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Princeville was reputed to be the oldest all-black town in America, until September of 1999 when it vanished beneath a sea of floodwater that covered much of northeast North Carolina. When the water finally receded, there was little left of Princeville. Newspaper headlines were soon reporting that the town was empty, completely abandoned, nothing but a “Waterlogged Pompeii.” Little did anyone know, at the far end of town, one man remained – perched on a battered recliner, wrapped in a thick wool blanket, slowly reading his Bible. Thad Knight was the town’s sole inhabitant. His house was gutted. His life’s belongings were lost. Yet there he stayed throughout the fall and into the winter, amid a forsaken landscape of wrecked houses, a seventy-two year old black man sitting in the frost. As Thad single-handedly manned the town of Princeville, the town’s officials bickered over a massive buyout proposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It was an all-or-nothing arrangement: Everybody stayed, or everybody left. This is the story of a man who refused to budge, and the town that followed his lead. |
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Picture a rugged ice-strewn stretch of Alaskan coastline, utterly empty and unending, punctuated by a single fourteen-story high-rise. This building is the “city” of Whittier, Alaska. Almost all of the town’s residents live in this monolithic bunker, and everything they needed is just an elevator ride away. Perhaps what’s most intriguing about Whittier is its lone entrance way – a 2_-mile long railroad tunnel that burrows beneath a surrounding wall of mountains and brings a train into town several times a week. All in all, Whittier is a perfect natural fortress. In fact, originally, it was built as a mega base for the U.S. military; yet by the early 1960s, Whittier was decommissioned and its population dropped from 10,000 to 32. Nowadays, Babs Reynolds is among the hardy few who remain. Babs has survived the town’s snowstorms, its avalanches, and its legendary claustrophobia. Not surprisingly, Whittier has a reputation for pushing some of its residents over the edge. Some even refer to the fourteen-story high-rise as the “Overlook Hotel” – a reference to the snow-covered resort in Stephen King’s novel The Shining, which eventually drives its overseer mad. For Babs, however, Whittier offers safety and a number of unexpected allures.
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One night, not so long ago, Jack Thompson awoke suddenly in a room lit in demonic, red light. Groggily he rose to his feet, teetered over the to the window, and glanced out towards a massive river of molten lava. He watched a glow of fiery syrup roll its way down towards the Pacific, where it detonated in a long series of blasts, bringing the seawater to a hissing boil. Jack enjoyed this spectacle for a moment or two, then slowly climbed back into bed, pulled the pillow over his head, and fell back to sleep. This was no cause for alarm, just another high-flow night on the edge of Mt. Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano. Jack Thompson’s house is the one of the only remaining traces of Royal Gardens, a town that has been surrounded by miles of lava for almost twenty years. Jack is Royal Gardens’ last inhabitant. Nowadays the town’s rooftops are sprouting with grass, its vacant houses are shrouded in vines, and its streets are frequented by wild boards. Yet as far as Jack is concerned, this spooky little pocket of greenery remains a perfect place to call home.
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Millie Decker is the last of the Malibu hillbillies. She’s old as dirt, barely five feet tall, tanned like leather, cranky like a cactus, and absolutely crazy about her ranch. She’s Malibu’s dust-strewn memory, and in case you forgot or never knew, she’s there to tell it like it was. Long before all the glitz – before the movie stars, the big-time developers, and the bikini-clad gold-diggers – Malibu was home to California’s toughest cowboys and hillbillies, and age at eighty-one, Millie Decker is still one of them. Millie has confronted many dangers in her life – taming wild horses, riding crazed bulls, detonating dynamite – but nothing tests her nerve like the wildfires that often hit Decker Canyon. In fact, Malibu is situated on an arid stretch of land, so combustible that it’s known as the nation’s biggest fire corridor. When the fires come, the Pacific Coast Highway is soon congested with hordes of Malibu’s movie stars and millionaires fleeing towards safety. Yet just a few miles inland, Millie can always be found staying to fight the flames with barrels of water and gunnysacks – just as her ancestors have done since the 1880s.
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Ninety miles south of New Orleans, a narrow stretch of land juts out into the Gulf of Mexico, inviting the fiercest punishment the sea can muster – and without fail, the sea delivers. As massive squalls sweep their way northward past abandoned oil rigs and sunken ships, weather officials listen anxiously to the crackle of the radio, waiting to hear the voice of Ambrose Besson. Grand Isle is Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island, and Ambrose Besson is one of the few residents who never leaves. Ambrose has been riding out storms for almost seven decades, a distinction he intends to carry to the grave. For him the storms come and go like clockwork. Before the island floods, which it inevitably does, the road to the mainland goes under. Shortly after this the power goes out. That’s when Ambrose cranks up the generator, flicks on the radio, and tells the continent what to expect.
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The Underwater Town: 
Tower of the Arctic: 
The Lava-Side Inn: 
Canyon of the 
Island of the Storm Riders: