The following may read like excerpts from
The Road but they are, in fact, from a
WIRED article about a Superfund site in Oklahoma:
Mounds of fine white grit called chat—leftover minerals from mining operations—loom over the town, 200 feet high... By September 2009, the police force had disbanded and the government dissolved. Picher was a dead city... a few people refused to leave. They call themselves chat rats, a loose and increasingly self-reliant colony armed with cell phones and Wi-Fi for communication and guns for driving off scrap-metal scavengers. It’s a life bordering on squalid—on the way out of the Gorillas Cage, Roberts spots shovel marks around the base of the burned-out signpost, the beginning of an attempt to steal it. Across the street, a former auction-house parking lot has become a dumping ground for tires. On the drive back out of town, he passes the abandoned high school and notices that the arts and crafts building has burned down. A man appears to be helping himself to bookshelves from an open classroom.
The water pumps were shut off when the mines closed; their subterranean chambers refilled with groundwater and leaked acid into nearby Tar Creek, threatening the town’s drinking water. Sinkholes opened under streets and houses. Heavy metal dust from chat piles choked the air. Kids started coming home from swimming in ponds near the mines complaining of what they thought were sunburns, never realizing that the pools were full of caustic chemicals. And most of the mining companies that might have been held responsible were either bankrupt or disbanded.
In 2000, frustrated by a lack of progress, then-governor Frank Keating appointed a task force to assess the long-term prospects of the area. The final report: The place was unlivable. The town needed to be evacuated.
Six years later, the Army Corps of Engineers confirmed that more than a third of the homes in Picher were undermined by massive voids and that the town was in danger of catastrophic subsidence. In other words, the earth was going to swallow it up.
And then—never say that it can’t get worse—on May 10, 2008, a tornado with 175-mile-per-hour winds touched down near a western chat pile and whirled east through the south part of town. The storm leveled buildings, flipped cars, and debarked trees, killing six people and destroying 114 homes. No one opted to rebuild—it was almost like the land itself wanted them out. A year later, the school system and city services shut down completely. The end was nigh.
Back at the chat piles, Garner produces a .40-caliber subcompact pistol—the kind that is extremely loud and launches Vienna- sausage-sized bullets. He aims at an old lawn mower starter far out in the sand and pulls the trigger. Blam!The starter explodes in a shower of metal. “There is now a Make My Day law,” he proclaims. “Mess with my shit and I’ll blow your ass off.”
Afterward, Garner tours his domain. It includes an abandoned picnic area, where he and his now-wife took pictures after their prom, and the charred husks of former houses—at least 13 have been mysteriously torched. In another neighborhood, an entire subdivision is spray-painted with orange X’s, indicating that the homes are to be torn down. Abandoned dogs wander the streets. At an old church with a missing bell, Roberts caught an indie film company shooting slasher erotica.
Not too far away, on the northwest side of town, Jean Henson, on disability for asthma, emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lives in a leaky 1968 Heritage single-wide that smells somewhat sour. She’s strung a network of hoses and extension cords to her son’s RV next door, the one with the Confederate flag in the window, so he can get water and power. Down the road, barefooted 70-year-old Tommy Thomas keeps a dozen Labradors and Chihuahuas. On a recent morning he kicks a discarded deer jawbone in his front yard, scanning for rat, raccoon, or possum tracks. He says he’ll eat anything he can kill—or find fresh enough to take back home. “Got a deer just the other day,” Thomas says cryptically. “And you can eat anything with scales.”
The only business still open—though its owner lives out of town—is Ole Miners Pharmacy. Many customers are former residents who come back to pick up their medications, trying to sustain generations-old connections to the area. (Two men in their fifties compare ailments at the counter. Final tally: eight heart attacks, nine stents, and a pacemaker between them.)
