The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Topsburgh to Bottomsburgh part four:

One managed to safely cross that gnarly intersection mentioned yesterday, an act whose execution caused me no end of existential anxiety, and soon the camera was positioned onto the McKees Rocks Bridge.

I’ve only walked this bridge a single time, and have been desirous of a return, as I think it’s fantastic.

This particular scuttle, which ended up being just a bit under ten miles horizontally, also saw me descending better than a thousand feet in elevation from ‘Observatory Hill’ in the Perry South area, nearby the Davis Avenue Pedestrian Bridge, moved through the neighborhoods of Brighton Heights and then Marshall Shadeland, crossing this bridge, and then heading down to the flood plains of the Ohio River in ‘McKees Rocks’s ‘Bottoms’ section on the other side of this bridge.

I get ahead of myself, however, and we are at the ‘crossing the bridge’ part of all that.

Just in case you’ve been wondering what the ‘Topsburgh and Bottomsburgh’ thing is about.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

McKees Rocks bridge is the longest span in Allegheny County, and it overlooks the massive Alcosan wastewater treatment plant found on the Ohio River on its northern approaches.

Pictured are – what looks to me – like aeration tanks, which wastewater professionals use to separate solid materials out of the ‘flow.’ Basically, the aeration causes solids to drop to the bottom for later collection. Solids can be anything from a matchbox car that some kid flushed down the toilet, to the rocks and stones and other detritus carried into the sewer grates during rainstorms.

My pals at the Sewer Plant in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint once told me that they had a bowling ball shoot out of one of the incoming pipes during a storm, which entered the plant in the manner of a cannonball. It caused all sorts of damage. The question of how a bowling ball ended up in NYC’s sewer system remains unanswered.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Looking across the Ohio River in a more or less southern direction for this one. I enjoy this bridge for a number of reasons, but primarily it’s an absolute ‘cat seat’ in terms of altitude and POV over the waterway, and the views are just fantastic.

Also, I like pointing the camera at industrial stuff, and there’s plenty of that visible from up here.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Saying that, I ended up spending close to an hour moving over the bridge as everytime I started walking, something caught my eye and I had to stop to get a shot. That’s the Fort Pitt Bridge in the far distance, catching a bit of light while standing in a cloud of rising mists.

As mentioned in my recent telling of the ‘slipped on ice and fell flat on my ass’ story, it had been fiendishly cold the night before, and the weather on this particular day saw temperatures in the high 50’s and low 60’s. That meant that a whole lot of misty weirdness was rising out of the hollows, crevasses, and ravines of Pittsburgh.

Lighting conditions were changing several times a minute, and things got photographically complex.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Me? I had a literal mile and a half of bridge to walk.

Pretty much loitering at this point. Waiting for a subject to pop into view, and scanning around for activity worth taking a picture of.

These moments are great tests for me, as a man who exhibits zero evidence of patience, and believes that the universe only shows him things that ‘need seeing’ when he randomly walks by them and that ‘you can’t force something to happen.’ One must compel himself to linger.

I remind myself of another personal aphorism – ‘it’s like fishing’ – and that you need to wait for a bite as you can’t order the fish onto your hook.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

You may notice how these shots continually look back towards that set of railroad tracks. One of the things I was looking for was rail activity.

I stuck the headphones into the ear holes, and started listening to that good old ‘History of Rome’ podcast again. I think I was on an episode numbered somewhere in the high 90’s, around the time of the Tetrarchy, but this walk was perpetrated on the 24th of March and today is the sixth of May, so… late in the game Italy based Rome, basically.

I find that ‘spoken word,’ as in podcast or audiobook, doesn’t lodge into my brain the way that the written word does. I need to listen to an audiobook at least a couple of times for it to ‘stick’ into my brain, whereas I can usually read a printed book, and then be able to quote it directly for a long bit afterwards.

Different parts of the language center in the brain, I guess.

Back tomorrow.

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