Disney-Pittsburgh

“That’s the thing about Pittsburgh…its history,” I told Mom, trying to get her on our side. She and Dad had been arguing—discussing, they would say—about which virtual Disney adventure we should take for summer vacation. Mom wanted to go to Disney—MallWorld, back to when people walked from store to store, fingered merchandise, and sometimes physically, not virtually, tried on clothes, actually putting them on their germ-ridden bodies. Mom thought it would be exciting. I thought it would be boring, and so did Dad.

           My Father and Mother’s argument became so fierce that it activated each of their devices, giving off Domestic Abuse warnings that sounded like fire engine sirens. I held my ears until they turned off their alarms and calmed down. Then they decided peacefully, in favor of Dad, because mother had made that awful decision last year: “Disney—A History of Place Settings.” It was the most boring vacation ever. I’d rather have gone to summer school.

           Dad, at my urging, chose a virtual voyage to historic Pittsburgh. I sold him by saying that it was here in town, with no traveling expenses required. I’d always been fascinated and proud of my home city. “Disney—Pittsburgh” offered an era of our choosing. Dad and I chose the 1940 – 1960 era featuring Steel Mill World. Mom didn’t want to go. “It’s too dirty,” she said. She and my sister decided on 1960 – 1973, before the Steelers had won the first of their 100 Super Bowl trophies.

           “Good,” my Dad said, “You’ll have a great time on the Skybus.” That set off his sarcasm alarm. Skybus, in the mid-1960s, was a proposed transit initiative. Walt Disney even discussed an option for Walt Disney World with Skybus engineers, but by the mid-1970s, its funding dried up, and the project was never completed, although Disney World did build a monorail.

           Mom laughed him off and said, “I’ll go to the real-life gift shop and bring back a Terrible Towel, and maybe we’ll get to meet Myron Cope.”

           I thought my mother had swayed him with that Myron Cope gambit because he was a local sportscaster legend in Pittsburgh, but in the end, Dad stuck with the steel mill tour. I like football, but I wanted to see the steel mills in a time before robots.

           Despite our destination being so close, we stayed at a Bed and Breakfast on Pittsburgh’s south side. I suspect Dad was placating Mom. After a refreshing night’s sleep in the Warhol room, we went downstairs for breakfast. We sat with another family that called themselves the Carnegies. “Don’t forget to visit my library,” the man said to me.

           I gave him the evil eye. I knew he wasn’t a real Carnegie because my device’s lie-detector vibrated in my pocket.

           A lady with a strange fabric wrapped over her head and tied under her chin served us. My Dad called it a babushka. The food was delicious, but we ate quickly, eager to be off on our adventure. We gentlemen split ways with the ladies on Eighteen Street, off to our respective portals to the past.

           We entered the park on E. Carson Street, scanned our tickets, and pushed through the turnstiles. It felt so real that I didn’t realize I’d entered a virtual world. My eyes started to burn. Soot kicked up on my shoes. We crossed the Hot Metal Bridge on foot and then boarded an open railroad freight car with low sides, rigged with passenger seats and lap bars. We chugged along the northern bank of the Monongahela. Frederick, our tour guide, wearing a white helmet, pointed out the foundry and the blast furnace, but our main attraction—the place we would work— was at the by-products division, where the coke ovens were at. As we approached, Frederick pointed to great billows of smoke and steam. “That’s where you are going,” he said. I looked at my Dad, wondering if Mom and Sis had chosen more wisely than we had.

           Frederick showed us how to punch in, and then he led us into the changing room. We climbed into stiff asbestos clothing and swallowed horse-sized salt pills. Next, we ascended to the top of the battery of ovens, where we strapped on wooden shoes. A machine on rails came along and hovered over one of the ovens where it unbolted and removed the lid. Then it poured ground coal into the ravenous heat. The devil himself screamed from below, his breath escaping through the portal in an orange swoosh as workers swept remaining bits of errant coal dust into the void.

           When we descend from the top, Frederick said we could remove our wooden shoes. Machines pulled the doors open on either side of another oven whose coal had been cooked. A pusher machine shoved the red-hot coke into a hot car in front of us. We traveled behind the hot car in our gondola to the quenching station and watched a shower of water soak the Coke, sending coal-ridden steam into the atmosphere, rising like white smoke.

           Frederick said, “That’s a quick overview of what we do at the by-products division. Hot cars transport the Coke to the blast furnace to aid in the production of steel. Here, we trap various gases produced in the cooking process, which we sell for a profit. That’s about it. We’ll take a break in the lunchroom, and then you can get to work on top.”

           That was our vacation, the best time I ever had in my life. It wasn’t easy, though. For eight hours each day, we sweated and breathed in dirty air that scorched our lungs. Fire singed our eyebrows as we swept loose dirt and coal into those portals to hell, and, with metal rods, we maneuvered the heavy lids back into place. We spent our evenings in the saloon, exhausted. Dad downed a few boiler-makers, and I drank real Coka-Cola. I even tried Turtle Soup, but I can’t say I liked it. I had tiny burn marks on my face that itched at night, keeping me awake. Whenever I blew my nose, the snot was black. I wished I could have saved some for my upcoming school story “What I Did on Summer Vacation,” but you can’t save virtual snot. It would have made a great prop.

           After five days, we met up with Mom and Sis. Mom lugged a case of Iron City, and she had Sis loaded down with Terrible Towels. “I caught ‘the immaculate reception,’” Mom boasted. I was a little jealous, but I couldn’t have asked more from my experience. Now I knew how it felt to build America.