Centralia
Written by Damien Gessel
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Sean McGinley points to a motley-looking collection of bricks scattered along the side of a deserted road. Grass, weeds and wildflowers poke through the cracks, practically swallowing even this last vestige of McGinley's childhood home, and at first it's hard to understand what he's talking about. "This is it," he says, sipping coffee. "This is where I lived." |
I stare at the field for a moment, trying to attach some meaning to its emptiness. In the mid-1980s, when McGinley was a teen, the spot we stand on would have been filled with the sounds of life, of routine. A television set would have droned in the background, cooking oil would have spattered and smacked in the kitchen, McGinley and his four brothers and sisters would have raised a ruckus upstairs.
Now the only sound is the sharp hum of chirping crickets. Even for me " a total outsider to Centralia " it's disorienting, even off-putting. I've heard stories of people returning to childhood neighborhoods to find the homes they'd grown up in converted to burger joints, the yards they played in made into strip malls, but McGinley doesn't even have a landmark. He can't complain to a board of city zoning officers, he can't scoff at the careless footprint of development. The loss of his childhood home, I realize, is more akin to the aftermath of a nuclear strike: there's absolutely nothing left. Forget McGinley and the hundreds of other former Centralia residents, forget the history books, and Centralia is just a bleak coal country forest along a nearly deserted road - a half-mile stretch of mostly unexceptional rolling hills a stone's throw from Route 61.
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