It is all weighted with absence.
        Not even there if you blink too often.
                        —Harry Humes, “Pennsylvania Coal Town”

        You need to know what once was there, or you will never notice anything. You’ll likely just drive through it, up the steep curve of the mountain, on the new highway, not knowing there’s an old highway—paint-sprayed and cracked, behind the trees—that had to be abandoned.

        The whole thing looks like hills and brush.

        Some bits of former walls.

        A couple houses standing still among the empty, flattened plots.

        A steeply, strangely vacant layered grade that seems too steep to build upon.

        A gated graveyard for a church that was knocked down.

* * *

        You need to park along the graveyard, by the clearing in the trees.

        Follow the dirt footpath that takes you past the gate’s edge, down the hill.

        There is an old green garden hose that you can use to scale down it if the mud is too thick, or the snow too deep.

        You should try to go in winter, when the snow is deep, because when you come to the base, the open vent between the stones, you’ll see the branches of the trees are covered in a sort of frozen, feathered mist, collecting from the vent, the drifts of steam.

* * *

        The steam comes from the fire underneath the ground—inside what was a mine, beneath what was a town—that has been burning over fifty years, that will burn for two hundred more, long after everyone who lived in this town—when it was a town—is dead.

* * *

        There is a whole world pouring from the vent, a world made of heat.

        Go in the winter, you will see the sharp change in the atmosphere.

        The snow just stops.

        The moss stays green.

        The air feels tropical.

        A gust of pale fog.

        A humid sulfur smell.

* * *

        Another garden hose—this one more faded—coils from a tree before the mouth from which the pale fog is pouring, like someone was attempting to get right down over—into—it, someone who had a need to know the feeling of the fire.

* * *

        That is all you need to know and that is all there is to see. Now, you can get back on the new highway and drive on through the other mountain towns—the small white houses, sea foam panels, gold-capped steeples, and the rust-bright trickle of a creek—where people are still living.