Pittsburgh entered the core of my heart when I was a boy and cannot be torn out. Andrew Carnegie (pronounced an·droo kaar·nuh·gee)

So much has happened, including Thanksgiving, catching COVID, and having a heart ablation, since we went to the East Coast for Michele’s Cousin’s Reunion, that it seems much longer ago than it really was. I also want to say that, although the rationale for the trip was the Reunion, the Reunion itself was a minor part of the trip. The trip itself didn’t really have a center unless rambling around counts. I thought Washington, especially the various Smithsonian Museums, might be the center, but it wasn’t. The parts that stand out were the new places we saw through the eyes of old friends, especially Pittsburgh and Baltimore.

Starting with Pittsburgh, the downtown part is pretty much like most downtowns, with new and newer buildings jammed together. But its resemblance to other cities ends as soon as you drive a couple of blocks from the epicenter. First, there are bridges, bridges everywhere. In some cases, after crossing a river, they dive directly into a tunnel. Just outside of downtown, I expected to see lots of lofts in recycled factories, and they might be there, but I didn’t see them. Although, we did go to see a superb jazz performance by Eliane Elias in an old industrial building that had been converted into a theater. The areas further from downtown are hilly, not mountainous, just hilly with tight hollows; somewhat like a Gold Rush town in California or Eureka, Arkansas.

Outside of downtown, on alluvial flats along the rivers or in a wide spot along a creek, flat ground is at a premium, and there are narrow three-story detached houses jammed together, giving it a somewhat Dogpatch-y appearance. As a former builder, I found this fascinating. On the way out of town, I would follow a road through a narrow valley with a creek, turn a corner, and it would open up to a small flat space jammed with a half dozen very narrow (around twenty feet wide) three-story houses, squeezed between the right-of-way in front and a cliff in the back. They looked old and not very prosperous. By the way, I don’t have any pictures of this because I knew we would be coming back in about two weeks. Unfortunately, by then, I had contracted COVID and only saw the inside of the hotel room.

At some point during our stay with Arlene and Al, Arlene said something like, “I love it here. I love the green. I would never want to live in California where everything is dry and brown.” It was a comment that I kept bringing up in my mind as we drove around the East. The question just wouldn’t go away. It seemed so true, I didn’t know why anybody would prefer the burned-out California hills to these green hollows either.

While we were staying with Al and Arlene, Arlene said that the Appalachian Mountains were the oldest mountain chain in North America which sort of surprised me because of all the coal beds in the road cuts. But, it turns out, the Appalachian Mountains are 480,000,000 years old (plus or minus depending on where in time you put the beginning. Basically, they were formed when the North American Plate slammed into the European and African Plates forming Pangaea. That was a long time ago, even before life had left the seas and started to colonize dry land.

During the next 480M years, it was much warmer because this area was closer to the equator, and the atmosphere was richer in oxygen; life on land flourished. For a good part of the time, this area was periodically underwater, and the submerged plants and animals were covered with alluvium. Millions of years turned those layers into coal and oil. Later, much later, I drove through road cuts that had exposed those layers and eventually ended up on a plateau where the Amish had settled in the early 18th Century.

I spent about an hour or so wandering around a faux Amish village which was very interesting until it wasn’t. Ever since I’ve read or heard of the Amish, I thought they were Luddites, afraid of progress. That is not true, they seem to have no problem with modern conveniences, what they are tucked away from is the outside world. They have no problems with refrigerators or blenders, for example, just the connection to the outside world that electricity requires. They have solved that problem with natural gas-powered refrigerators and pneumatic blenders.

During the late 60s, I became very interested in Amish quilts. I thought they were knock-out, with their moody dark colors like purple and maroon and I’m glad to say that the Amish are still in the quilt biz even if what they are doing seems more conventional.

Leaving Lancaster County, heading towards the Cousins’ gathering in Cape May, I entered a tree-lined maze in which I had only a vague idea of what state I was in. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware all seem to be intertwined in a way, that, from the tree-lined tunnel I was in, seemed close to random. At the end of the day, I ended up at the Atlantic Ocean just in time for a drink with Michele and Claudia.