The Drive Down Route 51

Seven in the morning outside Pittsburgh looks different depending on the season, and I’ve had three years now of watching it change through a windshield. Summer, it’s already bright and a little smug about it, joggers out, somebody’s dog dragging somebody else down the sidewalk. Winter, it’s still basically night, just a grayer version, and the drive feels like an extension of the shift instead of an escape from it.

I take 51 most mornings instead of the highway even though the highway’s faster by maybe six minutes. There’s a stretch past the old glass plant where the road drops down along the river and you can see the barges if any are running, and steam or fog or something coming off the water depending on the temperature. I couldn’t tell you the science of it. I just know that stretch is where my shoulders come down from wherever they’ve been sitting for twelve hours.

There’s a coffee place I stop at maybe twice a week, not for the coffee particularly, I could make coffee better and cheaper at home, but because the guy who opens it doesn’t try to talk to me. He clocked pretty early on that a person coming in at 7:15 in scrubs with a thousand yard stare doesn’t want a conversation about the weather, and now he just nods and has my order halfway made before I’m at the counter. I’ve never learned his name and I think that’s part of why it works. Some relationships are better left at the transactional level.

Pittsburgh’s a strange place to end up if you didn’t grow up here, all these steep little neighborhoods stacked on top of each other with no obvious logic to how they connect, bridges everywhere because the rivers make you earn every crossing. I didn’t grow up here. I came for a nursing program and never left, which if you’d told twenty two year old me that’s how it would go, I don’t think I’d have believed it. Places you land by accident sometimes turn out to be the ones that fit.

The part nobody tells you about night shift is that your relationship to a city gets inverted. I know what this town looks like empty in a way most people never will, the streets at 4 a.m. when it’s just delivery trucks and one or two other people who also work nights, some kind of unspoken fellowship in that, nodding at a stranger stocking shelves at a gas station because you both know something the daytime version of the city doesn’t. Then I get home right as everyone else’s day is revving up, and there’s a jolt to that, seeing a school bus while I’m trying to fall asleep, hearing someone’s lawnmower start while I’ve got the blackout curtains pulled.

I don’t have a point to make about any of this really. It’s just the twenty two minutes that are mine, before I have to be anyone’s coworker or anyone’s tenant or anyone’s anything, just a guy in a car watching a river go by in whatever light happens to be around that day. This place wears on you a little, the way it wore on me when I first got here too, everybody put their head down and grinding to be like everyone else. Some mornings the fog off the water is the only thing that doesn’t ask anything of me.