The Earth was cast in fire and intense heat. Every now and again it takes itself apart, little by little, in the same way. In 1962, a rubbish fire ignited an exposed coal vein in Centralia, Pennsylvania. The fire found its way into the rich coal deposits under the town and began to burn with an unsuspected intensity. It is thought that shafts drilled to monitor the fire’s progress and to vent gas actually accelerated the combustion.

            The Mac-Pac Eating and Wrenching Society (chartered MOA Club #289) is a concept, a movement, and a quasi-religious order dedicated to mileage and calories. The lure of adventure and culinary abandon have sent Mac-Pac riders on transcontinental pilgrimages for the ultimate fried chicken (Nashville, Tennessee), the consummate Tex-Mex chili (Abilene, Texas), the creamiest ice cream (Strasburg, Pennsylvania), the perfect pizza (Chicago, Il), the freshest lobster (Kennebunkport, Maine), the best breakfast (Auburn, Nebraska), and the most succulent Rocky Mountain Oysters (shuck ‘em yourself, Fort Peck, Montana).

            The preoccupation with eating is manifest in the club’s logo, which prominently features a wrench and a fork against a disc background. The extent of this fixation becomes clear when you get a look at many of the group’s GPS units. Numbers on the screens have been replaced by pictograms illustrating drumsticks, ice cream cones, pizzas, flaming sombreros, and cows holding their groins. Open any map case on a Mac-Pac bike and you will discover folded menus.

            It was this obsession with eating that recently led to one of the most peculiar rides in Mac-Pac history.

            The fire spread like a stupid idea in Congress. In 1969, the first three families were moved from Centralia. Houses over the hot spots were equipped with special meters to monitor the gas. Eleven years later, the US Bureau of Mines declared the fire “uncontrolled.” The first significant collapse created a hole four feet wide and 150 feet deep under Tom Domboski, who was pulled to safety by his cousin.

Authorities claimed the heat and gas would have killed him instantly, if he had fallen just a little deeper.

            The Mac-Pac meets for breakfast at the Pottstown Family Diner on the third Sunday of every month. Service at the PFD is ruthlessly quick and the management has given the group a back room with its own entrance. This provides a buffer between the Mac-Pac and the regular customers, who may not be accustomed to the violence of watching hyenas feed in their natural habitat.

            At one breakfast early last spring, BMW Motorcycle Owners of America Ambassador Brian Curry stood on a chair and called the assembly to order. The atmosphere was instantly filled with bits of toast, fruit rinds, balled up napkins and half-spent creamers propelled toward the speaker in a reflex action triggered by his “official” voice.

            Curry waited stoically until the air was free of detritus, and then stood like a bizarre admiral, with an epaulette of orange peel on one shoulder and a bit of buttered English muffin on the other.

            “I would like to challenge the people in this room to put together a ride that substitutes the metaphysical for the menu... The scientific for the sausage... And the epic for the epicurean,” said Curry. “I want you to conduct a ride that sums up everything the Mac-Pac stands for.”

            “You want us to ride to Hooters?” asked a voice in the back.

            The fire had spread beneath 582 acres by 1991. Worst case scenarios predicted it would continue to spread to 3,700 acres and burn for 100 years. Nearly 1,100 families were relocated and all but 13 houses were razed. Smoke, gas, and steam rose from fissures all over town. A local highway heaved, buckled, and split. Streets collapsed in places.

            Centralia became a place of bizarre legend. It has been removed from many maps.

            My proposal was simple: a ride to one of the strangest places on earth.

A place devoid of restaurants. A place where the fires of an underground hell could be felt in the soles of your boots. A place where the Mac-Pac could cook their lunches by simply wrapping them in foil and placing them on the ground. I wanted to do a ride to Centralia. My premise was that the heat generated by this underground fire was being wasted. With all the concern for global warming, here was a place where the already warmed globe could be put to good use.

            I presented this concept to the group and waited for the usual suspects to respond.

            The usual suspects are a nice bunch of guys who tolerate my “leaning” disability. It is whispered behind my back that I have never leaned my bike 10 degrees beyond vertical. Tom Cutter claims that the chicken strips served by the Pottstown Family Diner show more wear than mine.

            Another vicious clique says that following me through a curve is like trailing behind a sleepwalker on a treadmill. Among the Mac-Pac, where mercy regarding riding technique is sliced thin, it is generally acknowledged that a statue of a biker can take a turn faster than I can.

            The usual suspects did not respond. The peg-draggers did. The guys who turned out for the Centralia Cook-Off were the afterburner crowd, and there were 10 of them.

            I deferred to local boy Chris Jaccarino as ride captain. He offered to chart a route described as both picturesque and challenging. While it wasn’t exactly the Dragon’s Tail, it wasn’t the Dragon’s barstool either. According to Chris, if you don’t hit a curve every 60 feet, then you might just as well not ride. I insisted on riding dead last. Conventional wisdom places riders of my mediocre abilities in the middle, but I didn’t want to hold anyone back in the twisties.

            Jaccarino believes that everyone should have somebody else watching out for them in a group ride. So the ride captain had everyone draw straws, with the short straw being responsible for keeping an eye on me. The loser was Clyde Jacobs.

            “Why do I have to watch him,” asked Clyde.

            “Because I watched him the last 50 rides and I want to see what it’s like to use 4th, 5th, and 6th gears,” said Dick Bregstein.

            My decision to hold back was well warranted as I opted not to drag my bar-end mirrors through the curves like the other guys. Jaccarino dutifully collected the entire group and waited at every intersection.

            There were 170 intersections, each generally situated on a blind curve or between 15-foot high banks on a country road. (I took so long to get through one of these that two guys started a chess game and another lubed his rear spines all while waiting for me on a hot, treeless shoulder.)

            The route to Centralia was divided into two parts, with a stop at Hermy’s BMW (Port Clinton, Pennsylvania) in the middle. Here it was decided that managing 11 riders (including one who acted as a sea anchor) was a bit much. I announced that I would lead a more sedate group of butt draggers straight up the far less adventurous Route 61. (I figured none would go for this and I could cool my heels.) To my surprise, three other riders joined my cadre. These were Dick “Bermuda Triangle” Bregstein, Clyde “Short Straw” Jacobs, and Dennis “Suspenders” Dooces.

            We beat the peg draggers into Centralia by a good 25-minute margin. A fast reconnoiters of the sizzling landscape made us realize how parched we were, and we retreated to a gas station/convenience store in nearby Asheland. It was here, sipping cool water in the sparse shade of stark gas pumps that we watched our seven peg-dragging pals zip by us. In true Mac-Pac fashion, we shrugged. Fifteen minutes later, the entire mob passed us again, headed the other way. It was on their third foray up the main drag that one of them noticed our bikes and signaled the others.

            There is only one part of a two-group ride that gets on my nerves:  listening to the white-line dancers go on about their harrowing adventures. There were the stories about hairpin curves that looped back upon themselves like cobras ... the spine-tingling recounting of a road that turned to gravel, then to broken glass, then to steel spikes sticking three feet out of the ground. And finally, the finale of how seven hulking street BMWs all “caught air” cresting some hill that ended in a flaming hoop!

            I countered this tripe with details of an adventure of our own, explaining how we stopped to help a stalled charter bus of Victoria’s Secret brassiere models that had all developed a sudden allergy to Velcro.

            “Did that really happen?” Jaccarino asked my posse.

            “Yes,” replied Dennis Dooces. “I now have Velcro burns over two-thirds of my body.”

            It was at this service station/convenience store that John Clauss noticed his brake light wasn’t working, and making an audible buzzing sound when he attempted to activate it.

            “What does that sound like?” asked Clauss.

            “About $300 at the dealer,” someone replied.

            Forty-five years after the fire started, the remains of Centralia tell a sad story. Sidewalks trail off to nowhere. Streets appear laid out in an empty grid. Curbs are pierced for driveways long gone. Power lines seem shredded where splices used to be connected to homes. And odd little steps to nowhere tell of stoops and porches that once overlooked streets filled with activity. The handful of buildings that remain are oddly narrow, until you realize these solitary structures were once row houses, standing in a line like dominoes.

            I first passed through here in early winter. Smoke, steam, and vapor were easily discernible in the cold air. White plumes could be found streaming from the hill above town, outside the cemetery, and from the remains of old Route 61. Devoid of vegetation for the season, Centralia had a certain bleakness that matched its strange history. Even with temperatures in the 30’s, sidewalks and streets still felt warm. A sign in the old dump warned of eminent collapse and the presence of gas.

            Yet on this occasion I led the Mac-Pac into Centralia on the hottest day of the year. It was 91 degrees. No smoke was visible anyplace. No vapor trailed off into the sky. No haze rose from the greenery. In fact, the entire place had a peaceful park-like atmosphere that suggested benign serenity.

            “This is what you brought us to see?” was the first remark I heard. The crowd behind me was about to turn ugly. I showed the boys the unusual landmarks and told them the story of each, but a certain blank look was beginning to glaze over their eyes. I heard several muttering the words, “Dairy Queen.” In a minute, they’d begin drifting off in twos and threes to graze.

            The most dramatic example of the underground conflagration is an abandoned stretch of Route 61, hidden from public view by a detour. We found it in the nick of time. The road was split in a hundred places. The pavement was violently heaved and looks like it has been shelled. Best of all, smoke and steam was issuing from a dozen cracks and vents. The Mac-Pac boys were on this like physicists on an atomic pile.

            You can’t throw a rock at the Mac-Pac without hitting an engineer. This works against you when attempting to attract wild nubile women to one of the club events. But just suggest something that reeks of science and these guys are in their element. Both Chris Jaccarino and Rich Sichler are geologists. Sichler produced an infrared thermometer and began taking readings of the pavement temperature.

            The guys were soon passing this gadget around and measuring the temperature of everything. I was bending over my bike at that moment and heard them log my butt in at 108 degrees.

            “I don’t care how hot that gets, I’m not cooking my lunch there,” said Rich Cavaliere.

            A series of lateral fissures have violently split the surface of the road for a distance of a hundred yards or so. Some of these cracks are two feet wide and average about two feet deep. White smoke appeared to be rising from vents at the bottom of these, but closer inspection revealed this vapor to be steam coming out of the ground.

            Interestingly enough, these fissures attract something of an adolescent crowd. The snarls of ATV’s could be occasionally heard through the woods during our visit and graffiti captions the more prominent cracks in the road. One of these free-spirited expressions running parallel to a smoking gap in the road read, “Going down?” It reminded me of the line Dante penned for the gate to hell which read, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” The simpler “Going down” seems so much more appropriate for either setting.

            The fissures are filled with litter, largely tree branches and sheets of old newspapers. It seems that every person who failed science in grammar school tries to start a fire from the ground temperature, which while hot, falls well below the 451-degree flash point of paper.

            “Lunch is served,” I announced. In my K75’s hard cases were 11 MREs (Meals Ready To Eat). Entrees included roast chicken with rib meat, Southern Captain Chicken, Meat Loaf, Minestrone Stew, a pasta dish, and mashed potatoes.

            Rich Sichler discovered several places where the ground temperature registered 173 degrees. Most of the guys planted their meals directly over steam vents, where it didn’t take more then ten minutes to reach serving temperature.

            Clyde Jacobs inhaled his entree, which was meatloaf. “Ambitious but not pretentious,” he concluded, “with a fine aftertaste of subterranean anthracite.”

            “I’ve tasted better in a Turkish prison,” said Chris Jaccarino. His was a dish called Southern Chicken Captain. “But the mashed potatoes were good.”

            Mark Davies commented that his meal would taste better if he were eating it under different circumstances, like sitting a lifeboat with sharks swimming in circles.

            Bob Cook took this whole business very seriously. He went off by himself, found a steam vent, and dropped a packet into the vapor. Twenty minutes later, he was still looking at it. I later discovered he was waiting for a little bell or a buzzer to sound, indicating it was done.

            John L. Langsford II pronounced his entree (minestrone stew) as tasty, but was disappointed to discover someone had taken the cookies out of his packet. This discovery raised a hue and cry, and Dick Bregstein’s tank bag was found to contain a dozen looted cookies.

            A Mac-Pac Centralia Cook Book was briefly discussed by the group but determined to be of limited use for many readers, as preheating the ground with huge underground fires would be regarded as impractical. The eleven riders split up into three groups for the return trip. One group followed Dick Bregstein on a five-hour short cut (for a three-hour ride) until it was determined his GPS was actually a miniature Etch-A-Sketch affixed to his handlebars with rubber bands.

Author’s Note:  At the time this story took place, the abandoned stretch of Route 61 was partially blocked by well-worn bumps. We followed a procession of ATVs and dirt bikes onto the heaved pavement, and rode about three quarters of a mile to the site. There were neither advisories nor signs prohibiting this activity.

- The author, the Mac-Pac, and this publication do not condone nor encourage irresponsible motorcycle operation. I am informed that new higher and more substantial blockades are now on this road. A sign in the old Centralia dump warns of possible cave-ins and toxic gas. This story is presented solely for scientific content and environmental awareness. It is not presented as a recommendation for a destination and advises riders to be aware of their surroundings at all times.