When the shining city, too, fades, I will see only those forested mountains and hills, and the way the rivers lie flat and moving among them, and the way the low land lies wooded among them, and the blunt mountains rise in darkness from the rivers’ banks, steep from the rugged south and rolling from the north, and from farther, from the inclined eastward plateau where the high ridges begin to run so long north and south unbroken that to get around them you practically have to navigate Cape Horn.
Their lights illumine other buildings’ clean sides, and illumine the narrow city canyons below, where people move, and shine reflected red and white at night from the black waters. The tall buildings rise lighted to their tips. Where the two rivers join lies an acute point of flat land from which rises the city.
The Allegheny and the Monongahela meet and form the westward-wending Ohio. The Monongahela River flows in shallow and slow from the south, from West Virginia. The Allegheny River flows in brawling from the north, from near the shore of Lake Erie, and from Lake Chautauqua in New York and eastward. Calm old bridges span the banks and link the hills. The three wide rivers divide and cool the mountains. At sunset a red light like housefires shines from the narrow hillside windows the houses’ bricks burn like glowing coals. I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills’ curves, rows of bonfires winding. WHEN EVERYTHING ELSE HAS GONE from my brain-the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family-when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that. PITTSBURGH WASN’T REALLY ANDREW CARNEGIE’S TOWN. AFTER I READ The Field Book of Ponds and Streams
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