The Newtown Pentacle

Thursday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A humble narrator had been planning a Pennsylvania day trip for a while, one which would see him piloting the Mobile Oppression Platform (the MOP) on a two hour long, mostly north western journey, from Pittsburgh to Pennsylvania’s Venango County.

As is my habit for ‘away games,’ a fair amount of research back at HQ was undertaken. A Google Map was created with a series of way points and destination markers to follow and order the day. I always build an itinerary which would be fairly impossible to accomplish in one go, but there you are. Weather forecasts for the destination had been observed for the preceding week. A final embarkation date was arrived at in the last 48 hours before the trip, as to which of two or three candidate dates might be atmospherically propitious for the effort. Every day is D-Day for me – gotta get it right or you’re wasting your time, and there’s no greater sin than wasting time.

One left HQ, in Pittsburgh’s Borough of Dormont, at 4:30 in the morning and it was just 31 degrees Fahrenheit outside when I did. A companion was going to be coming along on this one, whom I’d pick up not too far from the half way point on my journey, at about 5:45 a.m.

The plan was to arrive just as the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself was rising in the vault of the sky. I was counting on fog rising off of the Allegheny River, in its hinterlands, but not quite as much fog as the peas soup we encountered upon arrival.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The night before this trip saw me emptying the camera bag out, and cleaning up all the equipment. Dust was blown off the lenses, an inventory of the bag’s contents accomplished, and everything was packed back up for travel. I would be bringing the full kit.

Clothing for the day was also laid out the night before, so as to not disturb Our Lady of the Pentacle or ‘razz up’ Moe the Dog at 4 in the morning. Also, a sandwich was constructed, the water bottle filled, and travel plan reviewed. I had even put the sandwich and the water bottle in the car so I didn’t forget them. It was colder without than inside my refrigerator, so…

As a note: I’m an absolute moron and klutz in the mornings, prior to having inhaled a few cups of coffee. Anything that I’ve left for myself to do in the early hours – other than ‘blow ballast’ in the lavatory, shower, and dress – has a 50/50 chance of successful completion. Long experience has taught me to handle all the fine details of preparation on the night before an adventure lest something gets left behind.

Leaving little to chance, and advance planning, is my way. It’s also why I’m seldom late for appointments.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It was a somewhat harrowing drive. One thing about the so called ‘red counties’ surrounding Pittsburgh that I just don’t understand revolves around street lighting. If you’re a Conservative, please explain this one to me in the comments section. Does street lighting, along major highways, somehow impugn your freedom? Do you just not want to pay for it? I really don’t get this one from a public safety POV, but as a prophylactic measure I activated the ‘brights’ on the Mobile Oppression Platform’s (MOP’s) head lamps and drove north cautiously.

One has recently became aware of a statistic affecting this part of the nation, which states that a Pennsylvania driver has a 1 in 59 chance of wrecking their car by hitting a deer, sometime during their driving career.

You know what would help shrink that deer statistic? Proper, and endemic, street lighting… but I digress…

One made it to the halfway point, where I was meant to pick up my traveling companion, in Pennsylvania’s City of Butler. After we tucked his gear into the back of the MOP, the northernly pathway was resumed. We arrived here, at the first destination on my Google Map just as the sky began to lighten up.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That anticipated fog was omnipresent, but was a great deal thicker and more opaque than I had counted on. A temperature inversion had occurred, which saw the atmospheric milieu shift from temperatures in the the high 70’s just a day before, then absolutely collapse into overnight temperatures in the high 20’s and low 30’s. It was definitively freezing out, but the Allegheny River’s water hadn’t received the memo and it was still about 50-60 degrees (that’s Fahrenheit for you euros and canucks). Thick slabs of fog and mist thereby occluded the first destination I had pegged for the day’s effort.

I like to start these photo expeditions at a point of elevation, it should be mentioned. The location we were in was an overlook park set against a steep hill. The river was flowing about 800 or so feet below us, but you could not discern the small city below us for love or money.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This is something else I plan for, unexpected circumstance. We took a few photos of the fog, as you’ve probably noticed by now. There were two central locations we were meant to visit on this day, with the first one being where we were – the community of Oil City, Pennsylvania. The second was about twenty miles north of here – up in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Given the atmospheric conditions here in Oil City, we decided to reverse the order of the various waypoints on my map and return here later in the day. We hopped into the MOP and drove a short distance up to Titusville to see ‘it.’

All those years on NYC’s Newtown Creek, where the oil pipelines and rail shipments of crude petroleum ‘product’ were heading to for distillation in the 19th century, had made the names of these two communities quite familiar to me from historical research about the oil business. This is where the petroleum destined for refinement and distillation in Brooklyn and Queens, along the fabulous Newtown Creek, originally came from.

We found our way to ‘it.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

By ‘it,’ I mean the Drake Well. The site of the very first modern, and commercial, oil well, on the planet. Dug in 1859. U.S.A.! More on that one tomorrow in what very well might be the longest post I’ve offered in years.

What you’re looking at is the spot where the end of the world started.

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