Monogahela

A river.  Its name comes from the Lenape meaning "falling banks"...in reference to the instability of the river's banks.  Not so much now (though you can spot chunks of the high banks at Pittsburgh that have washed away).  The river has been dammed.  Locks built to allow coal barges to float downstream and tie-up at the now dormant steel plants that once lined its shores.  So the river now moves slow and muddy from point to point.

The weekend's pleasure boats now tie-up at the ruins of bridges and quays.  Not a barge in sight.  Where the land has not been cleared or the banks proved too steep for building, either now or then, the mass of trees pushes down to the water's edge.  The trees and undergrowth are a jungle of deciduous entanglement...especially on this hot, moisture laden days...the shores seem impenetrable.

But, then, the towns...the former factory towns...the hollowed-out mills...the post-post industrial burgs...the single family homes crowded onto streets on the steep hills rising above the river...

 

And here and there, the domes of the Byzantine Catholic or Orthodox churches rising on the hills...testimony of the origins of the miners who arrived to dig coal and make steel...many from "present-day" Slovakia...who brought their bodies and their faith to this river...and some of those descendents now wander the streets of these towns...looking for the work that has gone elsewhere.  But the faith remains...or does it?

A mosaic on church...the use of small brilliantly colored tiles...an art form from Rome, then Byzantium, taken up by the religions of those empires...created again on the banks of this American river...as the waters spill slowly toward their union with the Allegheny to form the Ohio...another trade route of another former empire.

On the road?

OK so on Wednesday I was on the road...well, actually, the trail up to Arthur's Rock...out for a short hike to stretch my legs before heading out east.  The meadows were lush from recent rains; wildflowers in bloom; mists lay deep in the gulch...waiting for the sun to hit and dry them. 

But on Friday, it was on the road...though not the highway.  It was rather the road show at Denver International Airport (DIA)...thousands of people being sorted or sorting themselves...exposed to the shops and come-on of hawkers and kiosk matrons...moving with purpose...all "needing to get somewhere"...

 But, then, where?  And why?  Now Arthur's Rock is a destination...you get there the same way that our ancestral hominids walked out of Africa into the lands of the Middle East...but here in the hurly-burly of a morning rush that same bipedal motion takes us to machines purring at the gates...

where we cram ourselves and some of our stuff into small spaces...and we are flown through the upper atmosphere while we complain of the failure to have Pepsi instead of Coke while outside....

the clouds display a pattern from above that is unknown from the patterns they display from below.  I am always somewhat astonished at the contrast between my window seat (where I can sneak a few inches by placing my foot on the back of the right armrest in front) and the vast space outside...the noise of the plane's engines and the silence above the earth...

and then to land at some spot thousands of miles away (and still be in the same nation state)...and walk off the plane, using that same bipedal gait, and head for....another Arthur's Rock?