Gertie-less!

Today didn't turn out quite the way I expected. Oh, nothing bad happened!...but I'm in a spare bedroom in my father's house with nothing but my PowerBook, a cell phone and a couple of extra shirts, and Gertie is way across town at my cousin Hugh's place. I feel kind of helpless without her and her contents. Heck, this room doesn't even have an electrical outlet! (Well, I'm sure it does, but the wall-to-wall bookcases must be covering it up, because I can't find it.) So I'm hoping my battery will last long enough to let me finish this.

I woke up this morning feeling chipper and plotted a course from Barkcamp State Park to Hugh's place in Pittsburgh. (Barkcamp is called that, incidentally, because a lumbering operation used to strip the bark off the logs at this location before shipping them to the mill.) It looked like an easy three-hour drive, and I got on the road relatively early (for this trip) at around 10:30. I drove through eastern Ohio, a small corner of West Virginia and into Pennsylvania. Yesterday's steady drizzle had given way to clouds with patches of sunshine. The driving was easy, and the flat Ohio scenery soon gave way to more interesting views as I crossed into West Virginia. Too bad the roads didn't allow me to pull over and take pictures!

I pulled into a rest stop for lunch and was pleased to see that my house batteries were being charged again. And after half an hour of sitting there and playing music while I ate, the batteries' voltage reading was higher than when I stopped, so the solar panels were doing their job. While I was stopped, I emailed Hugh to say that I'd be arriving this afternoon, and called and left a message on Donald's* answering machine saying the same.

So as I rolled into Pittsburgh a few minutes before 2:00, I was right on schedule. (I even managed to get a fairly interesting photo as I was driving through the Fort Pitt tunnel on the way in.) My original plan had been to park Gertie in the small lot next to Hugh's home and art studio, a former bar in the historic Arlington neighborhood. (The lot used to be where the street cars turned around at the end of their runs to that part of town.) Then Hugh would give me a lift to a car rental place, so that I could get around that way instead of maneuvering Gertie through Pittsburgh's hilly streets. I'd drive the rental car to Donald's house on the other side of the Monongahela river and stay there for a couple of days before returning to Arlington and Gertie. But things didn't work out that way.

Either Street Atlas gave me wrong directions or I took a wrong turn—I'm not sure which—and instead of crossing the Birmingham bridge to Hugh's part of town as intended, I ended up on the wrong side of the river in the central part of Pittsburgh. This was bad. Being lost in a city while driving solo is no fun; being lost in a city in a motorhome is worse. But suddenly I spotted a familiar sight: straight ahead of me was the "Cathedral of Learning," and I knew I was in the Oakland district where Donald lives.

The Cathedral is a strikingly ugly 535-foot-high building that has been a Pittsburgh landmark since it was completed in 1937. The structure was an ill-conceived attempt by to build a skyscraper in the style of a Gothic cathedral in order to show the world what the University of Pittsburgh was capable of. It did, but perhaps not in quite the way intended. The resulting architectural mishmosh, streaked with black Pittsburgh soot, towers like a massive sore thumb above the Oakland skyline.

But it makes a dandy navigational reference.

When I spotted the Cathedral looming a few blocks away, I knew I was near Donald's part of town. I figured that I might as well stop and see him first—assuming I could find a place to park Gertie!—and then head over to Hugh's, with Donald riding along as navigator.

I managed to find my way to his street without directions. You can laugh, but this was a remarkable feat for me—I've been visiting him in Pittsburgh for 14 years and I still don't understand how to get around the city. There was no question of parking in front of his house—he lives on a tiny cul-de-sac whose narrow entrance Gertie could not squeeze through—but I found a decent spot on a side street two blocks over. Only trouble was, Donald wasn't home! I rang his bell and even called him on my cell phone, but there was no answer. I figured (correctly, as it turned out) that he was out making the rounds of the Saturday yard sales.

I walked across the street to a major yard sale that was going on there, on the off chance I'd find him. (As it turned out, he'd already been and gone.) I poked through the goods just in case there was something interesting, and picked up a laser videodisc of "Adventures in Babysitting," a comedy I hadn't seen but that looked like good mindless entertainment, for $2. (Heck, it would cost more than that to rent it!) I walked back and rang Donald's bell again. Still no answer.

So I walked up the street to Gertie and pulled out my printed directions (compiled on previous visits) for getting to Hugh's place. It looked doable, so off I went, lumbering through the narrow, winding streets of this hilly town. I found my way to the Arlington neighborhood and parked in the streetcar turnaround next to Hugh's building. I even found a reasonably level spot—and in Pittsburgh, that's saying something!

When Hugh let me into his studio, we discussed the transportation situation and I called Donald (who was home by now) to talk it over with him. Hugh offered to chauffeur me over to Donald's place, and I could think about renting a car later. That seemed reasonable, since I was only staying for two days and was not that keen on renting a car anyway. But it meant I'd be staying with Donald instead of sleeping in Gertie, and so I hurriedly threw a couple of shirts and some underwear into my backpack, grabbed the PowerBook and hopped into Hugh's pickup. I wish I'd brought more, but I was in a hurry. At least I did think to bring shampoo and a toothbrush. I hope Gertie will be all right without me!

When Hugh dropped me off at Donald's house, Donald and I sat down and had a good chat of the wide-ranging sort that we usually enjoy. Donald is a treasure-house of interesting knowledge—especially historical knowledge—and a good storyteller as well. As I may have said before, he tells stories about the American Revolution as if he's telling anecdotes about his old army buddies—he knows the personalities that well! And he knows all kinds of old tools and technologies, which are always of interest to me.

I was dreading supper, though, because I know what Donald's pantry is like: canned stew, canned spaghetti and canned meat. Sure enough, when suppertime rolled around, Donald served up Dinty Moore beef stew. First he emptied the glutinous mass into a leftover plastic sherbet tub. (He used to heat up stew right in the can on the stovetop, and then eat it out of the can to avoid having to wash dishes, but the microwave oven I gave him about fifteen years ago changed his procedure.) To "improve" the stew, he threw in one can each of Valu-Rite brand canned peas and canned mushrooms. Then he heated the whole business in the grimy little Emerson microwave oven, and served it in the plastic tub.

It was a grisly meal, and I mean that literally: the meat was so poor and so chewy that I just ate the peas and potatoes and threw away the rest when he wasn't looking. But at least my container was clean. Donald's was grungy beyond belief, coated with a thick, revolting layer of brown grime. When I looked at it and made a face, he shrugged and said "It gets pasteurized in the microwave."

It's hard to imagine how anyone could put less importance on food and eating than Donald does. The rest of the house is neat and clean, the wood is polished, and all the brass and copper (of which there are considerable) shines...but his kitchen can be charitably described as grimy. The reason his eating utensils are so scummy (his drinking glass is the same) is that he doesn't have any hot water in the kitchen—it stopped working about ten years ago and he never bothered to fix it—and he doesn't use dishwashing detergent. Why spend the money, when you can take the bits and pieces of leftover soap from the rest of the house and mush them together into a little mottled dirty-looking ball? The soap doesn't make any appreciable difference in this hard Pittsburgh water, but so what? The dishes get pasteurized when you microwave them next time, so...

We had apple pie for dessert—on clean plates, no less!—and sat around talking about my trip. I gave him a summary of what I'd seen so far, and talked a little bit about the fulltimer RVing culture as I had experienced it at the Escapade. I sometimes tell myself that Donald and Lucy (my late mother) would have really enjoyed having Gertie on their many fossil-hunting trips. But I'm coming to think that while she would have, he might not have. I think Lucy was much more of an outdoors person than Donald. Or perhaps he was more of a "field person" in his younger years, just as I was interested in tent camping when I was in my twenties—but not now.

I showed him pictures from the trip on my PowerBook's screen...until I noticed that he had dozed off. Then I tactfully wound up my presentation and announced that I was ready to turn in. Donald, who is a late night/late morning person, stayed up reading paleontological abstracts in the kitchen. I typed up as much of today's doings as I could before the computer's battery was in danger of giving up the ghost, then prepared to sleep.

I can tell that sleep tonight won't be easy, though. I'm beginning to realize how many things I didn't bring with me from Gertie. You see, I had never really planned on sleeping away from Gertie on this trip, so I just wasn't prepared with a knapsack full of stuff for overnight stays. In particular, I had forgotten to grab three important sleep aids: my earplugs (to screen out city noises), my Breathe-Right strips (to keep my nose breathing freely) and my SnorBan mouthpiece (to prevent sleep apnea and snoring).

It will probably not surprise you to hear that the mattress in this bedroom is very old. It has upholstery buttons that protrude noticeably, forming a series of little hard lumps. And there's no shade on the window—so I gave Pittsburgh a show when getting undressed, and will probably have trouble sleeping because of the streetlights shining in the window. (Unlike Donald, I'm a very light sleeper.)

Oh, well. Might as well turn off the light and get what rest I can.

* I was brought up to call my parents by their real names instead of generic labels like "mom" and "dad."