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Just after 10 o’clock on the morning of December 6, 1907, the ground shook in Monongah, West Virginia, and a sound rolled out across the hills that people miles away would later say they felt as much as heard. Underground, in a connected network of tunnels beneath the town, something had gone catastrophically wrong inside the Fairmont Coal Company’s No. 6 and No. 8 mines. Above ground, the blast was strong enough to collapse mine…
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George Sodder ran around the side of his burning house looking for the ladder he kept propped against the wall every single night of the year. It wasn’t there. He turned instead toward his two coal trucks, parked exactly where he’d left them hours earlier after a full day’s work, thinking he could climb onto one and reach the second-floor windows where he believed five of his children were trapped. Neither truck would start, though…
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The brick tower of the old Nye County Courthouse is visible from a long way off, rising over a scatter of stone ruins and sagebrush in a high valley of the Toquima Range in central Nevada. There’s no traffic light out here, no gas station, not even a paved road most of the way in. What there is, improbably, is a person still living in the house next to the old Cosmopolitan Saloon, and a…
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Drive west on Interstate 40 out of Amarillo, past the grain elevators and the flat-to-the-horizon cotton fields that make the Texas Panhandle feel like the edge of something rather than the middle, and somewhere around Exit 60 you’ll start seeing the signs. Not official green highway signs. Hand-painted plywood boards propped against fence posts, nailed to telephone poles, stuck in the dirt at jaunty angles, all pointing the same direction and all advertising more or…
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Drive north on Interstate 75 out of Macon, Georgia, take the Bass Road exit, and if you know where to look, you can still see it through the tree line: a low chain-link fence, a stretch of cracked asphalt shaped like a racetrack, and what used to be a mini-golf course now mostly reclaimed by kudzu and pine saplings. There’s a rusted metal frame back there too, tall enough to have once held something people…
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