Rain

The weather in Pittsburgh has not been good recently. For the most part, we have alternated between light snowfalls and rainstorms, and the sky has stayed a permanent grey. The days are shorter, now, and I need to be more conscientious about my time at the park.

When it gets cold in Minnesota, it gets very cold, but for the most part, it is a dry cold that stings your face, burns your throat, dries out your lungs in such a way that you feel hollow and raspy. Here, with Lake Erie not far away (in the grand scheme of things), we get a damper type of cold, and I have trouble deciding for myself which type of cold is worse. Sure, snot never freezes to my face in Pittsburgh, but there is a lingering dampness that chills your bones, and more wind, and many, many more clouds. Not gentle stringy clouds, either: thick, robust grey cumuli that block out the sun. It is cloudier in the summers here, too, of course. I think being in such a narrow valley surrounded by so many hills gives Pittsburgh a sort of snow globe affect: the moisture in the air has nowhere to go, so it just hangs around.

The dirt in the park is damp, soft the way you'd expect manure on a farm to be. Thankfully, it has a better aromatic quality than manure, though. There's a real, musky richness to it. That moisture in the air-- I can only assume-- also means that the grass does not dry out in quite the same way that it would back home. By April, when the snows recede in Minneapolis, you start to notice that the ground has been flattened out like hay laid out for a horse. Here it stays thick and green, and although nothing will sprout out of the soft, nutrient rich dirt for many months, it seems to be enough to sustain what has already grown-- at least for now, and at least in Frick Park.

There are signs of man-erosion in the park, where heavy equipment has been rolled onto the grass, or where generations of people have discovered shortcuts, and this is the time of year that the mud from after a rain-- like we had last night-- gets tracked back onto the concrete paths by people's shoes. The playground nearby is empty. I go over and tap one of the hollow metal poles that supports the jungle gym, and it is icy and rings a bit louder than it used to. This is not the type of ground that you want your children to fall headfirst on: cold hurts.

The squirrels are gone, and the park employees are busy doing some landscaping on the park's edge, certainly trying to sneak work in before we get our first snowfall that actually sticks-- that doesn't immediately run off down the straight, narrow roads that climb the hill from the river.

I spoke with a coworker who lives near here the other day, and she told me about how it is too cold now for her and her husband to work their garden, how they have a "winter project": constructing a headboard for their bed out of the wood from an old door. I ponder this for a bit. Recycling can indeed mean many things-- unexpected things.

And she tells me that she and her husband will continue their morning walks along the path that abuts the river. We talk about how nice it is down there-- it's the path that stretches from Pittsburgh to Washington, the one that avid cyclists ride the whole length of to prove themselves. I've seen children that I know on the bike path with their parents, and now I'm learning about my coworker-- a middle aged woman who has lived near here her entire life-- using it for her walks. It is a community gathering place, in a sense.

I walk down the hill from the patch of park with its sad, ghost white trees, their leaves raked up into piles. I go through the fog, and down to where the bike path is. It is behind a chain-link fence, and a few people are using it. The blacktop looks fresh and new, and is split down the middle by a dotted bright yellow line. But it seems to me a human imposition: this is not our natural space. We have contained nature in between two fences, in fact, and the only thing growing is weeds and grass along the path's shoulders.

The greyness-- and dampness-- of the day makes me feel a bit somber, so I head home.

Snow

There is a dusting of snow in the park this morning, which reminds me so much of the differences between the winters here in Pittsburgh and what we experience back in Minnesota. This snow won't last. It will not stay cold enough for long enough, and perhaps the topography also allows for snow to melt and run off into the river better here than it does on flat plains, where it seems to pile on with each successive storm.

Leaves stick out from the thin dusting, very dry and grey now. I am glad that the squirrels have had their opportunity to store food for the winter, although I know now from research that squirrels do not hibernate. Which causes me to wonder: where do they go? I never see squirrels moving around very much during winter months. I suppose that they are easier prey for predators against a white landscape, such as this. But what eats squirrels? Birds of prey? In Minnesota, there was a large population of hawks, kestrels and falcons, some of which may be big enough to haul away a squirrel in its claws. There is a sanctuary there for them, actually, along the Mississippi River, and occasionally you may see one flying, even above the densely populated city, where light and noise pollution ought to scare them off. It occurs to me that I do not see many of these types of birds in Western Pennsylvania, if at all. But perhaps I have not been looking hard enough. Perhaps now, on days when the sky is clear and cloudless and they are not blocked out by the leaves of trees, is the right time to start looking.

People do not seem to inhabit the park in the same density as I am accustomed too now, either. There is a barrenness to it, even though some grass still sticks out through the thin layer of fluffy snow. As the cold settles in, I wonder how well the park will function as a community gathering space. The thickets of wood here does not well suit snowshoing or cross-country skiing; besides, neither of these are big pastimes in Pennsylvania anyway, and the snow rarely accumulates enough to facilitate doing either.

When the weather is warm and spring-like, the paths are crowded and there are people in almost every clearing. It will be interesting to see how winter affects this landscape.

Squirrels, etc.

As I often see squirrels in Frick Park these late Fall days (it seems that the cooling down that comes before winter inspires some urgency in them), I've begun to think a bit more about them. When I first moved to Pittsburgh from Minneapolis, I mentioned-- in passing-- albino squirrels to a friend of mine. They are a common sight back home: bleach white, with laser red eyes. There is a spookiness about their presence, and I know that it is wrong, but that spookiness always sort of reminded me about why animals-- and people-- with albinism in some cultures are regarded as harbingers of death.

My friend had never heard of such a thing. Indeed, in Pittsburgh I have never seen one. Research that I have done since has not answered for me very conclusively if these squirrels are a species unto themselves, or just a more common squirrel that truly does have some genetic abnormality. I have concluded, however, that I was mistaken in my long held belief that they were so numerous in Minneapolis because of their ability to camouflage well in the snowdrifts of winter: there are apparently many colonies of albino squirrels around the country, and several of these colonies are located in the snow-less South.

I contemplate all of this as I sit in Frick Park, on a day approaching Halloween, that is crisp, cool and sunny. The squirrels seem less numerous now than they do in the warm months, but I can see them scurrying up or down the occasional tree. I remember when I used to live in a house on Minneapolis's Southside: an old American Foursquare in an old neighborhood that hugged a highway which looped around downtown. In this house (revamped into a four-plex) we had an infestation of squirrels one winter, and in the Spring, one of them managed to chew through the ceiling and was routinely poking his head out through a hole and into the upper level apartment. Our maintenance man set out poison in the attic, and the next squirrel I saw was dead on the back lawn.

I retrieved a shovel from my parents house the day that I encountered the squirrel, and buried it a few feet deep in the soft, Spring ground. A few days later, we had a ceremony for it in the backyard, where my roommate burned white sage, and I recited a sort of elegy I had written. This squirrel had been dutifully gathering nuts for his family, had been doing the things that were natural and instinctual to him, ensuring his own survival. And, as his bad luck would have it, he happened to get in our way.

It interests me, now, to think about the convergence of human society and of the society of squirrels-- the society of *all* of nature, really. As I watch the squirrels clawing up and down trees to the deep, cave-like holes where they stash and burrow food, I am left to wonder what-- if anything-- they have retrieved this Fall from one of the robust blue garbage cans near the parks trails. I've seen squirrels once in a while poking their heads out from inside of those, or heard them thrashing around against a can's plastic walls. What could they find in their that provides for them an appropriate amount of nourishment? What has our presence-- our human society-- done for them that is good?