The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Another ‘short walk day’ found me scuttling down a section of the Montour Trail that I hadn’t visited yet, here in Pittsburgh, this time it was in the South Hills town of Library.

As you may have guessed by now, I’m really leaning into the exercise at the moment. I’ve always walked a lot, but that was in New York where you could walk on a mostly flat plane for dozens of miles in any direction. The terrain of Pittsburgh is challenging, to say the least, and I’m walking about 20% less in terms of miles than I used to according to the phone’s health app.

Use it or lose it, regarding internally lubricated parts…

Luckily, rail’s road grading standard is one foot of elevation per every hundred feet, and since the historic Montour Railroad’s ‘right of way’ has been ‘nationalized’ and turned into a bike and pedestrian trail it’s easy to rectify all that.

Several sections of the Montour Trail have been visited in the single year that I’ve lived here, click here to see those posts in reverse chronological order.

My gameplan for this explorative process on the Montour has been to pick a parking spot and then walk around 5 miles in one direction and then double back to where I parked the car (the trail’s ‘org’ offers parking lots at some of the trailheads).

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s the Library Trestle, a 506 foot long former rail bridge which carries the Montour Trail over a primary arterial street called ‘Library Road.’ Said road varies in shape, width, and purpose over its travel route.

Midway along Library Road, quite near the massive recreational center called South Park, it’s what traffic engineers would call a ‘Stroad.’ Wide, multi laned, with strip malls and shopping centers populating either side. Stroads often omit sidewalks in favor of having pedestrians walk in the store’s parking lots instead. Here in Library, this stroad transmogrifies into a single travel and parking lane, in each direction, and it functions as a sort of ‘main street.’

The real estate in the surrounding towns, whose road system branches off of Library Road, is fairly expensive and quite suburban in character.

There is a T station in Library, however, which is accompanied by a large ‘park and ride’ lot that is seemingly free to use. I didn’t pay anything, at least, when I parked the Mobile Oppression Platform there for this walk. I looked around for some sort of kiosk, couldn’t find one, so… free.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

When I was walking across the Trestle, a T Silver Line came rolling by below. As you can see, the streetcar service uses a catenary system to power its operation.

The waterway you see in the top left of the shot, to my knowledge, is called Montour Run.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This time around, the audiobook I was listening to was a reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as narrated by Christopher Lee.

It really fed into a creepy mood I was enjoying. The great thing about these trails is that you’re often totally alone and isolated from surrounding communities. Sure – a bike rider will zip through, or you’ll cross another walker along the path, but the isolation can be glorious.

Surrounding the trails, there’s usually a bit of that massive urban forest which Pittsburgh hosts, but just as often you get to peek into unknown neighborhoods and observe ways of life alien to your own.

Gotta say, it’s weird seeing the Confederate flag being flown, especially so in Pennsylvania, where a lot of that conflict played out.

Y’know, many horror movies are set in Western Pennsylvania, not just Night of the Living Dead. Something about the place is inherently spooky, and especially so at night.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I had walked through several communities on the Montour that particular day. I only know this because they set out ‘welcome to’ signs along the trail. I had doubled back by this point of the walk, having walked the trail about three miles or so. With the turnaround, it boiled down to about six miles which I walked quicker than usual down – about 3.2 mph, according to the fore mentioned health app.

Every walk has to have a ‘turn around’ point here, either to get back to the car or to the T. It’s not like NYC where I could walk to the Gowanus from Astoria, and then just hop on the G to get back to LIC.

That’s (as I still believe it to be) Montour Run again.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I hung around on the trestle for a bit, hoping that I’d get another ‘T from above’ shot, which eventually paid off.

This wasn’t the only section of the Montour Trail which I’d end up taking a walk along this particular week. There’s reasons I’m leaning into the exercise as hard as I am at the moment, which aren’t dire, but mainly revolve around toning up the musculature and dropping a few pounds by revving up the ‘old’ metabolism.

No… I literally mean ‘old’ here, and not colloquially. I’m at that age where men begin to lose muscle, and it’s a ‘use it or lose it’ type scenario regarding staying active.

Back tomorrow.

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