SLAG

There’s nothing romantic about slag. At least, that is, not in the material itself. It is a far cry from a precious stone, not even useful like coal. In Pittsburgh’s era of steel, the city found itself with more of this byproduct of the steelmaking process than it could handle. It was discarded into mountains alongside the Monongahela River, right across from the Homestead Works. For decades the heaps of hard packed gravel-like substance have remained; a barren industrial wasteland of unnatural peaks and little vegetation.

In 1986 I was twelve years old. Like every boy with a penchant for exploratory adventure, it was my turn to do my own survey of the slag heaps.

It was like the Wild West. A dry, empty landscape with no rules. Who owned the slag dumps? Nobody knew. I took my first tour of the slags with Jay Cravotta, a kid much tougher than me. Our fathers were close friends so I trusted he wouldn’t ditch me back in the no-man’s-land on the other side of the big fences posted with NO TRESPASSSING signs. Brian Cusick was with us, too, who probably fit my category better than Jay’s. We were both nerdy, scrawny glasses wearers with just enough of a sense of adventure to ride our bikes past those signs. Jay tolerated us, I’m sure.

Jay told us about the “hole,” which he described no further than that: a huge hole in the ground. I was imaging flames of eternal damnation licking at the edges. Pedaling our bikes across the sometimes packed, sometimes granular slag, we passed burned out cars, twisted girders, train car axels, and heavy cable, completely ignorant of the risk of laceration, infection, or falling. We were on an adventure, with no more sensibility than our adolescence would allow.

At the foot of one of the larger heaps, we dropped our bikes and began a crawling ascent up a 40 degree pitch. Jay told us that the hole was at the top. Loose slag rolled down the slope and created harmless little avalanches. At the top we stood at the edge of a pretend volcano with dozens of discarded tires instead of molten rock.

Quite disappointed, I began to fabricate my own tall tales of the hole as we slid back down on our bums. My mind was already making the hole into a bigger deal than it was.

We continued deeper into the barren slag wild. All around us were peaks. Beyond them, our imaginations told us, was unknown territory for us to explore. We came to a small stream devoid of signs of life. A bridge – a mesh of railroad ties and iron – was no longer in use but stood before us as the most exciting way across. We could not ride over the bridge on our bikes. That would be suicide because gaping splinter-lined holes gave way to a 20-foot drop to the creek below. In some places, brittle, rotten plywood covered the holes, but only made passage appear to be even more treacherous. We scampered across, pushing our bikes, sometimes walking on one railroad tie while pushing the small pedal bike across another.

As we rode away from the bridge and into a drainage ravine that winded its way to the top of another huge slag pile, all three of us were silent. The sounds around us were manmade, unnatural. Cars purred across a highway bridge in the distance. A train slowly chugged along the banks of the river below us. A tugboat heaved a load of barges to market downriver. We were, after all, not in the Wild West, but on a heap of gravel overlooking the Mon River and the Parkway East. Our bike chains squeaked and our tires crunched as they searched for traction.

At the top of the incline we stood on a vast lunar plateau. Post-apocalyptic scenery was everywhere: burned and rusted vehicles, mattresses, furniture, and appliances. Evidence told us of huge bonfires with dozens of participants sitting on seats improvised from wood, TVs, washing machines, upholstered furniture, or chunks of slag itself. The thought of the place blazing at night was simultaneously exciting and terrifying.

We rode the moonscape for hours. Exploring every corner for artifacts meant riding up and over berms, ramps, and mounds – all made of slag and littered with junk. Our bravery began to increase as we jumped over broken metal and fire pits.

Before long we were exhausted and ready to make our descent. It was wild and dangerous, down a V-shaped ravine that presumably drained the plateau after it rained. Helmets were uncool and generally not available in these days, which made the “Babyhead” sized rocks that were everywhere as we flew down the ravine even more dangerous.

We approached the river and found the mythical Skeetersville. Several dozen homes, and nothing more, make up this small village trapped between the Monongahela, Nine Mile Run, and the slag heaps. In my 12-year old mind, Skeetersville residents had no reasonable way out. They had to either wade through the creek, walk across the train bridge over the creek, or hike through the slags to get to civilization. That each home had a driveway with a car in it never enlightened me with reality. We rode through town like young guns.

Then we did something really stupid.

From Skeetersville, we biked along a pair of railroad tracks, which cross Nine Mile Run on a narrow bridge. It is a short bridge and the acoustics were telling us there was no train nearby, other than the one that was standing stationary on the second set of tracks. And so, as stupid adolescent boys have done since the dawn of humanity, we pushed our luck. Imagine it: three kids crossing a train bridge on their BMX bikes. One track is empty, the other in use by a rusty stack of freight cars that hadn’t moved in decades. The width of the bridge: wide enough to hold two sets of tracks, no more. What happens next in this story? Of course, a freight train barrels down the tracks at the three kids.

We escaped death by locomotive not by outrunning it a la Stand By Me, but by tossing our bikes and then our bodies underneath the massive stationary train and laying down. In retrospect, we should have jumped off the trestle into the creek and simply risked injury. There I laid, looking down between planks at the creek. Two feet in front of my nose, thousands of tons of freight train thundered past, car after car. The noise was deafening and the bridge shook like it was about to give. All I could see from my position was the bottom half of the wheels of the monster as it rolled past. The train went on forever, and I cried. Fortunately nobody saw or heard. I don’t remember anything else about that day, not even how I got home.

Twenty-five years later I am a frequent slag heap visitor. Half of the region – the post-apocalyptic lunar plateau – has become a development. Apparently a clever engineering firm figured out how to build homes on top of slag. The other half is now home to some of the best mountain biking this side of Moab. Or, at least this side of Skeetersville.

Git R Dun!