In the American West, you have thousands of towns quickly settled, then quickly abandoned. In China, there are grandiose urban projects that can't find enough commercial or residential tenants. Founding Israel, Jews evicted Palestinians and razed their villages. When borders shifts or political systems change, entire towns evacuate. People have always had to flee for their lives, but in modern times, the scale and range of refugee flows have become unprecedented and truly staggering. A refugee at age 11, I slept in a tent in Guam, an Army barrack in Arkansas, then lived in Washington, Texas, Oregon, California and Virginia before graduating from high school. Such rootlessness is hardly unusual. When in Hanoi, however, I feel strangely at home, though I have never spent more than two weeks at a time there. It's not just the accent, my mother's, but a deeper resonance that comes from millennia of settlement by my kind. The entire Red River Delta has more gravity to me, but less so Saigon, my birthplace. Vietnamese haven't been there as long. That said, I'm best adjusted to Philadelphia and can negotiate its maze better than any other place's. My primary language is still English. I'm a Philadelphian.
With ghost towns all over, why should Centralia fascinate? First of, it's extremely rare to see Americans fleeing en masse from a place, and here they're even doing it permanently. An American refugee is still a very rare breed. Secondly, there are layers of symbolism to this catastrophe. Nourished by coal, this town has been destroyed by it. It's a man-made ecological disaster that destroys a man's home and all that he cherishes. Beneath a thin crust of it's-a-wonderful-life normalcy, there's a bubbling hell threatening to swallow everyone up, and you have to be an extremely smug American to be oblivious to this plot. Centralians also resent having their history and identity being reduced to a final disaster, and this happens, by the way, to all of history's losers. Just think of the American South or South Vietnam. Soon, you too will know the feeling. All Americans are Centralians.
Stories make a place. Without stories, there is no place, but without place, there can still be stories. If your stories are not organically grown, but imposed on you by those who hate everything about you, then you're virtually dead.
After the last Centralian has come home to be buried, the town will be just its cemeteries and a section of lost road. Buckled and cracked, it's filled with graffiti, much of it erotically inspired. Above bones, we screw, until we too become lost words. Oh mother of memory, forgive us for what we've already forgotten.
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