This is the third in an ongoing series of blog posts about the poetry of place. Upcoming posts will focus on factories, canyons, South Africa, and Oklahoma.
Centralia, Pennsylvania is one of those hidden wonders, one of the crazy places you hear about sometimes that you never knew existed in the world. Centralia is a ghost town, the inspiration for horror movies and video games, all caused by a coal seam fire more than 50 years ago that continues burning today. In some ways, it's the perfect metaphor -- perpetual fire underneath the surface. When you add on the layers of a handful of residents who refuse to leave their homes and the abandoned highway now diverted from the town, it's easy to see the intrigue.
I first learned about Centralia while studying at nearby Susquehanna University, and many of my peers wrote about it or visited. The allure escaped me until I moved to the southwest, perhaps because distance makes the heart grow fonder or because it can throw connections into sharp relief. In Centralia, a chapbook ultimately published by Porkbelly Press, I wrote:
"On my father’s side, I come from a Polish immigrant family of coal miners in northeast Pennsylvania, spread through the mining towns: Nanticoke, Glenn Lyon, Alden Mountain, Forty Fort. Now they’re full of dilapidated wooden houses with porches that face narrow, pot-holed streets. These are the kinds of towns that people pass through, not the ones to which they decide to go; they exist around the American Legion or the community college or nothing at all. Mountain Top is the same way, just a little younger, a little richer. Good schools, that’s why we moved there.
My father was not a miner, but he arrived home each day coated in a thick black layer of grease. After the mines, there were factories, and they weren’t so different as a maintenance mechanic. The danger wasn’t natural anymore, but he had open wounds all over his hands, blackened fingernails, knobby knuckles swollen from working inside the machines. And there was the heat.. The insides of the factories where he worked (Lipton, Mission, Gatorade) could reach a hundred degrees or more and he was willing to pay to keep our house a cold relief. He kept the house at sixty degrees and I wore sweatshirts in the dead of summer."
The connections between my family history and the mining town led to a more personal exploration of my relationships with my father and the men in my family. I had this perfect metaphor in my back pocket, but I found that trying to write it was easier said than done. I needed nuance, something stranger to make the place my own.
"My father has inherited his stubbornness, but we call it obsessive compulsive disorder instead. Chores must be done in a certain way at a certain time or there’s yelling. Stop tapping, stop coughing, stop doing things the wrong way.
Anger is too easy a comparison with fire, and not accurate enough. Anger is more like an explosion, a sudden burst of combustible material. Disappointment is the kind of fire that simmers in its coals, the kind of fire that spreads."
This is not new advice. So many of my favorite writers transform their perfect metaphors into something entirely else, otherworldly and beautiful. Acknowledging this difficulty in the writing itself helped me find what it is that I really wanted to say about Centralia and about the relationships I aimed to reconcile and understand.
I sometimes feel as though I could write forever about Centralia and what it taught me. I've only been there once. I didn't step foot in the town until after I had finished the first draft, and it felt anticlimactic to go, in the same way that going home sometimes feels that way. Everything is the same as you left it, no matter how long you've been gone. The fire's still there, burning underground, whatever that happens to mean for you.
Sarah Gzemski is the Publicity and Publications Coordinator at the Poetry Center and the Managing Editor of Noemi Press. Her chapbook, Centralia, is available from Porkbelly Press.
All images courtesy Sarah Gzemski.