Time to Pretend

One of the greatest pre-Christmas activities has to be walking along railroad tracks in between shopping excursions. Last Tuesday, I stumbled across this nondescript old warehouse along the Monongahela River on Pittsburgh's South Side, a neighborhood so rich in industrial history that it's literally like biting into a chocolate truffle to go exploring there.


Can't see it? Ok, Mr. Demille he's ready for his closeup.


For whatever reason, the scene just grabbed me. I thought of my September post on Bollywood Escapism. Would one consider this act of obviously planned graffiti an act of American Escapism?

Then my mind drifted to the subject of the artwork - that beautiful sunny country. I thought of being on the Costa del Sol at age 15. The sight of the blistering sun still floods my memory whenever I think of that trip. Was this what the artist intended to convey? Regardless, this was the effect - most people think of Spain (even if they have never been there) as a sunny place, far removed from the often bleak landscape of America's Rustbelt, England's Midlands Region, or Germany's Ruhr Valley. Yet, here it was spelled out before me - why?

We Americans love to escape so much, perhaps even more than Indians or Europeans. We have overdeveloped a peninsular swamp (Florida), created whole government agencies (NASA), and even built a desert emerald city (Las Vegas) for this purpose. Perhaps it was this strain of Americana that brought us Spain along the Mon Valley.

Looking east beyond the warehouse, I snapped the tracks continuing under the Tenth Street Bridge. This bridge has always given me the ultimate yellow brick road feeling, and I thought if these tracks stretched in a perfect trajectory across the Atlantic, they would take me back to Malaga and those warm sands of ten years ago.