The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As described yesterday, your humble narrator was out for a walk and finally got up to and past the five mile limitation which has plagued similar efforts, in this ongoing recovery period after having broken my ankle last September. Also mentioned, a bit of psychological trauma got inserted into me during the injury as well, which has caused this wandering mendicant to become a bit phobic about staircases.

Given that I’m partial to the old philosophical sentiment about ‘falling off a horse and getting right back into the saddle’ I’m going to be exposing myself to a bunch of scary stairs this summer while getting my legs back into shape, thusly.

That’s the West End Bridge over the Ohio River up there, and its stairs are doozies but certainly not the worst Pittsburgh has to offer. I’m working my way up to those, and they’re terrifying.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I did get distracted along the way to the bridge, but darn it these guys were doing something interesting. There’s some sort of development project kicking into gear around this area, and there’s all sorts of work going on to get the area ready for whosover’s dreams of avarice will be playing out.

This effort involved the replacement of a Utility Pole by a crew of workers with a lot of specialized equipment. I’m also visually intrigued by this sort of thing, and tried to get a few shots of the action while zoomed all the way in and from a distance.

Funnily enough, most people don’t like strangers walking up to and interrupting them while they’re at work, and especially not those strangers who start taking random pictures of what they’re doing while at work. I’m fully aware of how uncomfortable that is, and try to remain geographically aloof. That’s what a long range zoom lens is for.

I wasn’t hiding behind a mail box or anything, though.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It was an act of will to not clutch at the steel bannister on the West End Bridge with every bit of strength in my arm. This new phobia of mine, it’s going to take a while to be drowned out by something else I’m more scared of. Might as well enjoy it while I can, until it callouses over.

Some group in the local non profit industrial complex is floating a project which promises to redesign these approaches to the bridge’s pedestrian and bike lanes and bring them into compliance with ADA standards as well as polishing them up esthetically.

As mentioned, the powers that be have offered a development scheme for this section of the ‘North Side,’ click here for a lookie loo.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Having surmounted the stairs, in a cavalcade of fear and terror, one leaned into things and pushed forward. This bridge is in pretty rough condition, I have to mention. You can’t see it while driving over the thing, but while walking West End Bridge, the need for maintenance and probable major repairs is pretty apparent. Rust, broken concrete, all the tell tales are there.

Your humble narrator was actually somewhat happy during this walk, as I didn’t have to actively focus quite as much on the act of walking as I’ve had to in recent excursions. One of the many problems encountered post injury involved ‘proprioception,’ which involves the somewhat unconscious knowledge of where your limbs are spatially. Losing touch with that hidden sense of kinesthetic parameters, it was difficult to confidently walk as I was unaware of my foot’s relationship and relative positioning to the ground.

The trouble I’m having with angled surfaces is related to this dealie, but in time… everything will be great, all the time. I keep telling myself that.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It seems that the governmental powers are scratching out a new road for themselves on Mount Washington. I’m of the opinion that it’s going to just be for the ‘official’ vehicles to use, but you need to be able to,move emergency vehicles quickly, after all, and the roads leading to and from the summit are often choked with what passes for heavy traffic here in Pittsburgh.

This new road, observably, seems to parallel the PJ McArdle roadway across the face of Mount Washington.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As mentioned in the past, I’ve caught some critique on local Pittsburgh social media groups for referring to what you see above as ‘mineral barges’ when posting photos. A lot of this is politically motivated, IMHO, with some red hat wearer thinking he’s ‘owning the libs’ by screaming in all caps that it’s coal, why can’t you just call it coal?

As is often restated, unless I know for a fact what something actually is, a category level is jumped. It looks like there’s gravel or ballast stone in those barges, but that’s a guess based on purely visual observation. All I can say for sure is that a Towboat with four barges worth of minerals was photographed while navigating from the Monongahela River to the Ohio River in the Port of Pittsburgh’s Pool.

Back tomorrow with more.

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“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle

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“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.

Friday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Yes, we’re ending this week all ‘pastoral’ like.

For all the people who ask me ‘why Pittsburgh?,’ scenes like the one above are a part of ‘why.’ The name of this state I’m in means ‘Penn’s Woods’ after all, and it’s a not very long drive to leave behind the passive aggressive streets of the Paris of Appalachia to take a walk in a well manicured section of the ‘sylvania.’ If you wanted actual woods, that’s about another 25-30 minutes away in an any direction, this is a wooded corridor through an otherwise suburban area.

As described yesterday, a trailhead which I did not know existed was recently discovered as being about a 15 minute drive from HQ. The facility is called as the ‘Panhandle Trail.’ This particular trailhead, dubbed ‘Walkers Mill’ is found in Collier Township. There’s all sorts of indications that this area used to host a rock quarry, but I haven’t been able to find historic specifics. I’m am of the opinion that the ‘Walkers Mill’ nomen likely emanates from one of the legal founders of the town, in 1911, a fellow who was called J.J. Walker.

Saying that, I’m making broad inferences off of a scarce bit of research, so take that one with a grain of salt. I generally don’t ’deep dive’ these days unless I’m trying to prove a point.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One is always fascinated by the Appalachian layer cake you can observe here in Western Pennsylvania. One of the oldest mountain ranges on earth, the Appalachia are. Supposedly, these sort of rocks are heavily embedded with fossils of both a micro and macroscopic nature. They’re also valuable from a chemical perspective, having preserved climate data in their layers which go back as far as a billion years, and varying amounts of hydrocarbons can be found in the stack too. Coal, oils, gas. This trail has a feature called ‘Fossil Cliff’ which I’m intrigued by.

Unfortunately, I had a doctor’s appointment to get to, and the alarm on my phone chimed out (I’m currently using Black Flag’s ‘My War’ as the alarm tone) and that let me know it was time to go and get my 6 month in X-Ray for the busted ankle. An intention was to show the Doc what the ankle looked like after some exercise, instead of being all pink and fresh while directly out of a resting period. I offered the Doc my step count from the walk, and he seemed pleased with the orthopedic healing progress and my efforts. My exercise plan for the next six months was offered approval, as well.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It’s absolute Heaven for me to be able to do this sort of thing again, after my long autumn and winter of oft times extremely painful recovery from the injury to my ankle. The muscular atrophy in my upper things is a leave behind, which I’m assiduously attacking right now on a nearly daily basis. Just yesterday, I walked up a flight of stairs without clutching for dear life on the bannister, for instance.

The weather is also beginning to warm up here in Pittsburgh, now. My Doctor approved plan is to start up my old routine again, the one where there’s three short walks of about an hour splayed out during the week, and one long ass marathon scuttle on the weekends. Hopefully, by the end of the summer, I’ll be once again ‘turning the earth under my feet.’

Back next week with something different, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.

“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle

Buy a book!

“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.

Friday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Given my current limitations, it’s not surprising that this week at Newtown Pentacle ends as several others have recently, with an ‘odds and ends’ post as I’ve used up most of the images needed for narrative.

Looking ‘Under the hood,’ as it were, one of the many things I’m doing while walking along with the camera is thinking about how to string the photos I’m gathering up narratively. ‘Establishing shot,’ zoomed in subject, background, etc. I’ve got a whole shot list rotating in my head the entire way, and when I see something interesting that might support a post of its own, I gather a few detailed shots of whatever’s caught my attention.

Due to aforementioned limitations, the broken ankle and recovery thereof, I keep on finding myself running a bit short – at the moment – on fresh photos. Hence these odds and ends posts which utilize shots that didn’t quite fit into or tell the stories I wanted to tell.

I like the shot above, of CSX #3473, for a variety of reasons, but it doesn’t ‘tell a story’ given that its background is so generic.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I learned this talking about Newtown Creek for all those years. If a shot of the creek was facing westwards you’d see some facet of Manhattan’s skyline and it would instantly ‘place’ the waterway’s location and thereby tell a story. I’ve shot photos of that concrete factory above, but from onboard the Birmingham Bridge with the Downtown Pittsburgh office towers visible in the background.

Admittedly, Pittsburgh has nothing as iconic or familiar as an Empire State Building on which to hang its hat, but the concrete factory doesn’t seem to float in an unidentifiable void as it does in the shot above. Saying that, I did like the shot enough to upload it to Flickr, but it didn’t necessarily tell a story.

One of the things I’ve put a lot of thought into during this interval of uselessness is how to describe what it is I actually do. It boils down, your humble narrator has decided, to storytelling. Back when I did comics, or worked on Madison Avenue, or conducted tours of New York Harbor and Newtown Creek, even what I’m still doing here, is storytelling.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s one of the anchor piers for the South 10th street bridge over the Monongahela River, sitting alongside Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Heritage Trail, at an entrance to the City’s Color Park in a late afternoon. That’s ‘where,’ ‘what,’ and ‘when’ for you, but with no ‘why’ or ‘how’ which I’d direct you to prior posts this week if you’re curious about. If I threw in the fact that my ankle hurt, there’d be some conflict and urgency mixed into the story. The best and most efficient story ever written, in terms of narrative structure, is the children’s tale ‘Mary had a little lamb.’ It’s got it all, including conflict and pathos.

Back next week with something different, at this – your Newtown Pentacle.

“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle

Buy a book!

“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.