A guest post from Pittsburgher at heart, Nick Courage of amutualrespect.org.
I’ve been to Pittsburgh a few times now, can tell the Monongohela and the Allegheny apart; recognize where they meet at the downtown point of the city to form the Ohio. I’ve had a Chicago veggie at D’s Six Pax and Dogz, biked the jail trail, and seen the cloud factory behind Carnegie Mellon (twice). Shoot, I had drinks with Mr. McFeely at an astronaut’s house, which is about as Pittsburgh as things get as far as I’m concerned.
But before that – when my girlfriend wanted me to visit her family in the ‘Burgh for the first time – I was suspicious. Beyond Annie Dillard and Michael Chabon, I hadn’t ever really thought about Pittsburgh. And Dillard was too pleased with herself for me. And Chabon felt like he was hiding something. Outside of those two literary landmarks, I could barely find Pennsylvania on a map. After a disappointing trip to Philadelphia a few years earlier, I was actually opposed to finding Pennsylvania on a map; there was a geopolitical ethos of exclusion in play.
And now I know where the Monongohela and the Allegheny meet to form the Ohio, which – I also now know – contours West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois before feeding into the Mississippi, a popular favorite that’s worked its way down into the effluvium where I was born since well before it was discovered by Hernando de Soto (who called it Río del Espíritu Santo – “River of the Holy Ghost”), or the Cheyenne before him (they went with Ma’xe-e’ometaa’e – “Big Greasy River”).
