“I’m not worried about vandals or scary people or cave-ins or lead poisoning or chat towers,” Della told me. “Even though it looks bad around here, no one’s ever died from any of that stuff.” And it was true — while it was definitely dangerous for children to live in Treece, and while a lead-toxicology specialist told me that Treece residents were “almost certainly” poisoned by their environment, and while nearly everyone I interviewed offered anecdotes about friends or family suffering from lupus, multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, cancer, eczema or emphysema, no scientific study has conclusively linked these diseases to pollution in Treece. Of course, no comprehensive scientific study has ever been conducted in Treece. The first and only official lead test in children wasn’t carried out by the K.D.H.E. and the E.P.A. until 2009.

This April, officials abandoned their plan to turn Treece into a wildlife preserve. It had been a quixotic hope all along, dependent upon the desire of the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism, which had nothing to do with the buyout, to take over the land from the Department of Health and Environment. The Wildlife Department wouldn’t give an official statement, but one employee told me the agency wasn’t interested in the land. “It’s not because that couple stayed,” he said, referring to the Busbys. “Not only because of that, anyway. That land is inadequate for supporting wildlife, or from what I hear, any other kind of life.”

Instead, another auction will be held this fall. The now-barren plots of land will be sold to buyers who can use the space to hunt deer and rabbits, or to grow crops (at their own risk). The land won’t be cleaned up further except to dismantle the remaining chat towers by hauling the stones away and using them to fill local cave-ins, where the effects of airborne lead are mitigated. This could take years.

The state recently petitioned to remove the town’s name from maps. The “welcome” sign out on U.S.-69 has been taken down, and a visitor today couldn’t find the place unless she already knew the way. The Busbys will be allowed to stay in the ghost town as long as they like, but once they leave or die, it’s very likely that no human will ever live in Treece again.

I was curious how Mayor Blunk was coping with the end of his town, so I visited him and Judy at their mobile home in February. They had relocated to a grassy stretch of highway in Columbus, Kan., about 10 miles north of where they used to be. Blunk said that he was fond of certain aspects of his new life here. He liked that if someone tried to break into his house, the police would actually come. He liked that he didn’t have to drive 20 minutes to find a grocery store or gas station. He liked that he didn’t have to see chat towers outside his window. And he said he didn’t regret asking people to leave Treece or helping to make the buyout a reality, because he knew, in the end, “we couldn’t stay in our sick little town forever.”

But he said that he missed being mayor and that he had underestimated how strange it would be to have his hometown erased, to be “plucked from his roots like a potato.” His dad was a miner in Treece and Picher. His whole family grew up there. He didn’t know quite what to do without his fellow “chat rats,” he said, and he had even taken to cruising around Treece with his kazillion-watt spotlight, “just for kicks.”

I asked him what he saw out there on his drives.

Blunk took a sip of coffee and let the question linger for a while. “I see an opportunity for a decent place to live,” he said. “Not a great place, maybe not even a good place, but a decent place to live — and now it’s gone down the drain.”