June 21, 2001

The big difference with a recent landing in Pittsburgh was that the string of cabs lined by the departure lane numbered six units instead of the six dozen in other cases. Everything else was familiar. The identical beat-up white cab and same truculent driver I'd had at Austin International eight hours before wheeled up to the curb, ready to go careening off to a strange city for 30 miles and 30 bucks worth of my life.

The seat springs hit my upper posterior in the exact spot the desperate piece of Austin junk had located my tailbone. The driver stared ahead just like the previous fellow, glaring into the headlights as if a fare invaded his innermost privacy. Tires sang the same muted melody strumming on slick tread. And the screech of the brake bands heralded the introduction of a Texas freewheeling style to the Pennsylvania roadway.

Once we passed through a tunnel under Mount Washington, a startling vista opened onto a city of long arched bridges and shaded orange street lights. Arched bridges crossing the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers to come together downtown to head the Ohio River; street lights to illuminate the 88 neighborhoods making up Pittsburgh. (I am going on ahead as the cab driver is a mute. If you depended on him, you wouldn't know the difference between Benson, Arizona and Baltimore, Maryland.)

Off the slope of Mount Washington, we crossed the Monongahela on a bridge built by the designer of the Golden Gate. Upstream where steel mills once crowded the riverbanks, a "hot metal bridge" made to cross molten ore spanned the river. A grim reminder of an industry once sending shifts of 8000 to 10,000 smut-faced men struggling toward soot-coated homes to pass by the largest concentration of saloons on the North American continent. (For sure, you know by now that I'm talking, not a street-weary cabby.)

The couple running the bed and breakfast left the room keys in the mailbox as agreed. After an old sister in a Houston "B and B" pulled a deuce of clubs trick rusty enough to make a Bluebeard blush, I haven't been so trusting, or as keen on innkeepers. She ran my credit card through for two nights, then had the water turned off at daylight the second morning. She hands down holds first prize for early checkout procedures and ranks high among the modern-day buccaneers of the bayou country.

Took a three flight descent to reach a big bedroom joined by a small sitting room furnished with a dark cherry wood desk and a brown leather arm chair. The water was still hot, the towels clean and tasteful. The 40-degree drop in temperature from Texas chilled the room. I crawled into a bed based on the most marvelous rubber mattress ever to be on any road.

The next morning I bounded out the door, only to be faced by three steep flights of stairs. However, by going down slow, I regained my composure in time to meet two tables of guests and the innkeeper. Rested from the night's sleep, needing to talk, I opened by telling how the jumbo grasshoppers at the ranch were walking so spraddle-legged from beggar's lice burrs building up between the hind legs and the body that the stress caused the hoppers to expectorate as clear as a glacier melt.

Must have been a poor sampling of Californians. Seemed dull compared to the ones we used to watch on the TV, like Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. I wanted to add about ol' "Peanut" Dawson opening his mouth at the wrong moment in the back of a pickup in time to swallow a "jumbo", but the crowd dispersed before I finished the story. ("Peanut" claimed a "jumbo" tasted the same as a chew of "Day's Work" tobacco.)

After breakfast, the innkeeper agreed to drive me over to the museum district. He further provided an umbrella, a borrowed umbrella being the only kind I have ever carried. While I waited in the parlor, I practiced in front of a long beveled mirror twirling the canopy and refreshing my memory of the proper etiquette for opening and carrying an umbrella.

"A gentleman always points the spear toward his body in charging pedestrian traffic," the book said at home. "To prevent an indiscreet accident, (a goose?) the spear is pointed to his body, or toward the sidewalk upon following a lady mounting a coach, a bus, or subway." Further on the directions read, "In the event the impact of collision causes the gentleman to be stabbed by his umbrella, he should apologize for the inconvenience, then remove himself to privacy to extricate the spear."

The innkeeper guided much better than the cab driver. By mid-morning he had given a detailed tour and located the correct bus stops. For the rest of the trip, he picked me up numerous times. So the indignity of being taken by the Houston swindler faded away. I remained and remain a staunch supporter of bed and breakfast inns.

June 21, 2001