Archive for July 21st, 2023
Smokey Pittsburgh, part 2
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator woke out of his nest around 4:30 am, hastily cooked up a pot of coffee, and was out on the road by 5:15 after inhaling three cups of the stuff. The weather forecast called for a bank of heavy fog to set up overnight, which would be coupled with a pall of wildfire smoke so thick that it triggered a bunch of governmental warnings about air quality being transmitted to Pittsburgh’s citizenry.
One returned to West End Overlook Park, to see what this sort of thing might look like, as the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself rose in the eastern sky.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When I got there, you could hear the city but couldn’t see it. Heck, I could barely see the cameraman from local CBS affiliate KDKA and he was about thirty feet away from me. It was actually a fairly difficult drive, with visibility of under a hundred feet. Luckily this POV is only about twenty minutes from HQ by car.
I hung around for about thirty minutes, hoping that the occlusion would thin out a bit, but if anything it got thicker. A change of plan was instituted and I packed myself back into the car and headed for a different spot to do my thing from.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As is my habit, while stuck at a traffic light, the camera was thrust up through the car’s moon roof. At this interval, I had traveled down about 800-900 feet in altitude, and was more or less on flat land and quite near the Monongahela River. The fog – as it turns out – was acting like a low flying cloud, and the West End Overlook Park was right in the middle of the mass. Down here, it was mainly smoke, with heavy fog.
Pittsburgh smelled kind of like everybody in it was BBQing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After getting down to a river frontage of the Monongahela, and having parked the Mobile Oppression Platform in an appropriate fashion, a bit of scuttling ensued.
Pittsburgh’s downtown, where the large buildings are, was fairly invisible. As mentioned above, you could hear the city but couldn’t see it. That was eerie and weird, and worth waking up early for.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The camera was waved about, that’s the T light rail heading out of Pittsburgh on the Panhandle Bridge. The Smithfield Street Bridge is just visible behind it.
One had drank his coffee before leaving the house, but no Breakfast had been endured, and right about here is when I started wishing that Pittsburgh had NYC style bodegas on every corner. An ‘egg sandwich’ doesn’t mean the same thing here as it does in ‘the old neighborhood.’ In fact, when I’ve asked for an egg sandwich in the NY manner here: two scrambles, ham and swiss, on a roll – I get puzzled looks back from the Yinzers with a “you want what now?”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Finishing up the morning, with a last couple of shots pointed in the direction of Downtown and the Liberty Bridge. The fog, at least, had begun to disperse. One scuttled back to the vehicle and then back to HQ.
Back next week.
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