burning cheap incense. Any smoke going down that easy couldn't be good for the lungs. Like clove cigarettes - a hint of sugar, just as cancerous as tobacco.

The locals smelled the smoke. Hell, they've smelled it for years, some most of their lives. Probably couldn't imagine an environment without it. I could see those reporters swarming the town, shoving microphones in the residents' faces. "How can you stand that smell? Why don't you leave?"

What could they do but smile?

Why don't I move? Because this is my home?

"No. I don't want to bother anyone in the town. Maybe we'll stop at a house on the outskirts, on the way out. Ask some questions there." I wasn't bagging that idea out of mere sympathy, of course. The scene gave me pause, fear about the consequences of screwing with the natives. What kind of hard-ass would stay in a hellhole like this? And what would they think if we knocked on their door? It was a random Tuesday morning - rainy, foggy, miserable. Who was this jerk on the porch, dressed like Matlock? Honey, there's a man outside in a seersucker suit. He's got someone with him, taking pictures. Better to leave them some dignity. And avoid being met by a shotgun.

"Maybe we should get some shots of the smoke. You know, coming out of those vents." Charles aimed the car at the smoldering dump just off the main drag.

"Right. Get some pictures of it up close."

Bring your own bratwurst.

We were snapping photos in the dump when I looked up and saw the church, a thin gray structure punching through a canopy of trees on the side of the mountain across town. "We need to go up there, see that."

"So let me try to understand this..." When we got back in the car, I immediately resumed cross-examining Charles on 'The Breakfast Story.' "You and Emile did that shit intentionally?"

"Fuck no. We were drunk as hell."

"The two of you just decided, 'Hey, I have an idea,' opened the refrigerator and it just happened? Just like that?"

"Pretty much. You want me to make some crap up about why? Give you a story? Southern Comfort. There's your answer. "

"You had to be blacked out."

"No. I remember all of--" Charles stopped and rolled down the window. "Stop! Stop! We have to get this."

I slammed on the brakes and lurched the car to the side of the road.

"Priceless." He jumped out and started snapping shots. "The have a fire department. Engine, garage, the whole deal. A working fire department... Here."

Who says the rural lack irony?

The next stop was the church, a weathered clapboard building straddling the edge of a windy road up the side of a mountain overlooking the town. If anything in this town was haunted, it was the church. Sitting in the middle of nowhere, framed by the mist and grey sky around us, it looked like something from a Lon Chaney flick. A hall of specters, some place where the innocent were judged wrong... Ominously simple save an ornate spire at the top, the way you might imagine the wooden meeting halls in the Salem Witch Trials. And yet somehow, some way, the thing was clearly alive and functioning. The grass was cut, the windows were intact and the railings stood at perfect ninety degree angles from the ground.

Grey is the new bleak.

"So you weren't blacked out at all?"

"Huh?" Charles kneeled in the middle of the road, snapping shots of the structure.

"The story, the thing with Emile... You remember that night?"

"How could I forget it?" He laughed as we got back in the car. "That shit doesn't happen every day."

"How did you do it?"

"You need me to explain that?"

"I mean, was it a cardboard container? Glass? Plastic? I mean, how does an idea like that come up?"

"Fuck. Hold on." A few hundred yards up from the church Charles grabbed his camera and ordered me to stop. "I have to get this."

"Let me turn around first." I pulled a three point turn in the road. "You can get it from the window."

"I have to get close for this." Charles ran up to the front of a home and started taking photographs of huge wooden carvings of a Grizzly bear and a hunter in a coonskin hat planted in the lawn.

Whittling. For those years where there isn't much going on.

Blurry because... Well, you don't want to get caught walking on a lawn with this in it.

"People live there!" I shouted from the car. "They're going to get pissed about some asshole in their yard snapping photos of their shit."

"Anybody putting statues in his yard has to expect this shit."

As Charles went on snapping I saw the tail lights of a truck emerging from the garage of the home behind him. "Charles. Charles! Get out of there."

Charles looked up and saw the truck pulling backward, and I checked out the road ahead to make certain it was clear. Ensure I could stamp on the gas, blaze through the left turn ahead and race to the main road. Normally, I wouldn't be concerned. I'd seen a lot of yard sculptures growing up in this state. Plastic deer, statutes of Jesus or Mary framed inside half-buried bathtubs, pink flamingos in floral arrangements centered in the middle of painted truck tires... You wonder where Andy Warhol came up with Pop Art? His name was Warhola, and he grew up in Pittsburgh. The yards of rural and ethnic neighborhoods in Pennsylvania are filled with amazing kitsch, all of it sadly (yet endearingly) earnest. Still, even in that collection of aesthetic misfires, there's something disturbing about six foot sculptures of bears on their hind legs and trappers brandishing rifles. It's not offensive or garish, just a little off-putting, vaguely aggressive and out of place for that part of the country... Who could tell what the owner was thinking? Might just be art. Or it might be a statement. Either way, there isn't much good in annoying a man who'd put a tribute to armed frontiersmen on his lawn.

"Shit. He's behind us now." I gunned the car through the turns down the hill as I watched the truck in the rear view mirror.

"He's not following us. You're paranoid."

"We'll see when we get to the stop sign on the main road."

"So what? What if he pulls up and gives us shit? I was admiring his sculpture. If he didn't want people doing that he shouldn't put it in there. Thank about it. Why else would anyone even own stuff like that?"

"I'd agree. But not here, not like this." I was wearing a sport-jacket, shorts and flip-flops. And Charles was a terrible smartass, the sort who'd say "What? I thought you had a real nice Daniel Boone statue there," if questioned and have it come out like a snotty, backhanded joke. And nothing, nothing in the world, is more uncomfortable than watching one person begin to suspect another's laughing at - considers campy - something he takes seriously. It's the complicated equivalent of watching somebody call somebody else a rube to his face.¹ I think you're amusing. No use in letting that truck get anywhere near us. We'd only be seen as tourists, come to gawk and ogle. A pair of assholes in a foreign yuppie sedan, taking pictures like the place was some kind of wildlife preserve.

"Where do we go now?"

"Get a drink. I saw a bar in the town next door."

"We're done?"

"What else is left? See the art museum? The baseball stadium?"

Part III

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¹ It's picking the raw sore out of which politicians like Sarah Palin bubble up on our national stage.

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 12:39 PM

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Comments

I'm liking your transformation thus far. Best of luck, and my sincere thanks for writing what needs to be said. Hopefully, one day, the 10 percenters will be able to influence the country's direction.

As for Centralia, the first I heard of it was reading the Bill Bryson book A Walk in the Woods. He has a chapter in there similar to your adventure. Coincidentally, I read his book about a week before you posted this article, while I was waiting for yours to show up from amazon.

PL: Thank you. I've wanted to do this story for a long time. The other one I want to do is a Furry Convention (the national yearly gathering for those people who dress up in fuzzy animal costumes and have orgies).

You should see Centralia up close. There's no way any photos could do the thing justice because it's impossible to capture a truly resonant image of the absence of something.

Posted by: Andy at October 28, 2008 01:49 PM

Those statues are.. unsettling. Maybe the smoke really gets to your head over time, living there. The thumbs-up pic is also a standout, might work as an album cover.
Anyway, really liking this new direction. I feel like visiting Centralia now.

PL: Thanks. Doing this is fun. Less demons.

Posted by: Swope at October 28, 2008 02:30 PM

Hey another great story. Looking forward to the next installment. Word of warning though, I came to this page by clicking on your "Get the latest from Rudius Media" box below Gaijin Smash. When the page first opened the formatting was completely messed up and half the story was bathed in black and only readable by highlighting the text. Refreshing the page fixed the problem, but first time readers might not understand that. You're probably already aware of this problem, but just thought I'd tell you.

Great stuff PL.

PL: Thanks, and thanks for the heads up. I'll run it by the editor.

Posted by: Simon at October 28, 2008 08:34 PM

I love the evolution of your writing. The same amount of entertainment, but a very different story. You are a phenomenal writer, no matter which voice you are speaking in. I can't believe you wore seersucucker to the middle of Pennsylvania!! Is Pennsyltucky is the new Dirty South?

PL: I've worn it in Cape Cod... Hell, I'd wear it in Canada. I never bought into the whole Mason Dixon rule on the stuff.

But I do observe the Memorial Day rule.

Posted by: K at October 28, 2008 08:54 PM

Hey, I'm only a southern girl from Virginny that laid roots in DC.

I really don't get the opportunity to see a whole lot of men in seersucker north of Richmond. But, when I do --- it sure does turns my head.

Work it & own it, sugar!

PL: It's cheap as shit and comfortable as the sheets on your bed. Why Northerners don't wear it more in the summer baffles me.

Personally, as far as summer attire goes for lawyers, I think we ought to switch to something along the lines of what they wear in Bermuda. Shorts as formal wear would be another step toward untightening a whole lot of the stuffed shirts constipating the legal field.

Or maybe it's just that I'd have loved an excuse to deliver an argument dressed like Angus Young...

Posted by: K at October 28, 2008 09:42 PM

HAHAHAH OMG you're going to go to a fur con? Furries make great comedy material because they have such fevered egos; they live in more of a fantasy land than any tv pastor.

P.S. are you going to go undercover? Are you going to dress up as a shark?

PL: Isn't the whole place undercover?

Posted by: not a doktor at October 28, 2008 11:38 PM

Just completed your book. Although much of it was a reprise, there was some new stuff, kind of like half of the Rolling Stones' albums. My favorite chapter was "Marshal?", which I intend to share with the one other person in my office with a sense of humor and appreciation of the dysfunction that is law. She is a paralegal who also directs plays and acts on the side, talk about yin and yang.

I know you can sign up for e-mail, but if you could post when you will visit DC it is easier, I want to actully say hello and tell you thanks for such entertaining yarns and keep it up.

P.S. Is Led Zeppelin without Plant Led Zeppelin? I do not know but I am there anyway, having missed them by a mere 2 years.

PL: Not really a reprise. The original structures and language and emphases are shifted or in some cases entirely gutted and rebuilt to click as parts of a whole much more fulfilling in some regards than the stand alone pieces were before. But then, some people like to read it as stand alone pieces, and I'd like to think it works on that level as well.

The chapter you reference was amusing in edits. Originally, it was a bit more incendiary. Over a drink, I can expand considerably. You've probably seen it all and can guess what was deemed a bit too revealing.

No. That's unpossible, absurd.

Posted by: subrogated self at October 29, 2008 12:03 AM

Like the story, but be careful as you define the new direction. Didn't like the pictures. They were fine, but the fact that they were there. Felt like... a book report. I've always enjoyed your ability to use words to animate scenes. I'd argue that by forcing yourself to describe the scene instead of showing us, you can convey your lens, your interpretation, which is part of the fun of telling a story. This isn't any more of a "you have to see this" moment than anything else you've written-- words are not only sufficient, but better.

You compared "the farther we go the rounder we get" to Layla. Well, Clapton went downhill after Layla. It was his last great album. Theres no reason that should happen here; dont let it. A change of topics is good, but don't drop too many of the qualities that make your writing so enjoyable and strong.

PL: Eric Clapton made "Eric Clapton," "Slowhand" and "461 Ocean Blvd." after "Layla and Assorted Love Songs." And the real key to the power of the Layla record, even according to the liner notes of the boxed set of fantastic outtakes, was Duane Allman joining the band. Clapton had all the emotional baggage going in, which caused him to write some decent material. But Allman nailed those dog-whistle high notes that cause the record to soar in places.

Were I to keep writing about the same thing in the same fashion, I'd fall into a pattern. Nothing wrong with that. AC/DC just put out a fine record of exactly the same songs they've been doing since 1980. I just don't want to do that. So I'm going to experiment. So we used photos, which we've never done before... Why not?

Don't worry. I'll always write more than offer pictures. But for this scene, I think the photos were necessary, amateur as they are.

Posted by: Julian at October 29, 2008 02:31 AM

couldn't quite make it out: were y'all driving a 3 series or a 5?

PL: Shhhh.

Posted by: Ivan at October 30, 2008 02:52 PM

Hey, just wanted to say I finished and loved the book. Immensely enjoyable and thought-provoking. All the best to you and your family.

PL: Thank you. Same to you.

Posted by: Andrew at November 1, 2008 08:20 PM