We got home about the 21st of last month, COVID-free, I think. My first COVID symptoms were on October 10th when we were at Harper’s Ferry. I read that symptoms can appear two to fourteen days after exposure which means I could have been exposed anytime, anywhere, on our trip. But, on this Veterans’ Day, 2023, I am COVID-free. Yeah!
But I’m not symptom-free. My smell and taste are back, I don’t have a headache or body aches, and I don’t have a fever. But – and it is a big but – I am still fatigued. I think I still have something, maybe long COVID, whatever that is. I am exhausted all the time.
I wrote the end of the above about three or four days ago, and I started it close to three weeks ago. Most of those days were filled with my just staring into space. It was concerning. But, for the last three days, I’ve felt better – substantially so – every day. Yeah! Indeed.
In what seems like weeks ago, I went to the doctor’s, a new General Practitioner recommended by Michele. The first White Male I’ve had for a doctor in, I think, twenty-one years. He ordered blood work and a chest X-ray which I got at Sequoia Hospital, the day before yesterday. The X-ray Department is right next to the Emergency Department at Sequoia, BTW. After the X-ray, just as I left the changing room, I got dizzy. Standing there, sweating, trying to stand up by holding on to the chair rail for dear life, trying to catch my breath, somebody asked if I was OK, and I said, “No”. A minute, two at the most, later I was in the Emergency Department, and three hours later, Michele gave me a ride home. I have no idea what happened. Neither does anybody else. Still, Life Is Good. Grand, even.
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.
Where could one settle more pleasantly than in one’s home. Cicero
We got home yesterday, and it feels great. Seeing Precious Mae, sleeping in our own beddy-bye (with a very cuddlesome Precious Mae), and showering in our own shower are underappreciated joys.
I think that I am over COVID, although I’m still exhausted with periodic coughing fits and a runny nose. Getting here has been a bitch, basically seven straight days of driving, although some of the days were pretty short because of my COVID.
We made it to Laramie, Wyoming, yesterday. It is a charming town that Michele is particularly fond of because Michele lived near there in the early 80s while she was doing a geological survey of the Wind River Basin. I’ve read that the size of the buildings in a town/city reflects the values of the town/city; the biggest building in Laramie is the football stadium.
I’m testing positive again but it has been six days so the end is in sight. Israel didn’t bomb the hospital so that is much better. On our way to near Reno and then one more day and we are HOME.
We’re heading West as the countryside opens up. In the background, Hamas has killed Israeli babies, children, and innocents in a spasm of hate and terror. Israel has answered with, “You want to kill babies? We’ll show you killing babies on an industrial scale.” Fuck!!!
Luckily, driving west in our little cocoon, we miss most of it. I’m testing negative for COVID and haven’t had a fever in five days. More later.
