The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Another view of the neato lighting encountered along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh recently, while moving beneath the Fort Pitt Bridge on a waterfront trail through a ‘zone’ found along and under an interstate highway. Your humble narrator was executing a purely constitutional walk through this wintry palace at Pittsburgh’s edge.

Gotta keep moving or I’ll stop moving.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The trail follows into and joins with a commercial parking lot, in an area colloquially referred to as ‘the bathtub.’ Known for regularly flooding during springtime high tides which carry melt water from the hills and mountains of West Virginia, this spot is really interesting.

From a modern day city planning point of view, it is a nightmare.

They locked away miles of the waterfront, in the downtown area, from ever docking a boat or allowing public access to their river in the name of installing an elevated highway, and a parking lot beneath it? That’s some Robert Moses sized bullshit right there.

This walking and bike trail was an afterthought, and you can tell that while walking along the shoreline. It’s all about the automobile hereabouts.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As mentioned, your humble narrator has a weird relationship with cars.

Necessary to modern life, even so inside a transit rich area like NYC or Chicago, automobiles nevertheless require vast infrastructure. The necessity of this infrastructure crowds out the other stuff which a functioning city requires. Specifically docks. You always lose the docks when these highways get built. Manhattan screwed itself thusly with the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway, Brooklyn with the BQE and Belt Parkway, Philadelphia with the Schuylkill… the list is endless.

Saying all that, I ain’t one of them snarly bicycle people who blame cars for an unhappy memory, or some childhood disappointment.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Birds are assholes, I think I’ve mentioned that a couple of times in the past. Most of my bird problems are Canada Goose related.

I’m a fan of what the Audubon Society says it is, but not so much of their actuality. During my years in the ‘non-profit industrial complex,’ I discovered that the most fractious of the various ‘do-gooder’ factions were not – in fact – the bicycle people, instead it was the animal people. The ‘TNR’ (trap neuter release) groups were odd but doing good stuff for the masses of feral and wild cats that you see in industrial areas.

Members of the Audubons whom I encountered were in favor of liberally spreading poisoned traps around, to eliminate the population of feral cats around Newtown Creek because cats predate birds.

I stood there with my mouth hanging open, saying ‘but it’s an ecosystem.’ To me, the fact that there was an actual ecosystem at Newtown Creek, with wild animals and predator/prey relationships at all, was an absolute joy. Especially so that it wasn’t just rats eating garbage, but the cats ate the rats and then the raccoons ate the cats and what was left of the rats. I don’t pick and choose my affections for those that are tough enough to survive the death hungry embrace of the Newtown Creek.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’d imagine that these things were ducks, but unless I know specifically what kind of a bird that a bird is, I just make something up as otherwise I inevitably get it wrong (and used to get scolded about it by Audubons.) Thereby…

Three eyed Tallow Hens, that’s what they were.

The third eye is hidden, you’d need to look for it by palpating the bird’s butt. The bird won’t like this, and neither would the Audubon Society.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

There was a herd of these three eyed bastards, just hanging out. Pfft. Get a job.

Back tomorrow with something – hopefully – different.

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