A Walk in the Woods

For most of my life, I lived and worked in the City of Pittsburgh.  My wife and I bought a house in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Carrick.  I worked in office towers downtown; my wife taught in a public school in one of the city’s East End neighborhoods.  We enjoyed what the city had to offer. We subscribed to several theater companies, and I was a frequent attendee of Pirate games, especially after PNC Park was built.

Despite my appreciation of the amenities the city has to offer, I never lost my love of a quiet walk in the woods.  As a young boy eager to escape the heat of a midsummer day, the woods offered cool shade.  There were several patches of woods near my suburban home.  One had a well-worn path on which we could ride our bicycles.  Another had a small pond fed by a spring that we tried to dam to make a swimming hole.  But someone always broke the dam before the pond could fill up. In any case, the pond mostly flowed freely down the hill to a small stream where we caught tadpoles and crayfish. 

Besides the shade provided by the green canopy, I savored the musty aroma of the forest soil enriched by years of leaves dropped each autumn.  I learned to identify various trees and enjoyed the root beer-like flavor I tasted when chewing on the stem of a sassafras leaf.  When I grew up and moved to the city, I would make it a point to take an occasional day off from work and escape to the woods of one of the region’s parks.  Now, as a retired person, I don’t seem to find enough time to spend rambling about in the woods.

So, when I recently visited my son in Pittsburgh, I was intrigued when he suggested that I take an hour or so to explore the Seldom Seen Greenway in the Beechview section of the city.  The entrance to the Greenway is just off Route 51, about a mile north of the Liberty Tubes, and near the south entrance to the Wabash Tunnel.  I parked my car in the small parking area near the sign that identified the Greenway. 

Beyond the sign, a wide, asphalt path leads to a somewhat spooky tunnel that guards the entrance to the Greenway.  The path shares the inside of the tunnel with fast-flowing Saw Mill Run.  Upon exiting the tunnel, I looked up to the right and saw that someone had painted the words to a poem on a concrete abutment.  There were several blank spots in the verse, perhaps left by the poet to allow the reader latitude to supply the missing words. 

Moving further into the Greenway, the main path travels through a peaceful, verdant stretch, accented by the occasional bird chirp and the burbling sound of the nearby stream.  The path seemed to end at the bank of Saw Mill Run at a place that looked like I could proceed further by walking in the stream bed.  Unsure of where that would lead, I decided to turn around.  A short distance before I returned to the tunnel, I noticed a path leading up the hill to my right.  I followed that path for a few hundred yards, and it led me out of the Greenway to a graffiti covered building near a set of railroad tracks.  So, I walked down the offshoot trail back to the main path and followed that out of the Seldom Seen Greenway.

I enjoyed discovering the Seldom Seen Greenway, which certainly lives up to its name.  Though it is located near a major urban artery, I believe very few drivers stop and spend time to take pleasure in what it has to offer.  Its relatively small size allowed me to enjoy a dose of nature before getting in my car to drive across the state to where I now live near Philadelphia.  And for that day, it was just enough to satisfy my need for a quiet walk in the woods.