A Salt and Battery

Winter weather in Pittsburgh is somewhat unpredictable. Will that "Alberta clipper" make it across the Great Lakes with enough momentum to carry it into the Ohio Valley? Will that big front blowing in from the Rockies veer off to the north, or will it bless us with a good, heavy dose of snow? These are things that make the weatherman's life very risk-prone around here. But there are central tendencies. The most common pattern is something like this: a little ice, a little snow, cold, thaw, a bit of rain, rinse and repeat. This kind of thing has gone on, e.g., almost unabated for the past two months. OK, so far so good. But we also have the phenomenon of Pittsburgh being one of the most absurdly hilly cities in the country -- yes, more so even than fabled San Francisco. There are streets here that are so steep I refuse to drive up them. (OK, the _car_ refuses -- but I can take a hint.) There are streets here that are so steep they aren't even streets, but stairways -- with houses on them, and names! Now, what do you suppose happens when you combine those streets with that weather? Nothing moves, except at the greatest peril. So the city sends out a fleet of salt trucks to rival the flotilla that evacuated the British troops from Dunkirk, and before very long every bit of vertiginous verticality is salted as thoroughly as a Cape Breton cod. Then, a day or two later, all the offending snow and ice melts and we are left sailing upon a crystalline sea, a dried salt lake from the Pleistocene -- pure white as far as the eye can see. Then, a day or two after that, the rains come and wash it all away. "Away?" Well, not exactly. First it goes into the drainage system, then into the "runs" (those small streams that are called "brooks" in most places), then into the creeks (called "creeks" in most places), then into one of the three rivers that give Pittsburgh its distinctive topography to begin with -- the Ohio, the Allegheny, and the Mon. ("Mon" is short for a much longer Indian name that means "place where if you slide down the cliff you will skin your butt most painfully".) So basically, the city of Pittsburgh becomes a salt-water port each winter. The river captains between here and Cairo, Illinois are called "old salts". The vegetables grown the following summer in the river bottoms of Southern Indiana are pre-salted for your convenience. And I guess, eventually, it all winds up in the Gulf of Mexico, which is saltwater anyway. So maybe it's OK. And yet, I wonder...