Saxonburg
Pennsylvania
February 2021
I took this photograph of the car windshield just before we embarked on our trip of discovery.
Notice the rain on the glass. There is nothing wrong with the weather here. As Alfred Wainwright (English fellwalker, guidebook author and illustrator) told me, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.”
What’s a fellwalker? Someone who hikes over fells, of course.
Oh, what’s a fell? It’s high ground. You could say that we highpointers are fellwalkers.
Mark Twain let me in on this wisdom: “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
So, off we go.
Our first stop is the Brooklyn Bridge in Roebling Park in Saxonburg, three quarters of an hour northwest of Pittsburgh.
The Brooklyn Bridge?
It’s not the real one — we knew that — and I must say that I am disappointed with this Brooklyn Bridge. It’s considerably smaller than the real one and, unlike the real one that connects Manhattan and Brooklyn, this one connects nothing to nothing. Well, not exactly. It connects on one end to the shelter roof over a picnic table and the other end connects to the side of a building with a window high enough that you’d have to fall out of it to get to the bridge. You can’t traverse the thing, and if there is anything bridges are meant to do, it is to traverse.
Nonetheless, here it is.
We’re in Roebling Park in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. John Roebling is the guy who designed the Brooklyn Bridge, the one whose disappointing mini-replica is strung before us. Roebling was the civil engineer who invented the first steel rope cables and he did that right here in Saxonburg, in case you didn’t know that.
The Smithfield Street Bridge in Pittsburgh was designed by John Roebling. Well, wait. Not the Smithfield Street Bridge that currently traverses the Monongahela River. But the Smithfield Street Bridge that stood here before the current one. That one was designed by John Roebling. We Pittsburghers, in our innocent pride, sometimes don’t mind fudging when it comes to important matters. So we tell tourists that our Smithfield Street Bridge was designed by Roebling and they go, “Ooh!”