By The River

It's been more than six months since I took a buy-out from the Patriot-News and entered into the brave new world of Something Else.

I finished documentary film school at George Washington University, not so happily, and am figuring out what to do now. I finished an updated edition of my book on the Centralia mine fire, formerly called Unseen Danger, now to be called Fire Underground. Globe Pequot Press, my first "real," commercial publisher in the nearly 23 years my book has been in print, will release Fire Underground on Sept. 1. It takes the Centralia story up to this summer, with the state beginning to ease the remaining dozen residents out, and adds a lot of new detail throughout.

Cream cheese frosting on this cake: Fire Underground includes about 50 of my Centralia photographs, many in color. It's the next best thing to the book of my Centralia photography that I've always dreamed of doing.

So it's looking like Labor Day weekend will be big one. My wife is planning a book release party, which will probably dovetail with the opening of "The Town That Was," the documentary film about Centralia in which I appear several times, for a one-week run at the Midtown Cinema in Harrisburg.

In the meantime, I'm waiting to hear from Globe Pequot whether they'll publish my next book, tentatively titled, "The Epidemic," about a typhoid epidemic that ravaged Ithaca, New York, and Cornell University in 1903. It was one of the worst typhoid epidemics in United State history (in percentage terms) and one of the last, and was caused by corporate greed and stupidity. It is a surprisingly modern story. One factoid that fascinates me: Cornell students and their frantic parents (29 students died) kept in touch by long distance telephone call, then a new and quite novel technology. I envision men and women students in Hello, Dolly-era clothing picking up the telephone to tell parents that friends have died and yes, mother, I'll be on the next train home. The suffering and death in Ithaca was immense, criminal, and so, so avoidable.

So there's that. In the meantime, I worry about cash flow (the freelance writer's lament) and paying the bills, and should I get a real job? Not that there's many of those around in the kind of work I do best, sorry to say.