The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Just as I arrived at a series of ‘Bernie Holes,’ found in the fencing on Pittsburgh’s West End Bridge which overlook the CSX tracks along the Ohio River, a train set appeared. The locomotive engine was CSX #6348, an SD40-2 type built by General Motor’s Electro Motive Division. That’s literally all I can tell you about the thing, as I continue to refuse to ‘nerd out’ about trains.

Really, I just like taking pictures of the things, which I find fairly challenging. Something moving at 20-40 mph that’s bigger than most houses, which just sort of randomly appears… that’s a difficult photo. I guess I’ve been preparing for this sort of scenario with all of those subway posts I used to do back in LIC for a while now.

BTW- How’s that all that going these days, New Yorkers? I’ve seen the news about the Governor sending the National Guard in. Tell me in the comments, I’d love some ‘personal experience’ perspectives on the presence of long barrel military guns being brandished about down below.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This shot looks back along the West End Bridge span I’d just walked. This isn’t a hard walk at all, I’d mention, but driving over this bridge is actually fairly challenging. Narrow – in the extreme – travel lanes, and you have to be in the correct lane for your destination on the other side, I’d offer. The amount of gouging into and transferred auto paint on the bridge’s concrete sections speaks to the driving challenge. Tight fit, this.

Also, as a note… ‘Bernie Holes’… are gaps found in fencing that would otherwise occlude a desirable point of view. Some of these are surveyor’s holes, which are discernible by the fact that the fencing was cut with a power tool. My old friend Bernie Ente, who introduced me to the Newtown Creek community and acted as a mentor when I first turned up on the creek, had created a series of these apertures all over Western Queens. He made me privy to many of their locations, and long have I thereby referred to them as ‘Bernie Holes,’ although the ones here in Pittsburgh were obviously not created by him. They do use his preferred pry bar and spring powered vise grip methodology, however.

For those of you reading this who were members of ‘Team Bernie’, hello again old friends.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The train lumbered along, and the towboats were changing shifts. This one looks up the Ohio towards the Monongahela River. The plan at this point was to walk eastwards, in order to get back to a T station and home to HQ after my short walk.

Simple pathway, this. After debarking the bridge, I’d walk about a half mile, where the entrance to the Three Rivers Heritage Trail is found. An easy walk is found on the trail, which offers quite photogenic sets of circumstance along the way. This has become one of favorite paths here in Pittsburgh. By ‘easy,’ I mean flat.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As mentioned yesterday, something about this abandoned automotive service building, constructed of corrugated steel, intrigued me. The moss on the roof was calling, I guess. Imagine that, this has to be the most hostile environments that a plant might nestle into. Griddle hot in the summer, undertaker’s slab cold in the winter. Nature always wins.

One negotiated his way down a couple of flights of stairs from the West End Bridge, whereupon I needed to find a place to take a tinkle. Another sign of age which I’ve had to deal with – other than the various aches and pains which I bitch about endlessly – is that as soon as I start exercising the kidneys kick into high gear. This is a good thing, obviously, but it gets a bit problematic when you are walking over a bridge or something.

Luckily, right alongside that steel building pictured above is a fairly private area with lots of shrubbery. These plants were watered, thereby, with my personal liquor.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

After obliging these biological imperatives, one continued along with the photowalk. The view was pretty epic from my pee spot, as it turned out, and I waited around to see if another train might be fixing to cross my lens but there was no such luck.

I hate ‘hanging around’ and waiting for something to occur. It’s a ‘photowalk,’ not a ‘photo stand around and wait,’ after all.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One last look back at the West End Bridge, and then to the east did a humble narrator scuttle, which will be described in a subsequent missive.

As a note – I’m still re-listening to the History of Rome podcast mentioned last week, and I’m pretty sure that the story of Marius and Sulla was what was being discussed on this afternoon. It’s a very long podcast, by the way, and highly recommended. Caesar is coming.

Back tomorrow.

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