This Mountain of Ours (Mt. Washington)

Where I stand: Mountain. The immense formation of sedimentary stone more than three miles deep, pushed up from below by the increased friction of fault lines, the collision of ancient islands 435 million years ago, the shoulder bumping of the continent of Africa into our own. Imagine hearing the slow drawl of that rumble. The range of that imperceptible roar. The lifting of earth, while all the while soil and stone and boulder tumbled down the sides. A mountain shoving its face toward the sky. The slow way such monuments are made.

This mountain covered in hickory, maple, white oak. Ash, sumac and white walnut. Spanish oak and sugar tree. Red oak. This mountain home to humans and groundhogs and squirrels. Chipmunks, earthworms, white-tailed deer, pill bugs, northern ring-necked snakes. This mountain lift for hawks and sea gulls. Chimney swifts, robins, sparrows, and little brown bats.   

This mountain like a giant knuckle on a giant hand. Not a dividing point between city and suburb, so much as a joint connecting one slope of skin to the other. The rivers like veins taking oxygen rich water to the far reaches of the body of this land.

This mountain: first carved with footpaths, then dirt paths, then paths for wagons and trolleys and cars. Buses. Motorcycles. Leaning over the railing from this mountain zenith, I can almost see all of McArdle Road - the asphalt curve that cuts from top to bottom – from Grandview to the shoulder of the Monongahela River.

Earlier, to warm up before meditating on the mountain, I walked the sidewalk that tags along that road – the one that cuts into the steep hillside. To my left is a descent that would be treacherous at best: covered in dry leaves, all manner of litter, the enormous stalks of trees, some standing proud, some fallen, some still supporting the limbs of those gone before them. To my immediate right: a railing and cars speeding past at 40, 45, 50 miles an hour. I know because I drive this road all the time. Walking with stillness to my left and the insane roar of traffic to my right is disorienting. But I like this walk because I feel like I am in the center of a great beast – and I want to know the softness of its skin, its scars.

“To your right!” I hear a man call out behind me, expecting a biker at full speed from the tone of his voice. I gingerly press myself against the blue paint-peeling, rust-covered railing. Then an emaciated man in running gear, fairly sprinting, rushes past me. I am halfway down the mountain. I follow him with my eyes – his white Gortex easy to spot as he moves farther and farther down the steady slope. I watch him until it’s time for me to turn back around and climb up. He is just then beginning to cross the bridge into the city, miles below.

Then my thoughts are taken back in time. I think about that runner as the kind of person who would have been chosen to relay long distance messages – before telephone wires and satellite dishes. I imagine him running as a courier to the fort that sits at the fork of the three rivers. Fort Pitt, Fort Duquesne. Except I suppose, at that time, there wouldn’t have been a bridge – they would have had to catch a ferry across.

When I get back to the top of the mountain and take my place at the railing, I try to find the runner – as if he is a white pixilation among so many colors – but of course I can’t see him. I’m not a hawk. It’s incredible though – the speed with which he traversed the miles, made his way down the mountain and into the city of bridges.

A few years ago, I did some research about my neighborhood of Brookline. It was one of the first outpost settlements to form after the city of Pittsburgh began development. Well before the Liberty and Fort Pitt Tunnels were scooped out, allowing us to slip through the mountain, it used to take people more than six hours to go from my Brookline to the city. They had to go up and over the mountain. The time didn’t include coming back. Now, instead of six hours, it takes me seven minutes to get to the top of this mountain. Ten to get into the city. The long-distance runner, on the smooth concrete of sidewalk - maybe an hour.

And I don’t know what that means, except that it’s pretty incredible what scratching out a road over and around a mountain can allow us to do. Access things more quickly, see more of the world in less time. I wonder what we lose, though. Because energy cannot be created or erased – it can only be displaced, moved around. For all of our speed, have we forgotten how to be slow?

I think about why I like walking down the mountain on a sidewalk not two inches from cars that speed like death machines. Not two inches from maple and oak, tiny nests long abandoned, the remains of soda cans. What it is about walking this thin line between the progress of movement and the stillness of nature that appeals to me?

And now, after all of these weeks of wondering what exactly it was that drew me to my spot up here on the mountain, I think I might have found my answer. Or if not an answer, then a more firm grasp on the intersections of my desire. That I am in love with the world is no secret. But that I seem to find a strange comfort walking the hairline fracture between the human and inhuman world – maybe that love is new to me.  

When I was an adolescent, struggling with existential ideas, I decided that I most wanted to be a hermit. I idealized Thoreau and his escape to, his immersion in, all that was natural at Walden Pond. I thought that if I could just leave the world of humans behind – all that was confusing and painful and destructive (the gossip, the hormones, the insecurities) – then I could be free, happy even. I could just live in a tiny cabin in the wood and write.

But as I get older, it becomes more and more clear that a place of escape from “all that is painful about being human” doesn’t exist. Even in nature. Instead is the realization that these places (and moments and sounds, visions and dreams, words and relationships) can act as a means to remind us of all that is beautiful. And sometimes those places are less congested with reminders of a human presence, and sometimes they are the border between it. Sometimes, like this mountain, they are an apex of it.

Here I stand. On the top of a mountain. An immense old mountain – 430 million years old. It was shoved up into existence well before the world of humans crept across it, and here it still stands. Holding us - whether it wants to or not. Providing a view – of man and nature - as we hold hands, draw paths through the trees, climb from lowdown ground on up into the sky.

Come close your eyes

Today is March 17, 2014, and I have been having dreams of blindness. They are dreams in which I cannot open my eyes no matter how hard I try. I think the dreams are mutations of fear – of my inability to see the future. So today when I walk to my place, I sit on the bench, pull my booted feet up and rest my spine against the solid back. I close my eyes to the darkness and try for solace without sight.

A cool wind whips my hair like thin tassels against my forehead, while the thick sweet smell of cigarillo smoke affronts my nostrils, and they flare involuntarily - opening to take in fresh air still holding a faint hint of snow. A squeak of bird to my upper left; I know there is a tree there. A siren whirl pulls at my right ear, far down where I imagine the Southside slopes to be. The clank of metal reminds me of a boat dock, as the flag clip hits against the pole. Cars slide and race past not ten feet behind me; miles in front, down near the river, they make a different noise – one that sounds like a whisper from the far end of a tunnel. Then I hear footsteps and hasten to open my eyes.

A man is walking by in an oversized green jacket and after we exchange pleasantries betrayed by the sadness of his tone, I think about the way we make connections as people – how we speak to each other of hopeful things, even when we don’t feel them. I fold my hands and look out across the city. It’s the same city I always see, but different. There are little changes I don’t notice and can’t see. There are little people in little rooms making little bits of difference in the world all around me.

I look for the PNC tower now because my dad asked me the other day if I’d noticed the progress of it going up, and I admittedly hadn’t. I search for the outline of an unfinished building among so many whole. And I find it – its top baggy with huge white tarps protecting the incomplete upper floors. It’s settled right next to an enormous 25-story crane that sits like a fishing pole in the center of the city. With all of my looking at the city, I had spent less time seeking the detail and more about studying the amalgamation.

The new PNC tower is supposed to be the greenest building in the world when it is finished. This news is both exciting and unique. It instills a sense of pride in me – both for my city and for the earnestness of humanity. I see us wanting to make good.

I close my eyes again and try to feel the moment of this place – a cold river of air runs along my face. My heart palpitates my chest and moves me slowly like a rocking boat tied to a dock. I can hear wind chimes – a low bass that ricochets against itself and through to me. I think about how sometimes, when I am walking, I close my eyes for long moments as I move and wish that I could guide myself continually without sight – that I could feel safe letting my body move me through the world without always having to rely on sight.

When I open my eyes this time, there is a man a hundred yards down and leaning against the railing, he gazes through a telescopic camera lens. He must be trying to find something small – something beautiful – in the bigger picture that is this city. I understand this notion. I wonder if I will keep having dreams of blindness. If I might be missing some enormous building, and I simply have yet to notice. And to be honest, it wasn’t really the inability to see that made the dreams so terrible, but the frustration of wanting to despite it. So maybe my place here on top of this mountain holds some answers. Because it’s clear that even when our eyes are open, there are certain things we don’t see. Maybe it’s the same with my future. I’ve been looking at it for far longer than any other place I know, but I could have never foretold all of the beauty that was in store.

Old, cold winter

The sun is bleaching the snow a blinding white and where the sun is kind enough to leave it alone, not hit it quite so hard, it is blue – a washed out blue – like the snow is tired of itself. Like I am tired of myself, and the snow.

When I step out of my car, the flag clangs against the cold metal pole as if announcing my arrival. It bellowed the last time I was here, so I notice the repetition like an omen. I’m hardly out of my car, before I get back in. It’s windy and cold and I’m in a bad mood. I’ve forgotten my notebook and I’m resigned to write on an old Dunkin Donuts bag that is on the floor of the back of my car because I don’t like to throw things away when I know I can compost them. I try to write and the pen is stodgy and difficult. It barely writes. My cursive looks like Morse code. Today, I want a divorce from my place. It’s ugly and unloving. Today I need sympathy and it’s kicking me in the shins.

I think about the rants we read for class this week and I wonder if my utter hatred of the cold is enough of a justification to go off on a tangent about my distaste for the cold. I hate the cold. I hate this city in the cold. I hate I hate I hate it all.

But that sounds more like a tempertantrum, than a well thought out rant. It doesn’t seem… insightful… not like Jamaica and her post-colonial rant - or insightful, the way Gessner asks us to be creative, step out of our comfort zone, out of genre, out of specialization and into the grand expanse.

Rants can be of fire, but if they burn the skin instead of melt the snow, it’s as bad as a desert sun, no?

I moved to Florida once. For a year and a half, I lived with muted seasons. There was division of time, sure, but it was less         murderous, less        devastatingly long

And I was blessed to be there during a season without any personified storms – no hurricanes, just torrential rains… rains that dissolved into sunshine and the shimmer shiver of rainbows in the humid air. And it was good there. Beautiful in a way that beautiful is – easy to see, easy to love. And easy to romanticize. Especially now, when every bit of my bones feel heavy as lead, soaked through with cold.

When I moved back to Pittsburgh, it was the middle of December. It was the coldest recorded winter in 80 years. (I’m sure you can imagine the comments I got about that… Every northerner hates the cold, but we never make the exodus. We just stay here and bitch. But Why? In March, I always wonder why?) That was four years ago and the winters seem to have gotten worse. But I grew up here. I should be used to this cold, right? Well, I’m not. I think it might be because humans are dumb sometimes. By dumb, I mean: We say we are adaptable, but adapting means change. We haven’t changed… we haven’t grown more hair, thicker skin, higher body temperatures, a better way to store fat. No. We simply pretend we’ve adapted… and suffer instead. We build houses and shiver in them. Or roast and waste our resources. Either way, we’re not the bears or the birds – they are at least smart enough to hibernate or get the hell out.

Anyway… Not all birds fly south for the winter. There are birds out today. Tiny little palm sized sparrows. Are they dumb too? Or aren’t they cold? How aren’t they cold? For all their chirping and soaring, they don’t seem cold. I’m not chirping, and I’m sure as heck not soaring. I’m slumped like a turtle without a neck under a coat and a scarf, my feet are tired of posing as Clydesdale-feet, furry hooves clodding about. But maybe they are… cold, I mean. Maybe they’re chirping a rant. Maybe they’re talking about how stupid birds are – the ones that stay in this inclement weather. How sparrows should learn to adapt – grow more feathers, fatten up. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe their chirping about how beautiful the view up here is – like I was last week, and all the ones before.

It's a Grandview of Man

This morning is cold and the sun is vaguely shining. I want green and there is only brown. River mud and coffee with too much cream. A guy walks by me with a backpack; he is the carried sound of keys jingling. Cars wash past as swatches of noisy concrete sound. They drive fast. Too fast. There are tourists here. There's a view to be found. A decorative flag whips against a streetlamp post like a gong jangle. Another man walks by. He has a fluffy yellow-brown dog. He whistles, wrinkles the newspaper he reads as he walks. It's all commuters this morning. Everything is moving. Everything is sound.

I take my usual steps. Up to the railing, to the look out - to look out. But instead, today, I look down. Today, I am tired of my place. Tired of the view of a big city, of buildings and riverboats and barges. I wish, for a moment, that I had chosen a place somewhere else. Somewhere covered and covered and covered in trees.

Below is this hillside. The snow is all gone and the ground is something other than clean and white. Below the railing is compressed grass, like sun-faded, yellowed old newspaper. The trees have all been cut to the quick (probably to give way to the view). And the rest of the color that litters the ground is what remains of plastic and can.

Here's what I see:

Three blue plastic bags, one crumpled, one folded and wrapped around the ground, one flapping in the wind, held pressed against itself and the long stalks of laid-down grass by one Monster can, one sock, one red Solo cup; two more red Solo cups are around, as if someone modern thought one red blink on this litter-spread hill was not enough; one Gatorade bottle, clear and empty; one yellow shiny wrapper the size to wrap a candy but the wrapper is flat, so the candy is gone, eaten or dissolved or washed away by the rain or the snowmelt; and… one Fiji bottle, one Arizona can; one IC Lite, one Natty Ice; a Cheetos bag, a plastic cup and its lid, a cigarette butt, a Mambo wrapper, a brown bean pod. A brown bean bod? A seed pod. Yes. Tossed by the trees. Not some kid or some Man - made of trees - not of plastic. (and I:) tried to look it up. Name it. Find its copyright, its company name. But it's nowhere in the ethernet. Nowhere I can find. I'll have to pick one up and take it home. Take it somewhere, somewhere that it's known. 

On the wooden bench behind me:

To love and be loved, JB luvs BM, ROG + Em, B+N, JOL and a misshaped, half-carved swastika sign.

On the buildings:

Highmark, K & L Gates, Reed Smith, First Niagra, the sun slashing blinding white lines across glass

There is grass stubble around parking meters that still take quarters. A swivel-view-finder. Takes quarters. A fire hydrant. Yellow. Peeling. Takes many men to take water. Squelch a fire. Sidewalks. Wooden benches. Guardrails that guard us from falling over the mountain. Doesn't guard the mountain. Not from what we can throw.

I steep in the warmth of my car, my hands thawing slightly as I document my man-made thoughts of all of this evidence of our presence around here. So much Man around here. It makes me wonder why I chose this place as my nature spot, when what I think of nature is: Forests and trees. Greens. Valleys, grasses and bees. Mountains and hillsides. Blue skies, open fields. The bellies of birds as they soar.

But my qualifications? They are here. This mountainside covered with trees, their dead limbs, their cut stumps. With grasses and seeds. The rivers down below. A valley of water and land. Birds that dance in the updrafts. Phantom shadows on the hillsides. More sky than blue can be.

But still: This is a cityscape landscape. A nature of man. A man-made nature.

The City as a Mirror 

          

                   Today I want to escape myself. I am over- 

saturated. With: words, ideas, worries, memories, philosophies, futures, ideals. 

                   With: thinking and dreaming and talking and listening.  

                   With: Man and his words. But: I am Man and these words. 

                   And: I am in love with Man and his words. I need them like

                           clean air, and water, and land. 

                   But: Man, sometimes I need space. A space 

                                                                                                away from myself. 

I can't see the city for the snow

Today, looking at the city of Pittsburgh from my perch on Grandview is like looking through a thin piece of gauze. The snow is coming down in fat swirling pats of white, so that the buildings are hazy and indistinct. It’s almost like a heavy fog has settled over the city. When I look directly up into the solely white sky, the flakes seem to come from nowhere, emerging and then falling in a lazy descent. I try to follow one, or many, to the ground, where light and fluffy the snow has accumulated to at least 4 inches. But each flake disappears into the layered snow, as mysteriously as it came from above.

I think that winter is the season when water slows down. In the spring, summer and fall, water is a fast, rushing force – it comes in downpours and flashfloods; it can overflow rivers and wash away mountainsides. But in winter, water is different. It changes form. It is snow. It is ice. As if winter is water’s season to meditate – two hydrogen, one oxygen – slowing down; three molecules trying out a different design. It doesn’t lose its elemental power, but it makes a different show of things.

I think of meditation because these flakes fall slowly; they drift to the ground without any apparent need to hurry, to get to the ground. If it was warmer outside, these intricate little flakes would be solid drops, racing to hit the pavement, wet the soil, fill the rust-colored river below. But not snow. Even the way it piles up seems egoless, in a way. When it lands and collects with the rest of the snow, I hardly can distinguish when it disappears. It doesn’t make ripples along a surface; it doesn’t make a sound.

Behind me is a large downspout exhibiting a giant, frozen cascade. The underbelly is almost blue it is so thick – like glacier ice. It looks exactly like an explosion of water, touched by a freezing wand. Stand still, is the command. I have a vague recollection of a fairytale in which a man is turned into a tree. If winter is a water meditation, what is that its telling me through its snow?

I take a deep breath and two black crows slip across the white-out. They cross from right to left, as if they are trying to start over and reread the sky. When they are gone, I put my hand in a pile of snow and brush it easily from the railing where I stand. This is fluffy snow. I know, without thinking, that it is bad for making snowballs but good for easy shoveling. It is the kind of snow that comes down in flakes big enough that when you look up close, you can see their intricate designs. The nature of this is like a night sky full of stars – you can help but wonder about infinity.

But this snow is not like yesterday’s snow. Or even the day before. These weeks have  held wet, heavy slush snow. Dry, tiny balls of snow. The kind that blows away like dust; pings against your windshield as you drive. The kind you know will turn to ice. But what are the names of this snow? Instead of a field guide to birds or trees or wildflowers, I want to identify the terms of this water turned cold, turned into snow.

Champagne powder, corn, slush, firn, snirt, watermelon snow, zastrugi, surface hoar, finger drift, blowing snow, penitentes, ice, packed powder, packing snow, crud, crust, depth hoar.

Some beautiful, some ugly. All curious and fascinating. These are our names for snow. Interestingly, some of the words describe the individual flakes of snow, like depth hoar: a faceted snow crystal, usually poorly or completely unbonded to adjacent crystals, which creates a weak zone in the snowpack. Some describe the snow as its collective. A pillow drift: A snow drift crossing a roadway and usually 3 to 4.5 metres (10–15 feet) in width and 30 cm to 90 cm (1–3 feet) in depth. Or a finger drift: A narrow snow drift (30 cm to 1 metre in width) crossing a roadway. Several finger drifts in succession resemble the fingers of a hand.

My two favorites?

Snirt: the term for snow covered in dirt… and,

Watermelon snow: A snow colored pink by a species of green algae called Chlamydomonas nivalis, it contains a secondary red carotenoid pigment (astaxanthin) in addition to chlorophyll. It thrives in alpine and coastal polar regions and unlike most species of fresh-water algae, it is cryophilic and thrives in freezing water. It was written about as early as Aristotle.

(All information gathered about snow can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_snow)

This time, It's nighttime...

This Sunday's post will be dark because the sun has fallen and I don't have the energy to call it forth. As if I could. As if I could make myself goddess, take hold of the reins, and pull back the globe of the sun. As if could wipe down the lather of its coat to make clouds, let the heat of its racing heart melt this snow.

I would sit, but the wooden bench here is again covered in snow - it's been powdered, crystal-covered, sparkling, lamentably dirty and gray. I could brush it off with my gloved hands, but there's something about making contact with a cold surface that feels self-defeating - so I'll stand against the railing. I like it there better anyway. It's as close to the city as I can get. I suppose I could cross the metal barricade, but it would be a quick view before I slid (probably to my death) down a nearly sheer face of mountain - covered in summer with tall grasses and tiger lilies, now it is burdened with snow. Compressed grass I can't see, and lots and lots of snow.

I approach the railing as if the city is an orchestra and I am the maestro - slowly. I inhale this cold, odorless night. I inhale deeply. I am ready for the show. I know it's a grandiose metaphor but here's the thing - this city at night - it's a grandiose sight. 

In front of me is a magnificent display of lights - lights like symphonic sounds, resounding in the darkness like vibrato, like a crescendo across the darkness - calling out to me in squares of yellow and white. Again, I am in awe - of this quiet city at night. 

Most of the lights are the color of incandescence, though some are red, orange, blue - some flash and race. All along the river, bridges are decorated with giant balls of light like classic wedding tents. And the river is a dark mirror, a veritable crown studded with watery gemstones. Everything - regardless of the cold, or in spite of it - percolates light.

Everything but the sky.

Tonight the sky is black, smeared with violet clouds, and I suddenly can't seem to remember if I have ever seen the stars here before. Maybe there is too much pollution of light. I know I’ve seen the moon - sometimes auburn, sometimes the same color as the building lights - white, yellow, pale. I’ve seen it slivered and fat, and almost full – I’ve even seen it larger than life, as if I’m not in Pittsburgh, but on the African savannah where the equator has the power to magnify what is celestial. But no stars tonight. So I look to the city for a glittery night. Because here I could make a million constellations, draw the gods of myth from man-made stars.

My breath comes out in a small cloud when I pull my scarf away from my face. I imagine this lit city unlit. And then, when I can picture the buildings as a collection of simple black squares, I erase their edges and begin to fill in the dark with scribblings of tree boughs, trunks, a few dead leaves. I try to think about what it would have been like to stand on this mountaintop in the middle of February when there was nothing of man below but the smoke of small chimney fires, tent fires. Smoke as insignificant as the breath that forms at the edges of my lips now. I know that the city of Pittsburgh was only drawn up in the early 1780’s; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette up and running a few years later. But even then, even when the first idea of this city was forming, it had to have been darkness splayed out. And the sky must have stood in for city lights that weren’t even imaginable at that time – at least not in this magnitude.

I think of the word light pollution and what that means. Pollution means a contamination. I think these nightlights are like a horse-blinder, instead. Because nothing we can do - nothing we can possibly do - as miniscule, insignificant humans - will stop those stars from shining. They are a million light years away and a trillion times more powerful than we will ever be. No. All we can do is stop ourselves from seeing them. It’s not a pollution we’ve created, so much as a canopy. We’ve figured out how to hide this panoply. Or we’ve figured out how to make our own. Either way, I love this city at night.

Later, I googled: Mt. Washington, Pittsburgh, PA. I was curious to see what would come up about the view. I was fairly shocked (and happy - giddy even?) to see that an October 2009 edition of the USA Weekend voted this spot - Grandview Avenue, Mt. Washington - as the SECOND most beautiful place in America. The article stated, "The rivers cup downtown's lustrous Golden Triangle, where landmark skyscrapers thrust upward like rockets. At night, lights twinkle on no fewer than 15 bridges. Almost as breathtaking as the vista itself is the urban renewal that made it possible. A century ago, a pall of smoke lay so thick over town that streetlights burned all day." 

Link for complete USA Weekend Article: http://www.usaweekend.com/article/99999999/LIVING01/91015001