“I notice that you do a power walk when you go uphill,” my brother said to me one day. We were walking back down the street that led to his apartment after an uphill walk to the grocery store. I had spent, to that date, three weeks at his place in Pittsburgh, Penn., and this was only the second time that I was able to get his weighty and asthmatic body out and walking with me. What he saw as some kind of athletically healthy plan was really an acquired acceptance of a necessary misery: walking up the hills of Pittsburgh.
I do try to perambulate as much as possible, strolling about my micro-hood in Irvington. On occasion, I will venture onto the Pennsy Trail, but mostly, I like to wander the tree-lined streets and watch the squirrels and cats, listen to the birds and dance around the dogs. But even on my most enthusiastic walking day, my way is easy and my pace is restful. Not so in my brother’s neighborhood. His apartment complex is an island surrounded by magnificent woods, with streets that climb into the sky. And even though I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh, I don’t remember having to huff and puff up so many hills. Of course, I did leave the city when I was 22; the intervening 47 years have added some weight to my frame and detracted air from my lungs. But my memories of scampering about the city seems to have flattened the many hills for which it is famous.
During my stay with my brother, I visited some of the places that I frequented when young. I walked up the hill that led to the house I lived in when in grade school, the hill that — now that I think of it — I walked up and down to get to school and to sell newspapers at the Steeler’s home games. I visited the Cathedral of Learning, the soaring edifice that houses the University of Pittsburgh, and the library to which I walked from high school, and in which I worked for five years. And I remembered going down the wooded hill into Panther Hollow, where my brother, sister and I would play beside the creek; I learned to catch crayfish as they sped backward from the lifted rock, but never took any back home, up the hills to Terrace Street.
Mature people are fond of admonishing the languid young with tales of a world of hard work, where walking was the main source of transportation, even in the snow. I’ve never been taxed with having to do heavy physical lifting to finance my way in life, but in my youth, I walked far, and often. When snow blanketed the school year, there was no school bus for us; I would wait for the older, bigger kids to break a path and walk in the ruts created by their passage. If the bus or streetcar could not carry my siblings and me to the places we wanted to be, we walked to them. I once walked home from my grandparent’s home on a painful left foot, one that I did not know I had broken. And that walk was mostly uphill, too.
My journeys along the flatlands of Indianapolis, though pleasant, do not provide me with the challenges that the hills of Pittsburgh bring to my walks. My sojourn with my brother in my native city did much to help me improve my breathing and stamina, and provide me with stories to tell the young about walking uphill, both ways.