Pittsburg's Rivers

If you grow up in Pittsburgh rivers are in your blood. You live and breath rivers.  Literally.  Chances are your parents brought you home from the hospital when you were born in the family car over one of the many almost century old bridges that actually tie the city together. 

After living in Los Angeles almost thirty years it’s hard to daydream about and think about Pittsburgh and not have visual pictures of Pittsburgh in my head without seeing those old boheams of concrete and metal called bridges that went over our rivers.  But the rivers are what I want to talk about not the bridges. 

I think my very first memory of the rivers are catfishing on the Allegheny River with one of my childhood friends Wayne Jackson and his father Mr. Jackson. You see, the city of Pittsburgh is kind of built topographically like the capitol Y. There are these two huge rivers that literally cut right through the middle of the city and extend the length of the city.  Each river is almost a mile wide. That’s why when I look at that little drainpipe called the Los Angeles River I kind of laugh.  Anyway these two rivers in Pittsburgh are called the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River.  And after both of them travel the length of the city on opposite ends of the city they meet in downtown Pittsburgh and form the beginning of the Ohio River. As we all know, the Ohio River is one of America’s greatest rivers because it is a tributary of the Mississippi River.  But going back to fishing on the river with Wayne and his father, I think of my whole career of being a fisherman in Pittsburgh.  A career that probably had a collective span of one year.  I don’t think I ever caught one fucking fish.  Wayne and his dad would catch buckets of fish and I would catch 0.

After thinking back years later I kind of figured out why I never even got a nibble.  You see, Wayne and his dad would use live bait like worms, flies, moths--you know, stuff that wiggled under water and attracted the fish.  Even at that age I guess I was a vegetarian in training because I could not put a fishing hook through something living.  So I would just throw my fishing line out into the river with no bait on the hook and I wouldn’t catch any fish. 

The real rush of adrenaline came when we would be packing up to go home at sunset and by this point Mr.Jackson would be shit faced drunk from sipping Old Grandad all day from a small flask he kept in his back pack.  You see, back then in Pittsburgh you could drive your car right down to the river bank and set-up all your fishing gear and fold-up chairs and sometimes even a tent right at the tailgate of your car and fish from there. I think in years past the city stopped that because of the exact things Mr. Jackson would do after a day of drinking and fishing on the river’s edge. 

After we packed up the car, that is Wayne and myself, because his father was too drunk, Mr. Jackson would just be sitting behind the stirring wheel mumbling to himself and still hitting that old Old Grandad and telling us to hurry up because it’s getting dark.  So after the car was all packed up and ready to pull out is when the most exciting part of the day would start. You see the rear wheels would be just maybe 15 feet from the river bank. And Mr.Jacksons in his drunken stupor  would always put the car in reverse first. A couple times I really almost shit in my pants because I was so scared, I just knew he was going to back right into the river and the currents which were always extremely rough in the Allegheny river would sweep us away.  That motherfucker would do this every time we went fishing.  Sometimes I would wonder if he were doing it just to scare us, because Wayne and I would be in the back seat literally screaming and crying and actually praying, and Mr. Jackson would be laughing this cryptic laugh. 

But somehow fate would always intervene and we would miraculously get back on the main road.  I can remember times I would be scared to death to go fishing with Wayne and his father and my mother would make me, I didn’t have the heart to tell her about Mr. Jackson’s drinking at river’s edge. I didn’t want to get him in trouble.  I must have been eight or nine when I was going threw my fisherman stage.

As I got older, my friends and I would hang out at the river more.  When I think about all the crazy shit we used to do, like hanging out and playing on the locks that were on this huge dam on the river, for all intensive purposes I should be dead right now.  There would always be stories on the news about kids being killed in some freakish accident while playing near the river. The Corps of Army Engineers controlled the dam, and they would have a huge fence with barbed wire around the entrance of the dam just for the exclusive purpose of keeping kids out.  To this day I don’t know how we got on the other side of that fence but we did.  And after we got on the other side of the fence we would go down to where the locks were that the boats would go through. We would wait for the water to raise and lower in each lock and then go down and write graffiti on the side of the lock and then we would have to get the hell out of there before the water started rising again.  I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when I was doing that because I remember I didn’t start hanging out by the river again till my last couple years of high school.

There was this park in downtown Pittsburgh right where the two rivers meet, called Point State Park.  It’s an historic site because there’s a Revolutionary War fort there.  Evidently the mouth of the Ohio River was a very strategic point during that time.  So they built this beautiful huge building made of giant black  blocks, it has four pointed tips so from an aerial view it looks like a huge black star.  It’s not as big as the forts that are in Hollywood movies either. Around that time I was going to outdoor rock concerts and they would have them in Point State Park where the old Fort is, where by the way George Washington actually did sleep.  One of the old stories that the tour guides tell is how during the war Washington would come to Fort Duquesne regularly to keep tabs on his troops.   Getting loaded in Point State Park is great, too.  There was nothing like sitting on a park bench at night in Point Park and smoking a joint and looking up the hillsides around downtown Pittsburgh with all the twinkling lights; it’s something I did a lot as a kid. One night I was in downtown Pittsburgh by myself doing some shopping. It must have been a nice summer night so I walked down to the park to the Fort.  It was dark so I pulled out my dick and started jerking off.  To this day which is maybe 35 years later I still remember how great it felt to walk around the outside of that fort with my penis sticking out. I remember the fear that at any moment someone would see me but I guess that made it more exciting.  I remember a wind coming off the river, and I felt it on my dick, and it felt so good.  I remember thinking how “I’m jerking off where Washington and his troops fought.”  But anyway growing up in a river town is great.  And if you ever get a chance to visit Pittsburgh visit historic Point State Park in downtown Pittsburgh and walk around a real Revolutionary War fort.