running to the sea

My overall thrust was to the east; my sister had arranged for a video to one of my songs, and although my presence was entirely extraneous, I wanted to be there for the shoot in Manhattan. In the meantime, I had a week and a half to kill, so I decided to work my way through the northeast portions of Pennsylvania. This took me first to the coalmining regions where I had begun the project, and then into areas with somewhat more diversified economies, but ultimately similar stories. As I drove east, the monopoly of coal was gradually undermined by the appearance of cement factories and steel mills. Nevertheless, the towns mostly looked the same: desperate little affairs, doggedly clinging to the sides of darkly wooded hills. Many of these communities were dragged down with their crashing industries, and now lie in varying degrees of depressed isolation. A few found creative ways to survive and sometimes even reinvent themselves. The strange little town of Jim Thorpe is probably foremost amongst these.

Originally known as Mauch Chunk, Jim Thorpe was briefly home to the athlete of the same name. Thorpe got his start in Pennsylvania, attending college in Carlisle. He was one of those rare super-athletes who comes along perhaps once a century. The first intimations of his extraordinary talent came when he walked past Carlisle’s high jumpers with a 5’9” impromptu jump in plain clothes. He went on to be a star competitor in pentathlon, decathlon, American football, baseball, and basketball. He was a multi-Olympic medalist, and as a Sac and Fox Native American, he fought his whole life to overcome discrimination that threatened his career and family. Towards the end of his life, he descended into alcoholism and depression, and died more or less penniless. The town of Mauch Chunk, at a loss as to how to overcome the economic difficulties following the fall of the Lehigh Coal Company, struck a deal with his family to rename the town and set up an elaborate monument to him in order to attract tourism – even though he never actually lived in Mauch Chunk. The trick seemed to work; Jim Thorpe is today a bustling mountain community, a surreal contrast to its neighboring communities.

Passing further east, I came to Allentown. This is the old capital of the Pennsylvania steel industry, and while it went into a deep depression following the collapse of American steel, it remains the third biggest city in Pennsylvania after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. After immortalizing the city in a song, Billy Joel was awarded the key to the city over the protests of some residents. Driving through, I felt like I was right back in Harrisburg. I bumbled about the town trying to find the access to 495 so I could continue further south and east, and after passing promising but somewhat ramshackle public monuments and plazas, I found myself in the ghetto. The transformation was extraordinary. After traveling for weeks through the countryside of Pennsylvania and New York and seeing almost entirely white people, the population was once again entirely black. I could have convinced myself I had just stumbled into a section of Allison Hill that I had never known existed. There were the same streets with the same houses and the same trash. There was suddenly rap on the radio and on the sidewalk, children playing on the stoop, big fat ladies with hoop earrings and shorts in plastic chairs watching them from the porch, grandfathers in hats tottering over the pedestrian crosswalks with canes, and packs of young men slouching about with game in their lope and a desperate territorialism in their eyes, leaning forward to step ahead and reaching back to pull up their pants. One looked up and pierced his menacing, carefully delinquent gaze through the windshield of my van. Our eyes locked immediately in the age-old contest that grips young men together in rivalry down every generation, igniting the jealous spirit of a mountain ram within blood long-brewed for just this purpose, ripe and ready in the razor thin margin of a single glance to spur even the most pacifistic into locking horns. I made a point of holding his gaze until my van rolled off his block. It felt familiar.

The next intersection, however, led me out of the neighborhood and into a small shopping center. A middle-aged blonde woman sat on the grass beside the parking lot screaming gibberish at the passing traffic. I doubled back to try and surreptitiously record her ranting, but when I made it back around the block, she had calmed down. Immediately after, I saw signs for 495, and was once again launched into the countryside.

I arrived that night in Philadelphia, stayed with my sister and set off the next morning into New Jersey. I wanted to hit the Jersey shore in the off-season, and I had come at the right time. The highways to the coast are satisfyingly flat and uncurving, shooting straight through the heart of the garden state to meet the sea. I was about halfway there when I realized I had left a vital piece of recording equipment at my sister’s, said a very bad word and doubled back, just in time to meet the beginning rush hour into Philadelphia. I didn’t really mind, though; it felt good to be driving. I cranked up “Sweet Child of Mine” on the radio and jostled my way through the close-packed cars, singing loudly and grinning all the way. After picking up the abandoned equipment, I turned around again and retraced my steps, now catching the other end of rush hour. By the time I was back on the straight-shooting Jersey throughway, it was dusk. The length of the highway, scores of cars passed me going the other way, but I was almost alone on the east-bound side. I drove fast and smiled into the cold wind and coming headlights, enjoying my solitary speed on the eastbound track. I drove and drove, the road never seeming to alter or waver, gunning due east as the sun burned down behind me and the night grew ahead. I finally started seeing signs for the coast after dark, and navigated my way onto Long Beach island, a long, narrow lancet of earth jousting out from the mainland into the Atlantic. It was a strip of tiny seaside resort towns, now deserted at the beginning of the off-season. I zipped over their darkened streets, all the way to Barnegat Light, the last town on the island. By this time, the night air was heavy with salt, and lights were restricted to a space only a little wider than the highway, betraying the massive, black expanse of the sea beyond. I pulled onto one of the cross streets and drove a short way until it ended in a rising sand dune. Parking the car at the edge of the asphalt, I jumped out stripped down to my boxers, leaving a trail of clothes on the street. I ran up the dune, my bare feet pounding the sand and the cold wind buffeting my skin. Just a little bit further over the rise, and there it pulled into view, the ocean. Or rather, everything else disappeared, and I knew the ocean had to be there because nothing else was. A beach extended a long way forward to end in an inconceivably huger blackness, an unexplainable bulge of void stretching the length of my vision and the extent of the horizon. It swallowed everything, even the sky, with the lights of the whole nation to my back shrieking shrilly into the night and then dissipating, losing themselves in a truer black than one can see on land, a primordial black punctuated only by bright, hard stars. I was pulled the whole way from Philadelphia by that primal thrust that drives men to the sea, which challenges, draws, confounds and drowns us. It pulls us inexorably in, perhaps with some inborn memory or lightless intimation that this wet black hole is where we came from if we look back far enough, that our furthest fathers dragged their cold bodies from its depths before they had feet to walk or minds to understand their travels. And now, grains in the sands of evolution, we are driven back, again not entirely understanding why but irresistibly pulled by the enormity of millennia, by secrets whispered and roared in wild voices we could surely comprehend if we but listened. And I was completing the last few yards of this journey on foot, running at dead sprint down the long, cool beach, the shadow before me growing and extending until I could hear it, and then feel it meet my legs with a cold splash, and suddenly I was part of a new physics, the world was swirling, indistinct, and cold, and I was at the mercy of a far, alien universe that drew me in and picked me up, sent me under and thrashed me about, churning with a vast invisible power that did not know me and yet inspired everything that was its reflection within me. I felt explosions of strength and ferocity and sadness within me with every crash of cold, buffeting water, and swam out into the void until I could not feel anything beneath my feet but water, and met the extent of the secrets she was willing to share with me. Then I returned to the shore and walked back up the beach, exhausted.

first trip north (pt. 3)

The radio stations diminish steadily as I drive North of Pottsville. The buzz drifts on as I try to zero in on the remaining channels. The Righteous Brothers sing “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Some country singer wails about how he wanted to ramble and roam, but she wanted a family and home, building to a chorus of “Angeline, baby, I’m sorry / my future’s in the past / I broke your heart in a million pieces… but Angelina baby, my whole world was you.” NPR is doing a special on the army’s 10th Mountain Division in World War II, a group of trained skiers and rock climbers that worked in altitudes of up to 13,500 feet and in temperatures as low as -20ºF. They were instrumental in the battle for Appenine Mountains in Italy, where they took Riva Ridge, a heavily armed Nazi installation amongst sheer cliffs thought entirely impenetrable. I catch the news at two o’clock. OJ Simpson, cleared of double homicide charges in the 90s, is back in court for assaulting and robbing a sports collector and making off with his own memorabilia. The news turns local, where justice is also afoot. The Naked Thief of Carbondale has been caught after sticking up a convenience store wearing only a hat. They asked him why he did it; “because,” he replied, “I was bored.”

I hadn’t been planning to stop by Centralia on this trip, but my path leads me right through next-door Ashland, and so it seems silly not to go. The most devious feature of anthracite coal is not that it is difficult to light but that once lit, it is almost impossible to put out. Centralia is the greatest testament both to this rather obscure scientific fact and to the disastrous effect it can have on a community. This place was another small, bustling coal town in the earlier part of the last century, but now it is hardly there at all. At some point a vein of coal was lit inadvertently lit, probably by a garbage fire. While the trash part of the fire was quickly doused, the coal part spread stealthily underground, invisibly following tunnels of anthracite deep below the surface. The people above were largely unaware what was happening, even as the ground grew hot in places and thick smoke began pluming from the woods on the outskirts of town. For some time, residents tried pumping dubious chemical concoctions into the abandoned mines, and then new combinations some years later when the old ones failed to stop the smoke. No record was kept of the materials used, and there was no practical way to flush old additives out, so the effort amounted to a regular meal of volatile chemical combinations for the fire.

In 1981, the first accident happened. A child playing in the backyard of a Centralia home shrieked, and his parents ran out to investigate. The ground had opened up beneath him, and he was clutching grass, his feet swaying in a dizzy vacuum at the top of a hole some eighty feet deep, plunging into darkness and ending in burning coal. By this point the fire had already crept under route 61, melting and warping the asphalt. The highway was blocked off, a detour constructed. Around the same time, the owner of a gas station situated in the middle of town measured the temperature of his underground tanks at 172ºF, and the earth thirteen feet under them at over 1,000ºF. The U.S. Bureau of Mines came in to investigate, and suggested a variety of possible solutions. Their most realistic remedy was digging an enormous trench through the town to block off the lit coal lines, but the estimated cost was wildly above what anyone in this busy but humble town could imagine spending. Meanwhile, smoke had begun to rise all over town and cave-ins were becoming an ever-greater danger. People were complaining of nausea and dizziness, probably on account of the tremendously high level of carbon dioxide in the homes and streets, but who knows what other health threats are caused by a massive underground chemical-fed coal fire. It soon became clear that evacuation was the only feasible option.

The federal government provided $42 million to get everyone out. Families left and bulldozers followed. Mindful of the danger rubble could cause in an area where the ground was liable to cave under the weight of a child, the government meticulously cleared all the big detritus left from the leveled homes. The result was a strange, sad place that goes way beyond any ordinary conception of a “ghost town.” In most conventional ghost towns, where, say, miners flocked upon the report of gold and then promptly left once they found none, there are ruins, abandoned buildings, and the like. In Centralia, there is nothing. Or rather, there is a surreally complete infrastructure with nothing to serve. Most of the town consists of suburban grids with no houses on them, a familiar element torn unsettlingly from its context, like seeing only the headlights and fenders of a car driving silently down a dark highway. These are not streets with no names; there are signposts on roads where nobody lives, and stop signs at intersections where nobody drives. Only the ghostly footprints of what was once a town remains. Here a collection of asphalt steps leading up to a front porch that no longer exists; here a driveway leading neatly into an empty lot; here, cruelly, a fire hydrant. Some of the remnants are simply bizarre. In one scraggily, overgrown patch of conspicuously open grass, a refrigerator sits on its side. Everywhere, smoke rises.

Of course, the government couldn’t force people out who wanted to stay, and some did. These are stubborn people, remember, some of them descendents of Irish sharecroppers who would wage rural peasant wars to protect their plots. Centralia’s continuing habitation is the weirdest – and the scariest – thing about the whole affair. Punctuating the eerily vacant landscape are four or five inhabited residences. They are almost all in different parts of town, mostly narrow wooden townhouses, the sort meant to be stacked in tight with identical structures to line a street, only here they are alone, standing vertical, narrow and awkward. In the driveways, neatly parked cars compliment the actual presence of a house, and seem to willfully ignore the scores of identical but pointless driveways surrounding. The houses are painted brightly but shuttered. In one intersection, a gaily-painted wreath hangs on a tree, reading “WE LOVE OUR HOME.” These are the people who keep their town on my Pennsylvania road map, who keep the post office open and demand the construction of a bright, spanking-new fire station on main street (the only two buildings on main street). I have been to Centralia many times now, however, and I have never seen one of them. I suppose if I were that committed to my hometown, I would shutter myself in and avoid poking, curiosity-seeking intruders, too. I’m not sure whether to admire or fear them. I’m not really sure what decades of carbon-dioxide inhalation does to a person, or decades or living in an abandoned town, or, for that matter, what sort of person willfully demands to stay in that sort of environment after all their neighbors have left. They may be heroes, or horrifically mutated monsters, or, for all I know, dead on the cellar floor. How long would it take somebody to find out?

Early on, Centralia became a bizarre kind of port-of-call for Arthur, Edmund, and I. We first learned of it in a book of Edmund’s called Weird Pennsylvania!, and resolved to make a visit. This was back in our senior year of high school, after applying to college and in the heat of that tense, breathless time when the letters are coming in and it feels like your whole life is being decided by the contents of your mailbox. Arthur, I think, learned of his acceptance to Georgetown the morning we left. Anyway, we went, and had lunch in a diner in Ashland where we were amazed that you could still get vanilla coke made with real vanilla syrup, and drove into the smoking town. You can walk anywhere in Centralia; the only barriers are big signs on all the main entrances to the town reading something like “DANGER. Toxic fumes and ground prone to sudden collapse. Entering this area may result in serious injury or death.” Strong stuff, but that’s all. We took pictures under them and tromped around, smelling the sulphuric fumes and weirder smells, hoping one of us wouldn’t suddenly turn a color usually seen only in oil spills and drop dead. We went out on the abandoned high way, crawled over the big cracks, traced the warped median line over strange hills and valleys of asphalt. It felt like walking on the set of some post-apocalyptic film, except it was real, and it was a contained sort of apocalypse, relegated only to the bounds of a small Pennsylvania coal-mining town. In places, the highway was streaked with a graffiti – pictures of skulls, swastikas. “kill all niggers.” “WELCOME TO HELL.” We pulled our coats tighter against a cold wind that tore at the ashen sky and hurled the smoke about. It was the perfect day to visit Centralia. We returned later, together on fall break, with college friends in the winter. In some truly strange way, the town became some sort of symbol or beacon of our friendship.

Returning this time in the van, the weather is incongruently sunny. I decide to pass-up the $8.50 Ashland coalmine ride, instead resolving to have lunch in the town of fumes. I pull in to the familiarly empty streets, but the do-not-go-here-or-die sign is gone. Its posts remain, however; I assume it has been stolen, and wonder how many times it’s stolen each year. I drive on top of a hill and look around. No smoke today it seems, but I feel confident there’s still something burning beneath my tires. One mine fire authority was quoted in an issue of Newsweek as saying that if the rate of burning held steady, Centralia would roast for a thousand years. I open the side door to the van and sit in the threshold, eating tuna fish and watching two enormous dump trucks haul slate-gray gravel up a faraway mountain. They look tiny across the valley where Centralia lays down its empty grids, and the growl of their engines and the muted boom of their falling loads echoes listlessly between the hills, quieter than the soft rush of breeze and grasshoppers. They rise up, dump the stuff, and then glide back down, trailing a cloud of dust ten times bigger than themselves. Here in Centralia, the coal is burning, but across the way, they’re still digging for more. I pull out, eager to move on while there’s still light. The trucks, still revolving in their quiet, remote clockwork, are beautiful.

first trip north (pt. 1)

Bidding farewell to Avdo and Steve and Will, to my parents and the turtles and the acorns, I started north. What a true joy to be on the road at last! I planned to go as far up as I wanted, and then loop back down and return to Hershey in about a week. There, I would resupply, install any gear I had overlooked, and pick up my first copilot! Anthony Cheng is my oldest friend. He was trying to figure out what to do with a free year between college and medical school, and agreed to come with me for the first few months. I welcomed his company, but wanted to first get the hang of things on my own.

I headed up 81 in beautiful sunlight, but soon ran into traffic in the mountains. I resolved to get off at the next exit before things got really hairy, and so found myself in the tiny town of Ravine. It’s just that; one street wedged by a creek in between high hills, its most distinguishing feature being a lot of school buses. I pulled off at a gas station to orient myself, and found a card my family had stowed away in the van. “They died so we might live,” the cover read, with a picture of chicken wings. Inside: “let us dance to their memory,” and the chicken dance came tinnily bouncing from a little battery-powered gizmo. We hope you find these EVERYWHERE! The inscription read. I have the best family in the world.

I continued on, driving deep into the coalmining region of Pennsylvania. This is a beautiful, grim place, strange and half-forgotten, filled with hard people and the husks of towns. It was victim to an inhumane industry that oppressed its workers and scored the land with strip mines and coal fires. Though it sat on one of the richest coal deposits in the world, northern Pennsylvania did not give of its treasures easily. The stuff was discovered 1790 by a hunter named Necho Allen. According to legend, Allen was woken from his slumber at the base of Broad Mountain – on the south end of present-day Pottsville – by a raging conflagration. He had inadvertently ignited an outcropping of coal with his campfire. This is a good story, but it’s probably not true; it would have been almost impossible for Allen to set fire to Pennsylvania’s most stubbornly adverse resource with a mere campfire. His contemporaries immediately realized that the land offered coal almost beyond imagination, but it was anthracite coal, hard, unforgiving stuff, difficult to light and immune to conventional mining tactics. They didn’t figure out how to access it until 1828, when an ingenious Scottish immigrant named James Neilson replaced cold air in the furnace with directly bellows-injecting heated, and at last found success. The process became known as blasting, and ravenous for the riches that had teased them for decades, the men took into the land with a vengeance, using scorched-earth tactics and producing some 300 million tons of coal a year, about as much as the rest of the world combined.

Rural Pennsylvania enjoyed a colossal heyday for about a half a century, aided by the extraordinary additional discovery of oil in the region. The slash-and-burn approach of the big companies brought unimaginable wealth to a few entrepreneurs but wrecked the land and the poor immigrants who worked it. They paid their miners by the ton, which both upped production and encouraged a deadly rabid zeal as hundreds of hungry, dirt-poor men hacked at the coal veins with hammers and pickaxes without regard to safety or sustainability. Bill Bryson notes that “mining has of course always been a wretched line of work everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.” The miners saw little of the wealth that flowed from their work, and the 22,0000 who worked in Schuylkill County alone might have called the period something other than a “heyday.” Their words, however, would probably not be in English; they were mostly fresh immigrants, lured to America by promises of work and fortune. Their lack of familiarity with the local language and culture made them thoroughly exploitable, and exploited they were. They were herded onto freight trains and shoveled into dangerous mines where they struggled to learn the ropes of deadly job on-site. Differences in language often separated the workers from each other, and almost always made the English safety signs inscrutable. Deaths and serious injuries were measured by the hundreds each year. 5,500 of the workers were children between seven and sixteen years old. They worked the simplest jobs, mostly separating slate from coal. Although they might have been two young to see it, this grinding task gave them a good sense of their future: the task was shared by the “breakers,” the broken and the injured, whitebeards too old to work the trickier jobs, finishing their careers as they’d begun them as children. The mines themselves were dark, dank, claustrophobic affairs. Imagine yourself wedged into a dank rock tunnel barely as wide as your own body, surrounded by black mud and trickling water, blanketed by underground shadow far darker than any equivalent on the surface and pierced only by the dim light of your gas lamp, breathing coal dust and powder smoke, incapable of understanding the words of anyone around you, and separated from your family and world by tons of black, caving rock. It was not an easy life.

But these were tough, tough folk. Many of them were Irish, hated in America and hailing from a long, crushing history of small-scale potato farming. They had worked their plots for centuries, starving through the winters and fighting each other when land became scarce. They were accustomed to backbreaking labor and developed a wiry, barbed resilience. When pushed, they would destroy fences, plow cropland by night, kill livestock, and even kill people who oppressed them. To defend their interests, they formed secret societies like the Whiteboys and the Peep O’Day Boys, which were armed and quick to dispense retributive justice “to correct transgressions against traditional moral and social codes.” In the words of sociologist Kevin Kenny, they believed they were following “a just law of their own in opposition to the inequities of landlord law, the police and court system, and the transgressions of land-grabbers.”

This sort of thorny hardiness permitted them to survive Pennsylvania’s coalmines, but it’s unclear to what degree their militancy accompanied them over the Atlantic. The very rumor of secret societies, especially the notorious Molly Maguires, was sufficient to provoke harsh retribution from industrial overlords. To be sure, violence and crime among the mineworkers was common, but whether or not this unrest was organized in part by a secret society is still a fundamentally debated question. James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett, writing sympathetically to the justice leveled against the Mollies, nevertheless admit, “the difficulty of achieving strict and fair accuracy in relation to the Molly Maguires is very great. Sensible men have held there never even was such an organization.” Regardless, the primary historical function of the secret society – whether it existed or not – was undoubtedly to provide an excuse for the coal industry to persecute its own workers, and especially to discourage the budding union that increasingly provided them with real organization.

The union became popular as workers sought outlets for their unrest. A string of mining disasters – including an 1869 fire at the Avondale Mine in Luzerne County that took the lives of 110 men – underlined the need for workers to organize in self-protection. The Avondale project resembled coalmines across the region: the company had refused to supply ventilation or pumping systems, sound scaffolding, or emergency exits. In fact, the mine was only a single, glorified tunnel with no secondary entrance, so when flames blocked the way to surface, the workers were trapped, impounded to a dark, fiery death. As charred bodies were dragged from the pit over the next few days, thousands of miners arrived in solidarity from surrounding communities. At some point, John Siney, the head of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, climbed onto a wagon and spoke to the crowd: “Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with.” He urged his fellows to join the union, and thousands immediately did.

The smoldering malcontent was brought to a boil by the depression of the 1870s, when one-fifth of the nation’s workers lost their jobs to reckless speculation and stock watering. It was in this desperate climate that the union became most popular, swelling to 85 percent of Pennsylvania’s total anthracite miners. If they existed, this was also presumably when the Molly Maguires, who had already supposedly supplied fifty “inexplicable murders” between 1863 and 1867, struck out most fiercely against their oppressors. After coal operators announced a twenty percent pay cut in 1974, the union decided to strike, and on January 1, 1875, thousands of workers laid down their picks. Corporate leaders, unaccustomed to insolence and determined to crush resistance, quickly struck back. Franklin B. Gowen, president of both the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Reading Coal and Iron Company – called “the wealthiest anthracite coal mine owner in the world” – hired Alan Pinkerton to address the problem.

Pinkerton’s detective agency was famed across the land. Their name had became commonplace after successfully foiling an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln, and they were also employed to track western outlaws including Jesse James, the Reno brothers and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Most of their expertise and livelihood, however, was in union breaking, where they often employing violence to crush the will of striking workers. A popular song in 1892 wailed, “hear the poor orphans tell their sad story / Father was killed by a Pinkerton man.” Although the coalminer’s union was adamantly opposed to violence, a continuing stream of killings attributed to the Mollies permitted the Pinkertons and even more shadowy groups thugs to intimidate miners more or less indiscriminately. A gang of armed vigilantes named the Modocs joined the corporation-owned Coal and Iron Police in ambushing and killing militant miners. The slash-and-burn tactics of the corporate response led to some detractors within the anti-Molly forces. James McParlan, the Pinkerton agent originally hired to infiltrate the Mollies, resigned after he realized that masked men were committing the “murder of women and children.” Nevertheless, the backlash continued, union leaders were imprisoned, and after six months, the strike collapsed and miners returned to work, accepting the pay cut.

Some especially ornery elements continued to resist, providing the coal companies with an opportunity to make further example. After a sensational trial, six “Mollies” were hanged in the prison at Pottsville, and four more at Mauch Chunk in Carbon County. A Carbon County judge later described the episode in the following terms:
“The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.”
An industrial spokesman at the time painted a different picture:
“Peace once more reigns in the anthracite coal regions. Mollie Maguireism is practically dead. The inhabitants of the anthracite coal regions are now enjoying the blessed peace which has recently come to them. God rules, justice must reign, and right must triumph.”

The union, as is often case, lost in attaining its goals in the short term and won in the long-term, sort of. Reforms were eventually introduced, but mining continued to be a dark, dangerous affair, left to men who could find work nowhere else. More generally, miners and the wider coalmining region were pretty much always losers. By the 1950s, the industry was in steep decline, and the Knox Mine Disaster of 1959 – where 10 billion gallons of water flooded a riverside dig, killing 12 people – essentially ended deep mining in Pennsylvania. The area suffered heavily from the decline of the industry, with “patch towns,” small communities of 500 people or less tied to a specific mine, left high and dry. Some opened mining museums like the Pioneer Tunnel and Steel Train in Ashland and others survived under the protection of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Most were less lucky, reduced to ghost towns or forced to suffer extreme rural poverty. Driving through them is a depressing affair. From the highway, miles of low, gray green mountains thickly filled with dense forests suddenly give way to ravaged holes or burnt-out timbers overgrown with scrappy, tan undergrowth, the quiet, ravaged testimony of strip mines and coal fires. The names of the towns make their history and purpose clear – Minersville, Carbondale, Slatedale, Ashland. Some of them hunker down, waving flags and crouching courageously on the black soil. Others are simply stacks of loosely shingled shacks crowding each other in little hamlets huddled between the oppressive hills. It’s hard for people to get out of these towns. Many young men join the army to escape, others take over small businesses from their fathers, but the region as a whole wallows in the hopelessness of its economic situation. Harvey’s Diner still serves vanilla coke with real vanilla syrup. The water in its bathroom is scalding. Here a ravaged old man stands vacantly, watering his driveway. He raises his thin, grizzled face to identify my roaring van with an unfocused gaze of hard-learned, tired terror. Our eyes meet, and I briefly feel myself gazing into an endless, icy, hole. Coalmining country.