Archive for May 20th, 2024
River, & Towboat, Allegheny
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator was at the start of one of his long constitutional scuttles recently, here in Pittsburgh, and my route for the day involved walking on the Allegheny River’s shoreline and the Three Rivers Heritage Trail. That’s the Fort Duquesne Bridge pictured above.
The light was fairly extraordinary, with the atmospherics involving temperatures of about 75 degrees (and rising), coupled with a fairly high dew point and concurrent level of humidity. A strong storm was brewing to the west, but at this moment in time it was Ohio which was bedeviled by it and Pittsburgh wasn’t going to get walloped by it anytime before midnight.
Speaking of bedeviled, a long interval of inactivity – lasting about two weeks – was being punctured by this walk, and your humble narrator was suffering from stiffened muscles in the back and legs.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Towboat activity on the Ohio and Monongahela Rivers is a common sight, but less so on the Allegheny. A Towboat, named for the river, suddenly appeared navigating towards the confluence of the three rivers and was towing a fuel barge. As mentioned last week, I had decided to constrain my photographic pursuits by bringing a series of fixed focal length prime lenses with me instead of zoom lenses. I affixed my 85mm lens to the camera.
Why?
Intentionality, that’s why. This may sound like wanker talk here, but there’s a different ‘process’ at work in the way that you perceive the environment when you spot something interesting and you have to quickly ‘do the math’ on which lens to use, as opposed to the ability to dial a zoom lens up and down its range. Additionally, the primes are considerably less of a carry than the larger and heavier zooms. As mentioned above, I was feeling stiff and didn’t want to carry a series of three pound glass and metal bricks with me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Towboat Allegheny navigated into the navigational channel under the Fort Duquesne Bridge. I couldn’t find a reliable history for this boat, as there seems to have been several towing vessels with the call sign ‘Allegheny’ launched over the centuries, including a U.S. Navy one.
The Port of Pittsburgh is actually quite an important inland port, as it turns out, a statement which will probably make all my ‘blue water’ sailor friends back in NYC laugh out loud. From here at the ‘Pittsburgh Pool,’ the United States Army Corps of Engineers maintains lock and dam maritime connections which lead to the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, and eventually you can even make it all the way to the Mississippi River.
Who knew?
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