The Canals of Mars: A Memoir

Subsidence, Mine Fire, Bypass, Golf

M y father tells me to turn up Spencer Lane, the first time I’ve taken this road in thirty years. “Why?” I thinkofasking,buthe’ssittingupsostraightIknow I don’t have long to wait. “Look,” he says, after we make two right turns. The street is blocked by sawhorses with blinking lights. “Subsidence,” he says, “after all these years.” Road Closed is repeated on three signs, and I keep driving, allowing him to direct me through a loop of roads to thebacksideofStoneridge,thehousingplanthatcoversthehillside near his house. “We can park here and walk,” he says. Heliveslessthanhalfamileaway.Wehikedalloverthishillside and the woods just below us until the houses sprang up when I was inhighschool.Nowwepassmailboxestippingtowardsunkenyards, houses with heavy equipment parked near the shrubbery, a sure sign of cracked foundations. The lights are out in every house; if anyone else is taking the tour, we don’t see them. Fifteen minutes later, my father has me park in front of the fire hall, where a meeting has already begun with township officials and a set of engineering and mining experts. The hall is packed, every chair taken, a triple row of people I imagine are Stoneridge residents jammedalongthreewalls.Onebyone,twenty-seveninallwhilewe watch,thehomeownerswalktothemicrophoneinthecenteraisle and voice their protests. After each speech—limited, apparently, to two minutes—a round of applause, whether the speaker is loud or soft, profane or polite. When the first engineer begins to deliver his assurances, my father nudges me toward the door. “We don’t need to hear the rest,” he says. “I didn’t realize the mines were that close,” I say. “You were a kid,” he says. “When you’re a kid you don’t know something like that. The closest shaft is at the end of the street. Back when we had sewers put in, forty-five years ago, I thought the Millers were kidding when they said they didn’t need to tap Subsidence, Mine Fire, Bypass, Golf 158 ■ w e a k n e s s in because they dumped their sewage down a mine shaft. I thought they were cheap, but I never did see any sign of a septic tank, none of that telltale rich green you get from having one.” It turns out the township has mailed my father and the rest of his neighbors a map of the mines in question. If he had bought on the other side of the street, he says, he thinks he would be in danger. “The map doesn’t tell you for sure?” “You can look,” he says. “You have the map.” “It’s hard to read.” When we get home, he starts to search for the map among stacks of old mail he’s piled on the dining room table. I’ve seen dates on those envelopes running back five years. My father, who misplaced his bifocals months ago, can’t read the map he finally fishes from stack #3. The tunnels, according to the map, run along the backyards of the houses across the street. Not so lucky are the residents of Stoneridge, a large part of that housing plan built over a labyrinth of abandoned seams. “I used to help deliver coal,” my father says, and I let him tell me old stories —how, when the truck came, the driver dumped the coal in the alley behind their house. “The basement window was under the back porch,” he says. “We had to shovel the coal into bushel baskets, and one of us boys had to get under that porch, take the basket, and hand it down to my father. There’s not much worse than breathing coal dust.” I think of worse at once, tell my father about Centralia, the town near where I live that has suffered an underground fire for over forty years. He thinks I am making it up, but I show him, on the map of Pennsylvania, the highway that is closed now because the fire passed underneath it, causing it to ripple and crack, unsafe for cars and trucks. “Route 61,” I say. “See? It’s not just some rural two-lane.” The earth, I tell him, is so hot in some places you can start paper on fire. A friend and I, a couple of years ago, chose what we thought were the hottest places, kicked a wad of newspaper as if it were a soccer ball to see if we could score a goal of flames. “You sound like a couple of kids,” my father says...