Seeking Ferret

Because I'm me, I suggested a visit to famed ghost town Centralia, PA, as a possible date with a girl I was interested in. After the relationship failed to take hold, I was complaining to deainperpetuum that as much as I was disappointed with how things had gone with the girl, I was as disappointed about not getting to see Centralia. deainperpetuum suggested we go anyway, so this past Sunday I went to Centralia with her and her boyfriend.

Centralia was a tiny coal mining town northeast of Reading until an underground mine fire caused the mine to be abandoned. As was the case in many such mining towns, the town withered away gradually after the mine left. As was not the case in other such towns, the fire kept burning. It's been burning for over forty years now, underneath the town. The bizarreness of the fire, the way it serves as a metaphor and memorial for Northeastern industrial culture, and the fact that for years signs warned visitors not to come because of safety concerns, have made Centralia a sort of contrarian tourist destination.

The most important thing to realize about visiting Centralia is that there is nothing to see in Centralia. The primary visual motif in Centralia is overgrown. Everything is overgrown. The few remaining buildings are overgrown [I think a couple of people still live in the town. Literally two or three people.] The sites where other buildings had been demolished are overgrown. The hiking trails through the woods are overgrown.

There is also nothing to do in Centralia except walk around surveying the nothing to see. Which is peaceful and pleasant when done in pleasant company. We all enjoyed ourselves wandering around, taking pictures of ourselves in front of piles of big rocks, hopping through grass up to our waist, telling stories to each other, exploring in hopes of seeing something unusual. I kind of expected, as hinted by my mention of the 'metaphor and memorial', to find something solemn or sobering about walking through a ghost town, but I didn't really ever have that.

Instead, the most striking experience we had was when we stumbled on an abandoned road, about three quarters of a mile long, that had apparently been appropriated by area high school students as their personal graffiti canvas. The entire road was covered with spraypainted messages from end to end, an effort whose artistic merit was entirely in its sheer volume. Of all my experiences in Centralia, this one most solidified my sense of this town as a wildland with no one taking responsibility for it.

All in all, it was not a profound or exciting adventure, as I had dared to hope it might be. I warned deainperpetuum before we went that there was the possibility that the trip might suck, and while I'm grateful that it didn't, there's a perverse part of me that remains convinced that going on trips that don't quite live up to their potential make the unexpected adventures that exceed expectations even more special.