From Centralia to Athens

As the financial crisis continues to unfold, both in Greece and in other countries in Europe, a seemingly common response, especially among young people, is to leave their country and move to greener pastures. The lead article of a national newspaper on Sunday, November 21, splashed across the first page the main reasons to leave Greece. The BBC Magazine also ran this week an article on Irish leaving, or wishing to leave, their country.

Why should then somebody stay?

People do move around. A few years back I visited Bodie in California. Bodie was founded in 1876 to exploit a deposit of gold-bearing ore, boomed from 1877 to the late 1880s, and then started declining; in 1915 it was labelled a ghost town. Today it is a tourist attraction. People did not stay. It looks like having been taken out of a Western movie. But it may be exactly because it looks like it is putting on a show that I cannot take it seriously as the stage of any human drama.

A more recent example of a ghost town is the story of Centralia in Pennsylvania.Centralia was deserted by a mine fire that probably started in 1962 and still burns today in tunnels beneath the town. The attempts to extinguish it were unsuccessful. In the 1960s and 1970s people complained of health problems related to fire byproducts, such as carbon monoxide and dioxide; yet residents were unaware of the magnitude of the problem until in 1979 the then mayor of the town and gas-station owner "inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F (77.8 °C). Statewide attention to the fire began to increase, culminating in 1981 when 12-year-old resident Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole four feet wide by 150 feet (46 m) deep that suddenly opened beneath his feet in a backyard. Only the quick work of his cousin Eric Wolfgang in pulling Todd out of the hole saved Todd's life, as the plume of hot steam billowing from the hole was measured as containing a lethal level of carbon monoxide".

In the 1980s people started relocating with financial support from the U.S. Congress. In 2009, formal evictions began. The departure was not without acrimony. People were divided in two camps, those wanting to move and those insisting to stay, even ignoring the fire's existence, as narrated by journalist Joan Quigley in her book The Day the Earth Caved In. In a recent podcast interviewees relate how ugly it turned: families were split; a molotov cocktail was thrown through an apartment window at 4 a.m.; a woman was stabbed and killed by her husband.

Remarkably, a handfull of people have stayed in Centralia, living there, and refusing to leave their homes. In the podcast, eleven people were found still in the town, living literally on top of a fire.

Which reminded me of Julio Llamazares's novel La Lluvia Amarilla, a monologue of the last inhabitant of a village called Ainielle in Huesca, Spain, reminiscing about his, and the village's past, and preparing for his, and the village's death.

For what should then somebody, we, stay?

Perhaps because it is more difficult than giving up. Perhaps because it is more interesting to stick it out instead of throwing in the towel, because it is the decent thing to do, as some of the citizens of Oran did. So that, paraphrasing Gabo's, Colonel, after seventy-five years, or whatever the length of our life may be, minute by minute, we will be able to feel pure, explicit, invincible, and ready to reply: Shit.