Last summer, I finally made the drive up from Philadelphia to Centralia. Reddit posts warn that little draw remains. Gone are the pits spewing white smoke that Bill Bryson described in A Walk in the Woods while commenting that Centralia is “the strangest, saddest town I believe I have ever seen.” The stretch of Route 61, cordoned off due to the fires and transformed by taggers into a shifting canvas affectionately named "Graffiti Highway,” was buried in 2020.