Pittsburgh, the Paris of Appalachia. Some wag, maybe Brian O’Neill.

Michele and I are back from our trip, and I’m searching for a theme to write about it. Maybe there isn’t one, maybe it was just a half dozen triplets, maybe the theme is the contrast between the foreground of being with sweet, generous people and the background in Ukraine and Israel of the human animal at its worst, or maybe everything doesn’t have a theme. Maybe themes are just the way our imagination makes us feel the world makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t.

When we travel, we are both drawn to the big cities and find them repetitive. That is because we go to the same kind of places in the cities, over and over again, the museums which, increasingly, show similar artists and the – for lack of a better descriptor – upscale tourist areas. The Fifth Avenue area in New York and the Spanish Steps in Rome are examples; both have the same stores as Union Square. In Pittsburgh, our first stop, we stayed with Al and Arlene Grubbs, third-generation Pittsburgh natives and aficionados of everything Pittburghian. Through their eyes, we saw a Pittsburgh we never would have seen otherwise.

When we met with Al and Arleen, they had tickets to a Jazz Concert on Saturday evening and a musical on the life of Billie Strayhorn on Sunday. They invited us to join them and both were excellent. It left me wanting to take more advantage of the abundance of musical and visual art resources we have. Staying home for years, literally, during COVID has diminished my life. Contrasting that diminished life with the richness of Al and Arleen’s was inspirational and remains so even though I am still recovering from the dreaded COVID.

One only-in-Pittsburgh tour we went on was the now-defunct Carrie Blast furnace. Interestingly, blast furnaces were named after women, real women, and, I read, the Carrie was probably named after Carrie Moorhead Holland. However, Michele tells me that the new thinking is that it was named after Caroline “Carrie” Clark (not that it matters). There are two conflicting theories for blast furnaces being named after women; one is it was a continuation of the common custom of naming ships for women, and the other is that they were named for women because both were “unpredictable, contrary and hard to handle.” I think the first theory is safer.

Carrie was only one of a long line of blast furnaces, each producing 1,000 to 1,250 tons of iron daily. Besides the size of the operation, one of the things that the fascinating tour drove home was the dangerous conditions under which the workers toiled. As we were on the tour, a long coal train went by and then stopped. The sound of the train compressing on itself, hundreds of yards away, was loud enough to stop the tour guide’s conversation. The map shows, the RR tracks around the blast furnaces in their heyday; there were dozens of trains every hour, taking coal and iron ore in and iron out. The noise was horrific, and a large percentage of workers retired deaf.  

When something jammed, which was not uncommon, a man dressed in leather underwear and asbestos overalls would have to climb up a ladder, a hundred feet in the air, to unstick it. It was dangerous work. As sort of an aside, when I first went to work as a carpenter, Skillsaw safety guards were coming into use, and it was not uncommon to see older carpenters with a missing finger or two. As a further aside, when I was first given a job requiring a Skillsaw, I was taught how to override the safety, a practice I gave up after seeing all the missing fingers. End asides.

The Carrie Blast furnace was the first museum – using the term very loosely – we saw on our trip. The unexpectedly delightful California Trail Interpretive Center, 15 minutes west of Elko, Nevada, was the last. Between 1841 and 1869, up to 250,000 people sold their belongings, bought and packed wagons, and set out to walk 2,000 miles west. The California Trail Interpretive Center gives an excellent accounting of that almost impossible journey in which about ten percent of the travelers died. Both left me with the same impression – probably augmented by my COVID – for most of human history, for most people, life has been very rough. What we, today, would probably regard as impossibly rough.

I consider it a bad day when Lewis Hamilton didn’t win a race, but for most people throughout history, a bad day was when their wife and child died during childbirth or their husband who supported them was killed at work. It’s nice to remember that when Hamilton doesn’t win.

Michele and I know an extraordinary number of artists from Pittsburgh, and I don’t know why. At first, I thought it was because Pittsburgh is an art town with a higher-than-average number of artists per capita, and I had a theory as to why, but it isn’t, and the theory is a theory for a phenomenon that doesn’t seem to exist. What does exist, however, is an astounding permission wall of graffiti behind the Carrie Blast furnace.

I was only in Pittsburgh for three days – Michele for two days. – and I really don’t have an overall impression. We had planned to fly into Pittsburgh, see Michele’s cousins, stay with friends in Baltimore, visit Washington DC, and then drive back to Pittsburgh through West Virginia. A great plan, but I caught COVID and spent our shortened Pittsburgh time in a hotel room. Consequently, we didn’t really see Pittsburgh.