h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania – 10 September 2006

We drive south on Interstate 81 with Jil and Tom to see the Huber Anthracite Breaker and the Luzcerne County fair. They lost their New York apartment on 9/11. By coincidence, we will be with them on the 5th anniversary. Tom says they have some of the old subway lines up and running though the big pit again after five years.

Tom removed 60 black bags of debris from the apartment. All the windows and the substantial window frames were blown out. I ask him what kind of debris. He says that there were three 12-foot metal pieces from the disintegrated skin of the Trade Center, lots of dust, reams of paper, pieces of drywall, computer parts and chunks of cubicles.

The authorities eventually had second thoughts about his trash removal. They were concerned that there might be body parts in the black bags. So Tom and Jil gave up and went on the road fulltime four years ago. Now they send me T-shirts from places like Sturgis, South Dakota and Seward, Alaska.

The Everhart Museum of Art and Natural History in Scranton, Pennsylvania, had three haunting paintings of old coal breakers. The scenes are dismal and dark, painted with snow on the ground and mounds of black coal and industrial trash around the huge wooden buildings.

I wanted to see an anthracite breaker. There were once hundreds of these industrial structures in the area. In 1917, over 100 million tons of anthracite were produced and 118,000 deep miners were employed. The older breakers employed scores of children as young as six to pick out pieces of rock. Only one breaker is left standing. It is the Huber breaker located 35 miles south in Ashley, Pennsylvania. It was built in 1939 and ceased operation in 1976. The “Ashley file” below discusses paranormal investigations at the Huber breaker. http://mywebpages.comcast.net/tecsite/Ashley/AshleyFile.html

The breaker building is huge and unguarded. I climb five stories up into the twisted ruins on broken metal staircases and cross cracked concrete walkways as I ascend. The building is full of conveyors, chutes, chains, electric motors, gears, pulleys and levers. I hear smashing noises coming from one abandoned building and skip that one. I take my own paranormal readings and find this place ranks as medium spooky under the blue September sky...

The engineering that went into breaking up chunks of hard coal is impressive. Here are the shots of the Huber Breaker:
http://good-times.webshots.com/slideshow?ID=554002956

A few miles further south, the Luzerne County Fair is open though this weekend in Dallas, Pennsylvania. Here. I like these a lot. They never change. Always the same food, rides, games, cooking contests, bluegrass music, llamas, cows, pigs, petting zoos, antique tractors, car smashing, magic mirrors, the freak show. I eat Italian Sausage and ice cream, go though the mirror maze, ride the rides and see the exhibits. Here is the County Fair slideshow
http://good-times.webshots.com/slideshow?ID=553992086

What a freaky looking place. I understand there are people who explore ruins for fun.

Fascinating. Another piece of history.

Two Irish people, a woman and her young daughter, were in one of the planes that struck the Twin Towers. They recently found the mother's wedding ring. Funny how something almost trivial like a small piece of gold can get through something like that intact, and yet the people who wore it are reduced to nothing. It's hard to believe we are 5 years from it already.

Their apartment, which they called a loft, was located just over the street on the south side of the south tower in lower Manhattan.

They leased the space and renovated it as the towers were going up.

You could see the office workers in the windows across the street. They would often wave, especially when Jil or Mrs. Phred were wearing filmy night clothes in the early morning.

The apartment windows were tall, but you could only see the first 30 floors when you pressed close to the windows.

We always went to the top of the tower when we visited, usually a Christmas. My fear of heights went into overdrive when I peered down from the edge to see my Pontiac GTO parked on the street far below.

You could see office workers from Wall Street stream out of the building like ants every morning...the sound of sirens, car alarms and screaming derelicts filled the night...city sounds.

The last time I visited the apartment was to negotiate a settlement on s multi-million dollar estate in the Law offices of William Donovan in the Rockefeller building. Donovan was head of the American OSS in WWII.

They lived there for nearly 30 years.

I remember taking my five-year old son rat hunting in the fire house under construction next door. We used slingshots and ball bearing in the well-lighted evening. All the firefighters from that Unit ran across the street to the South Tower, climbed up with 60 pounds of gear and died.

I'm amazed that our response to this atrocity has been so weak and ineffective. If we still had leaders like Roosevelt and Donovan things would be much different today.

Chervenitski Coal has some good images of old breakers in a slideshow.

http://www.coaldelivery.com/gallery/index.html

LeoAlpha,

I can see where exploring ruins would be a fun hobby...wandering into the bowels of the breaker felt very much like diving a shipwreck and swimming into a dark hold and up into the corridors with a flashlight...spooky...

I envy anyone who can explore areas like that without becoming claustrophobic. Couple claustrophobia with the fear of heights and you just about have my state of mind for exploring anything taller than a two story building.

Phred, what do you use to take paranormal readings?

*imagines taking paranormal readings at the Big Pit*
*imagines that Roosevelt, faced with Pearl Harbor and Germany, would have resisted the idea of declaring war on India*

I'm very pleased with the performance of my Binford 5000 Ectoplasmameter....

Imagines Hitler making up a big lie about a Polish incursion into Germany to jusify Polish invasion....Imagines LBJ making up the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify expanding the war in Vietnam...Imagines Dubya minions fabricating evidence about WMD....etc.

Doesn't take much imagination, does it? No dig intended. I promise not to rant or get on a soapbox.

The pictures from the fair reminded me of going to the Puyallup Fair in Washington state a few years back. I'm guessing they had fried twinkies and snickers bars, too?

Did they have those cool little chairs you sit in that jiggle your feet until they don't feel tired anymore? Puyallup was the first place I saw those - I thought they were fantastic.

Fried Oreo Cookies....no twinkies or snickers bars that I could detect...no foot jigglers either...lots of banjo players...